Page 84 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

64 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

native agents throughout the nineteenth century, reflecting the triangular
relationship which linked the Al Khalifah administration to the Bombay
Government, and to the British residency in Bushehr. Between 1872 and
1900 the agency under ‘Abd al-Nabi al-Safar and his son Muhammad
Rahim was staffed by Persians and Hawala clerks who were fluent in
English, Arabic and Farsi. 61 With no indigenous bureaucratic tradition
surviving from the Safavid period, literacy and record-keeping among
Arabs was almost exclusively the preserve of merchants and clergy. The
absence of suitably trained locals was a crucial factor in the employment of
many foreigners in areas which demanded specialised clerical skills, partic-
ularly in shipping. Foreigners also monopolised the few contracts offered by
the ruler: Indians occupied key positions in the customs and Persians were
employed as landing contractors in the harbour. Even powerful Hawala
entrepreneurs were relative latecomers to the business, and their public
profile, as was the case with Yusuf ibn Ahmad Kanu, was established only
when they became attached to European firms (see Figure 3). 62
The Arab pearl merchants of the town were a heterogeneous lot. Both
Sunni and Shi‘is looked at Bombay as the commercial, cultural and
religious capital of the region with its import–export offices, Arabic print-
ing presses, and thriving religious and intellectual life. They invested in
urban properties and maintained family residences in the Indian port. The
primary and secondary schools of Bombay, which offered both scientific
and commercial education, further fashioned the Arab urban elites of the
turn of the century. The offspring of pearl merchants also joined the
Islamic University of Aligarh founded by the reformist Sayyed Ahmad
Khan (1817–98), which promoted Islamic values, followed a western
curriculum and constituted the training ground for Indian Muslim acti-
vists who opposed British rule. 63
After 1900, the newly built British political agency (locally known as Bayt
al-Dawlah) further promoted Manama’s mercantile and multi-ethnic tra-
dition. It introduced a new public ceremonial which emphasised the posi-
tion of the agency as the protector of the town’s commercial classes. The
representatives of the Bombay Government skilfully orchestrated official
events following British Indian protocol as the counterpoint to the tribal
pomp of the court of Shaykh ‘Isa in Muharraq. In June 1926 Charles

61
Onley, ‘Transnational Merchants in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf’, pp. 63–77; Onley,
The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj, p. 107.
62
Political Agent Bahrain to Political Resident Bushehr, 17 May 1914, n. 546, R/15/1/
331 IOR.
63
‘Abd al-Karim al-‘Urayyad, Nafidhah ‘ala al-tarikh: Bayt al-‘Urayyad (Manama
al-Mu‘assah al ‘Arabiyyah li al-Tiba‘ah wa al-Nashr, [n.d.]), pp. 40–3; Ayyam al-zaman,
p. 84.