Page 184 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices 181

communications, it has a thriving if modest agriculture, and a good proportion
of its inhabitants are skilled in some trade. It is less reliant on oil production for
its well-being than the other states of Arabia, which is just as well, for the oil
reserves, never at any time very great, are running out quickly. Production

peaked in 1972 at 70,000 barrels per day, and by the end of 1976 it had dropped
to 59,000 b/d. There are quite sizable reserves of natural gas, which are used
to fuel electricity generators and water-distillation plants, although a good
proportion of the gas has to be injected into the oilfields to keep up the pressure
needed for recovery of the oil. A quite substantial portion of Bahrain’s earnings
from oil come from refining operations: the refinery complex at Sitra, on the

eastern side of the main island, has a throughput of some 250,000 barrels per
day, most of it piped across from Saudi Arabia.
To diversify Bahrain’s sources of income - other than from oil, commerce
and associated technical services - a large aluminium smelter has been con­
structed in recent years (aluminium being a particularly useful material in the
type of construction going on in the Gulf), which has so far proved successful.
A second major enterprise, the construction of a huge dry dock for the

servicing of ships of all sizes, including giant oil tankers, has been undertaken
under the auspices of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting
Countries. Whether it, too, will prove a success is problematical, since it will
have to fit into a much wider economic pattern than that represented by the
local economy of the Gulf.
While Bahrain has generally enjoyed prosperity and stability for much of

this century, there hangs over the shaikhdom the latent and sometimes active
threat of internal dissension. It does not derive, as in Kuwait, from a prepon­
derance of Uitlanders in the shaikhdom’s population, since the proportion of
immigrants is much lower in Bahrain than in any of the other minor states. A
few years ago they numbered 38,000 out of a total population of 216,000. The
proportion probably remains the same today, even though the population has
grown to around 250,000. The menace derives instead from the religious

schism in the population between Sunni and Shii Muslims, and from the
material division between the wealthy oligarchy which rules Bahrain and the
politically conscious and ambitious intellectual proletariat below them. Most
of the Baharinah, the indigenous inhabitants of Bahrain before its conquest by
the Al Khalifah in the late eighteenth century, were Shii by confession. The Al
Khalifah and the tribesmen who accompanied them from the mainland were

Sunni, so that with their arrival and settlement a Sunni ascendancy was
established in the island. Throughout much of the nineteenth century and into
the twentieth there was a steady immigration of Persians into the shaikhdom,
most of whom earned their living as merchants, artisans and urban labourers.
I hough they had little in common with the aboriginal Baharinah (who were in
main cultivators and fishermen) they tended as fellow Shia to side with them in
religious matters. Persistent discrimination against them and intermittent