Page 42 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

22 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

minimum to survive. In the words of a Persian traveller who visited
Bahrain in 1836: ‘They get the inedible dates and the rotten fish.’ 16 A
song still remembers the dire economic conditions of the peasantry in the
period of the joint rulership of the two sons of Ahmad al-Fatih, the first Al
Khalifah ruler of Bahrain: ‘An ankle ring for 400 rupees, I wish it was a
sour lemon / grown in the garden / ‘Abdallah peels it and Salman eats it.’
Similarly, the decadence of Bilad al-Qadim as a centre of religious devo-
tion is still lamented in a nursery rhyme: ‘Pray for Muhammad, pray for
the Prophet / the springs of Bilad al-Qadim are dry / and no longer bring
male children.’ 17
In response to such dire circumstances, villagers drew on a rich reper-
toire of oral tradition which celebrated the pillars of rural life, particularly
water and agriculture. In offering an idealised and idyllic representation of
Bahrain before the arrival of the Al Khalifah, Shi‘i folklore echoed the
Sumerian and Akkadian myths which celebrated Bahrain as the ‘Islands of
Paradise’ featuring the hero Gilgamish and the prosperous Dilmun civi-
lisation. 18 Water entered Shi‘i popular imagery as a supernatural force
which symbolised prosperity, political stability and urban regeneration.
Springs and wells, in particular, featured in epic tales set in the early
Islamic period which recounted stories of emancipation from ‘foreign’
yoke. In 1860 Lieutenant Whish, a British naval officer, collected a folk
tale about an invading army which blocked a large spring near Suq al-
Khamis, a place of Shi‘i worship, in order to weaken the resistance of the
local population. The water suddenly resurfaced in a myriad of sea springs
which allowed villagers to drive the invaders away thus rescuing the
population from the humiliations of foreign rule. Theodore Bent and his
wife, two amateur archaeologists who visited the region in 1899, recorded
a similar story set during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik
19
ibn Marwan (685–705). Local tradition also attributed to ‘Abd al-Malik
the covering of ‘Ayn Sujur, a large spring in the village of al-Diraz, in order
to punish the population for having sheltered religious dissidents from

16
Muhammad Ibrahim Kazeruni, Athar shahr-ha-ye-bastani savahil va jaza’ir-i Khalij-i Fars
va darya-ye ‘Umani, annotated by Ahmad Iqtidari (Teheran: [n.pub.], 1996), p. 881.
17
Salah ‘Ali al-Madani and Karim ‘Ali al-‘Urayyad, Min turath al-Bahrayn al-sha‘abi
(Beirut: Matba‘ah Samia, n.d.), pp. 202, 208.
18
R. Alster, ‘Dilmun, Bahrain and the Alleged Paradise in Sumerian Myth and Literature’
in D. T. Potts (ed.), Dilmun: New Studies in the Archaeology and Early History of Bahrain
(Berlin: Reimer, 1983), pp. 39–74; G. Bibby, Looking for Dilmun, 2nd edn (London:
Stacey International, 1996), pp. 23–35.
19
Lieutenant R. W. Whish, ‘Memoir on Bahreyn’ in Records of Bahrain: Primary Documents,
1820–1960, 8 vols. (Slough: Archive Editions, 1993), vol. I, p. 174; T. Bent, Southern
Arabia (London: Smith and Elder, 1900), p. 15.