Page 186 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices 183

the ringleaders imprisoned or sent to exile on St Helena, the evidence of
Britain’s ineradicable perfidy seemed to the young Bahraini nationalists to be
conclusive. They also learned, however, to temper their valour with a little
discretion, so that their subsequent demonstrations against the ruling family
and its British protectors in the 1960s took the form largely of strikes and other
trade union agitation over pay and working conditions.
Much of the political agitation in Bahrain over the past twenty-five years can
be traced to its roots in the shaikhdom’s educational system. The first school

was started by American missionaries in the 1920s and the first government
school was opened in the 1930s. From these beginnings the educational system
developed - under the ‘repressive’ and ‘unenlightened’ rule of the Al Khalifah
- into the most comprehensive in the Gulf. ‘Comprehensive’, however, is a
relative adjective in this context. Although education is free it is also voluntary,
so that as late as 1971 only half the children of school age attended schools, and

the proportion of girls among the schoolchildren was even lower. Fifty-three
per cent of the whole population was illiterate, and among adults over the age of
forty-five, 77 per cent of the men and 95 per cent of the women were illiterate.
It is the content of the education provided by the schools that most gives rise to
concern. The emphasis is not upon technical and vocational training but upon
the social sciences, the young Bahraini having an aversion to earning his living
by his hands, especially in an occupation where he might run the risk of soiling
them. His ambition is to go into commerce or government service, to be a

shopkeeper or a clerk, rather than an engineer, a mechanic, an agriculturist or a
veterinarian. The aversion to practical training and careers is shared by the
handful of Bahrainis who go abroad each year for higher education. Between
1950 and 1972 426 Bahrainis obtained degrees or diplomas at universities and
other institutions of higher education in the Middle East, Europe or North

America. The greatest number of them studied one or other of the social
sciences, sociology being favoured more than any of the others, presumably
because it was considered a soft option. The consequence is that the over­
whelming proportion of technical posts in Bahrain are occupied by foreigners
(82 per cent in 1971 and 54 per cent of the professional posts as well), while the
bureaucracy bulges with so many clerks as to make the government the biggest
single employer in the shaikhdom. Whether the recently founded Gulf Tech­

nical College will make any appreciable difference to this situation is highly
doubtful.

Although Bahrain has more of its own nationals and fewer Egyptians and
Palestinians teaching in its schools than is the case in Kuwait, the predilections
of the teachers and the nature of the curriculum have combined to produce
much the same result as in the more northerly shaikhdom, the students
emerging from the schools with their heads stuffed with political fancies and
somewhat exaggerated ideas of their own importance, competence, ability and

sagacity. Over the past decade, as the pendulum of politics in much of the Arab