Page 48 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

28 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

already importing fairly large quantities of dates from al-‘Ahsa’ to provi-

sion the population. 33 In search of new opportunities many agricultural-

ists abandoned their plots and moved to Manama, which in the last

quarter of the nineteenth century replaced Muscat in Oman as the leading

commercial emporium of the Arab coast. Desperate to find new sources of

income and a modus vivendi with the regime, a segment of the rural

34
notability also abandoned their ancestral homes. Families of religious
standing (such as the Ibn Rajabs, al-Jishis and al-‘Alawis) recreated eco-
nomic and religious networks in Manama in symbiosis with the town’s
growing mercantile communities.
Developments in the legal sphere also explain the deterioration of the
social and economic conditions of rural Bahrain at the turn of the twen-
tieth century in contrast with the growing prosperity of urban settlements.
The customary law (al-‘urf) in force among the tribes continued to be
applied consistently only in the villages while shariah and British Indian
law became important instruments of government in the towns. On the
one hand, the consolidation of a system of Islamic courts, both Sunni and
Shi‘i, was an integral part of the progressive centralisation and adminis-
trative specialisation of the Dar al-Hukumah. 35 On the other, it can be
explained by the threat to the authority of the Al Khalifah posed by the
gradual imposition of British extraterritorial jurisdiction in Manama.
Most notably, the application of shariah law had important implication
for the property regime inside Manama and Muharraq. Here the presence
of religious courts favoured the commercialisation of real estate, and the
acquisition of properties by merchants as qadis certified sale transactions
between notables, and between them and the Al Khalifah. In the villages,
customary rights continued to protect tribal landlords and discouraged
the penetration of merchant capital which could have injected a new lease
of life to the ailing agriculture of the islands. Additional factors prevented
urban-based merchants and entrepreneurs from investing in agriculture.
They looked to the sea as their main source of income, social prestige and
political legitimacy. Even those Shi‘i notables of rural extraction living in
33
‘Report on the Administration of the Bushehr Residency and Muscat Political Agency for
1873–1874’ in The Persian Gulf Administration Reports 1873–1949, 10 vols. (Gerrards
Cross: Archive Editions, 1986), vol. I, p. 66; Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, p. 251;
Sulayman Da’wud ‘Abdallah, Samahij fi al-tarikh (Manama, 1996), 100; Kazeruni,
Athar, pp. 91, 94.
34
Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, pp. 222, 238, 298; J. Onley, ‘The Politics of Protection in the
Gulf: The Arabian Rulers and the British Resident in the Nineteenth Century’, New
Arabian Studies 6 (2004), 30–82 (34); C. H. Allen, ‘The State of Masqat in the Gulf and

East Africa, 1785–1829’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 14 (1982), 117–27.

35
Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, pp. 249–50.