Page 81 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

The making of Gulf port towns before oil 61

The vicissitudes of the fort established the historic credentials of
Manama among the local population, who named it Qal‘ah al-Faranji,
the fort of the Europeans, at least since the mid nineteenth century. 54
Despite its powerful impression upon popular imagery, Qal‘ah al-Bahrayn
guarded Manama’s harbour from a distance and it seems that no perma-
nent fortifications integrated the fort into the town’s defensive and admin-
istrative system. A temporary line of defence which protected the harbour
was erected by the local governor Muqrin in 1521 during the first
Portuguese siege of Bahrain. The wall had disappeared by 1605 when
the Portuguese fleet attempted to reconquer the islands after the occupa-
tion by the forces of Shah ‘Abbas. 55 According to Carsten Niebuhr,
Manama (which he referred to as Bahrain or Awal) was a fortified town
in 1765. His description is confirmed by the Persian traveller Muhammad
Ibrahim Kazeruni, who in the early nineteenth century described Manama
as a gated port which was protected by fortifications and guarded by twenty-
eight towers. Although the presence of the remains of town walls is con-
firmed by twentieth-century observers, the surveys and accounts produced
by British naval officers after the 1820s do not confirm Kazeruni’s obser-
vations. His representation of Manama is somewhat striking and unique, a
stylised vision of a fabled port town which emerged from the desert and
from the squalor of rural deprivation surrounding it. The condition of the
agricultural population held a particularly emotional and political appeal to
the writer, a devout Shi‘i Muslim whose visit to the Gulf region was
sponsored directly by the Qajar shah. 56
In the absence of detailed historical records, cartography offers some
clues on the position of the settlement in Bahrain’s changing politics of
urbanism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A detailed
Portuguese picture map dating from 1538 provides an impressionistic
illustration of the northern coast of Bahrain from the point of view of a
sailor approaching the main island from the northwest. While Qal‘ah al-
Bahrayn takes the centre stage with flags indicating the headquarters of the
Portuguese administration, Manama is sketched as a dense conglomer-
ation of white buildings overlooking the seafront. In this period a
al-Watha’iq al-Tarikhiyyah (Historical Documentation Centre, Rifa‘, hereafter MWT);
th
M. Kervran, Bahrain in the 16 Century: An Impregnable Island (Manama: Ministry of
Information, 1988), pp. 24–30, 40.
54
The name Manama is also connected with the presence of the fort as indicated by the
toponymic qasr al-manam often used to explain the origins of the town as the sleeping
quarter of the ruler, from the Arabic root nama (to sleep). Ihya’ madinah al-Manamah al-
qadimah/Manama Urban Renewal Project (Ministry of Housing, Physical Planning
Directorate, State of Bahrain, 1987), p. 7; Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, p. 52.
55 th
Kervran, Bahrain in the 16 century, pp. 16–20, 31–4, 41–2.
56
Kazeruni, Athar, pp. 880 ff.; Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia, vol. II, p. 152; Belgrave, The
Pirate Coast, p. 76.