Page 59 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

Indigenous state traditions and the dialectics of urbanisation 39

between religion and politics which has been a constant feature of the
history of Shi‘ism. Through rituals and religious performance ma’tam
congregations reinforced sectarian bonds among the population irrespec-
tive of status and socio-economic divisions. They also provided a platform
for the expression of ill-feeling against the Sunni government. The majlises
were Sunni institutions which centred on family and kinship. Although
each household had a majlis as a separate room to entertain visitors, the
majlises presided over by members of the ruling family, the heads of
pearling tribes and by the merchant notables of Muharraq and al-Hidd
were the lifeline of the Dar al-Hukumah. Here the powerful and influen-
tial negotiated alliances with the Al Khalifah and with their peers and,
most crucially, attended to the administration of the tribal towns and of
the agricultural regions they controlled. Moreover, as the institutions which
regulated tribal affairs, majlises had a strong hierarchical ethos. Leaders
and merchant patrons of tribal stock received their protégées and interacted
with them as subordinates, settled internal disputes and in some cases
dispensed justice. 60
The strong political profile of the majlises of wealthy Muharraqis with
connections to the ruling family created a demarcation between public
and private spaces in their residences. This is suggested by the presence of
a majlis khususi and majlis ‘umumi: the former used for private audiences
and for family business, the latter open to visitors. 61 In the houses of the
sponsors of ma’tam congregations the boundaries between religious,
domestic and public space were often blurred. The history of the
ma’tam sponsored by the al-Sabt family in the village of al-Samahij is a
case in point. Around 1910 the family, whose economic background is
unclear, built a mosque and started to sponsor ‘ashura’. Typically, the
congregation which mourned the death of Imam Husayn was first organ-
ised inside the family residence. Subsequently, villagers collected funds
for the acquisition of a piece of land adjacent to the house. In the austere
but allusive words of ‘Abdallah Sayf who collected the oral account in the
1990s: ‘Hajj ‘Abbas [the builder] from al-Jufayr [a village to the south-east
of Manama] … built a courtyard in order to transform the land into
a ma’tam.’ 62 This account rehearses a theme which is familiar in the

60
Wali, al-Muharraq, pp. 71, 118–19: Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain, pp. 35–6. As venues
for socialisation and informal politics the majlises of Bahrain were similar to the al-
diwaniyyat of pre-oil Kuwait.
61
Wali, al-Muharraq, pp. 118–19, 142–3. The term al-khususi also defined spaces in the
house which could not be accessed by visitors.
62
‘Abdallah Sayf, al-Ma’tam fi al-Bahrayn, 2 vols. (Manama: al-Matba‘ah al-Sharqiyyah,
1995; Maktabah Fakrawi, 2004), vol. I, pp. 348–52 (p. 349, my translation); ‘Abdallah,
Samahij fi al-tarikh, pp. 76–7.