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that led to the crisis as well as providing an overview of developments in Egypt in

order to trace the latter’s influence on the Bahraini movement.

Before 1953 tensions between the two largest religious communities in

Bahrain (Muslim Sunnis and Shi’ites) were growing alarmingly. Sawut Al-Bahrain,

the island’s only magazine at the time, portrayed the level of distrust in Bahrain in

1950 in an article entitled, ‘Sectarianism is our biggest problem’. The author, Ibn

Thabit, believed that a single community did not exist in Bahrain ‘but rather

opposing societies and groups which are full of grudge for one another and seek to

conspire against each other’. The author will almost certainly have used the nom
96

de plume Ibn Thabit to hide his or her identity for fear of being criticised or even

harassed by their own community.

97
Hay, the British Resident from 1946 to 1953, recorded the growing
tensions between the two communities in a report in 1951 forwarded to GW

Furlonge at the Eastern Department in the FO, as he summarised events in the

Arabian Gulf. In relation to Bahrain he said: ‘Although there have been no incidents,

ill feeling between the Shias and the Sunnis is stronger than usual’.
98
Signs of a coming crisis were revealed in the summer of 1951 vis-à-vis the

Manama Municipal Committee. The Committee consisted of twenty-four persons;

twelve elected and twelve nominated. Although elections for the Committee the

96 ‘Al-Taefiyah Alatunah Al-Kubra’ [Sectarianism is our Biggest Problem], Sawut Al-Bahrain,
September 1950, 11.
97 Sir William Rupert Hay was born on 16 December 1893. He enrolled in 1920 with the Indian
Political Service and worked in a number of locations in Asia, such as Afghanistan, Baluchistan and
the Arabian Gulf. Hay was appointed as the British Resident to the Gulf in 1946 and remained in
post until 1953. He was succeeded by Sir Bernard Burrows. See Hay, ‘The Impact of the Oil Industry
on the Persian Gulf Shaykhdoms’, 361-72 (361).
98 ‘W.R. Hay, Summary of events in the Persian Gulf during the month of November 1951’, in Political
Diaries of the Persian Gulf, vol. 19 1951-1954, ed. R.L. Jarman (London: 1990), 1-9 (6).

© Hamad E. Abdulla 32