Page 187 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

184 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

world has swung further to the left, the expectations of these intellectual
sans-culottes have grown markedly. When the ruler, Shaikh Isa, announced in
June 1972 that the basis of the shaikhdom’s government was to be broadened

and that elections were to be held for a constituent assembly, they unhesitat­
ingly denounced the move as a meaningless sop and called for a boycott of the
elections. The call went unheeded by the great majority of potential voters, so
the radicals hurriedly dropped their opposition and joined in the scramble for
seats. About a third of the twenty-two candidates elected in December 1972

were moderate or radical nationalists, and the religious division was fourteen
Shia to eight Sunnis.
The constitution drawn up over the next six months and promulgated in
June 1973 declared Bahrain to be an Islamic state with the sharia as the
principal source of legislation. It provided for the setting up of a national
assembly with legislative powers, consisting of thirty elected members and a
council of ministers appointed by the ruler. The franchise was limited to adult,

male Bahrainis. Political parties were forbidden, as in Kuwait, so that candi­
dates for the assembly had to stand as individuals. Despite this prohibition, at
the elections held in December 1973 candidates with socialist leanings cam­
paigned as the ‘Popular Bloc of the Left’ and won ten of the thirty seats. They
were balanced in the assembly by the elected conservative candidates, some of

whom held fairly extreme religious views. As the council of ministers was
composed of members of the Al Khalifah family and prominent Bahraini
merchants, the overall complexion of the assembly was of moderate or even
conservative hue. This did not save its proceedings, however, from degenerat­
ing over the next eighteen months into an acrimonious farce. So much time was

spent by the members in pursuing personal vendettas or engaging in religious
and political polemics that not a single piece of legislation was passed. The
climax was reached in August 1975 when, after an outbreak of violence in the
shaikhdom instigated by underground Marxist and Baathist cells, the
assembly refused to pass a draft internal security law which included a pro­

vision for detention without trial. Shaikh Isa thereupon suspended the con­
stitution and dissolved the assembly.
Whether the members of the Bahrain assembly or their supporters have
learned anything of the nature of political responsibility from their fleeting
acquaintance with representative government is not easily ascertainable. 1

seems unlikely. Those of them who are not dominated by sectarian or c°m
munal passions are befuddled with a hotchpotch of Nasserist, Baathist, arx
ist and other ideas which they are incapable of translating into a co ereJ\
political philosophy. As we shall have occasion to remark later, theprospe^
for genuine constitutional and representative government in the ra wo

are sombre in the extreme, and in the Arab states of the Gulf, where no P^g^
traditions or institutions of any kind other than those of shaikh y ru e av
developed, they are of a positively Stygian darkness. The conserva