Page 82 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

62 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

Portuguese observer provided the first brief description of the town’s built
environment as an assembly of tall mansions with wind towers. 57 Another
Portuguese naval survey produced around 1635 when Bahrain was a
province of the Safavid Empire presents Manama as a cluster of small
dark houses, most likely huts. The Portuguese fort, now with an addi-
tional wide moat, is connected by a bridge to a large inland settlement
with stone buildings and a tall minaret, clearly Bilad al-Qadim. Taking
into account a margin of inaccuracy in the stylised representation of the
two Portuguese cartographers, Manama appears prosperous under
Portuguese rule but was sidelined in favour of Bilad al-Qadim in the
Safavid period. The deterioration of Manama’s urban environment reso-
nates in the accounts of the period by local ‘ulama’, who rather puzzlingly
do not make any reference to the settlement. 58
The separation of the harbour from the fort and Bilad al-Qadim under-
lines what seems to have been a continuum in the town’s more recent
pre-modern history; that is, the struggle between its independent civic
tradition and constituted authority. While providing continuity in the
entrepôt economy of Bahrain, Manama defied the crystallisation of a
state-sponsored urban tradition. As part of a ‘littoral society’ resulting
from the interface between land and sea over the centuries, Manama
constructed its image of dissidence as a stopover of seafarers, privateers,
pearl divers, adventures and fishermen who sought provisions, shelter and
rest during or after their long journeys at sea. As suggested by the etymol-
ogy of its name (from the Arabic verb nama, to sleep), the harbour was a
‘resting place’ which allowed almost unrestricted access to a heterogene-
ous crowd of occasional visitors and permanent settlers. In the nineteenth
century Manama was a commercial emporium in flux, as the harbour was
not a geographical, political and economic barrier but a highly permeable
border. Cosmopolitanism was the building block of urban society and
mercantilism the ideology of its audacious free entrepreneurs. The wide
array of opportunities offered to newcomers by the harbour economy
worked as a double-edged sword, guaranteeing a cycle of prosperity but
also fostering political instability.
In the 1860s the British traveller W. G. Palgrave celebrated the exhila-
rating atmosphere of Manama as a counterpoint to the strikingly different
geographical and political horizons of Najd under Sa‘udi influence.
Unfavourably impressed by the restrictions imposed in Central Arabia

57 th
For a reproduction of this map see Kervran, Bahrain in the 16 Century, p. 41; Jean Aubin,
‘Le royaume d’Ormuz au début du XVIe siècle’ Mare Luso-Indicum (Geneva: Droz,
1973), vol. II, pp. 77–179 (p. 99).
58 th
A reproduction of the 1635 map is included in Kervran, Bahrain in the 16 Century, p. 51.