Page 44 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

24 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

long-lasting legacy of more than a century of Shi‘i government under the
Safavids. When the modern administration started to register land and
properties after 1925, Shi‘i endowments by far outnumbered their Sunni
counterparts. 23

Upheaval from the sands: the tribal ‘revolution’

The collapse of Safavid rule in 1717 revolutionised the political and urban
landscape of the islands. Between 1735 and 1783, the year of the arrival of
the first tribal contingents of the Al Khalifah, some thirteen different
governors seized power including the al-Madhkur family from Bushehr
which acted as the representatives of Iran. 24 In an important respect the Al
Khalifah family, a section of the al-‘Utub confederation from Najd, dif-
fered from their predecessors: they transformed Bahrain into a colony of
tribal settlement and imposed the organisation of the nomadic polities of
Central Arabia upon its agricultural and mercantile society. A three-tier
system of settlement emerged in the nineteenth century. The newcomers
established new tribal towns which became their strongholds: Muharraq,
al-Budayya‘, al-Hidd, Rifa‘ al-Qibli and Rifa‘ al-Sharqi. These towns
developed separately from the Shi‘i agricultural hamlets and from
Manama, the most important port and entrepôt centre of the islands.
The reorganisation of the territory reflected a competition between ‘the
desert and the sown’ in a variety of ideological contexts. al-‘Asabiyyah
(tribal solidarity) and kinship which united the tribal elites and their allies
became the organising principles of politics, superseding the strong reli-
gious ideals which had sustained the Safavid polity. Further, as the new
tribal settlers were Sunni (mostly adhering to the Maliki school of law)
their relations with large sections of the indigenous population were
tinged with strong sectarian overtones.
The making of the islands of Bahrain into a tribal principality
(‘imarah) was part of the fractured power politics which antagonised the
successors of Ahmad ibn Muhammad Al Khalifah, also known as Ahmad
al-Fatih (the Conqueror), who first captured the islands in 1783.
Although the Al Khalifah were no longer nomadic when they arrived in
Bahrain from Qatar, they still followed the tradition of the desert. Family
members fought among themselves over the distribution of the spoils of
war, vying for the control of the new fiefdom. After the civil war which
opposed the descendants of Ahmad al-Fatih in 1842–3, the branch of his
son Salman took permanent control of government. The first Al Khalifah

23
Kazeruni, Athar, pp. 880–1; Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain, p. 83.
24
Tajir, ‘Aqd al-lal, pp. 97–100.