Page 103 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

had been intensified by a dispute among the members of the Manama
their traditional observances, though the motif was an attack on the early
Municipal Council as a result of which all the Shia members,'who were a orthodox Caliphs of the sect to which the Shaikh belonged.
minority on the Council, had resigned. One of my first jobs on returning
was to try to persuade the recalcitrant Shias to return to the Council.
I had endless interviews with the three Shia leaders, two of whom
were
good friends of mine. The third man was a tricky character, bitter and
hard with no sense of humour. When he laughed, which was rarely, it
was to express contempt. He used to shout at me, ‘The Bahama [Shias]
arc oppressed and down-trodden, nobody employs them, nobody con­
siders them.’ I interrupted him: ‘What about all the Shias who hold
important Government posts? Are not some of them Heads of Depart­
ments? You forget that the secretary who docs my confidential work i_ _
is a
Shia.’ He would brush off my remarks, becoming quite hysterical about
the imagined wrongs of his co-religionists.
Mansoor Araydh was a different type, he belonged to a well-known
family which produced useful citizens and a poet of some fame. He was a
pearl merchant and landowner and had been much in India. He was large
and stout. In the summer he wore an almost transparent white garment,
and when calling on me he used to push off his hcadshawl and sit bare­
headed—a most unorthodox habit. He had a wide knowledge of social
and political problems abroad,.and often surprised me with apt quotations
from the Bible or from Shakespeare, though he spoke no English. Much
to my sorrow before I left Bahrain he became blind, which ended his
career as a pearl merchant.
The third ‘leader*, also a pearl merchant, was amiable and rotund,
dressed in a symphony of browns and yellows. He used to walk out to
his pleasant garden beyond the town every evening, where he sometimes
gave tea parties, which was unusual as few people ever walked a step in
Bahrain if they could afford to go by bus or car. At our meetings he was
inclined to echo the sentiments of the last person who spoke. These
were
the three men with whom for days and weeks I discussed the i
impasse
on the Municipal Council, but to no avail.
During the first ten days of the month of Muharram, the first month
of the Islamic year, Shias in Bahrain, and elsewhere, commemorate the
martyrdom of Hasan and Husain, the sons of Ali, the only surviving
grandsons of the Prophet Mohammed. The bitter feeling between the
two sects is fanned to fever heat by recitals and representations of incidents
which happened in Iraq over a thousand years ago. Some Governments
forbid any public demonstrations, but because the population of Bahrain
is partly Sunni and partly Shia the Shaikh allowed the Shias to carry out
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Ali was assassinated in a.d. 66o. Hasan, his eldest son, was reputed to
have been poisoned in a.d. 668. Husain, his infant son, his young nephew
and some of his relations and followers were killed in battle on the plain
of Kerbala, south of Baghdad, on October 9th, a.d. 680.
From the first day of Muharram the Bahrain Shias assemble after
sunset in the matems in Manama and in the villages. Matcms resemble
church halls in England; they are supported by religious endowments and
are used for religious and other meetings, for accommodating travellers
and for the preliminaries of funerals. Some of them arc ancient and
picturesque buildings. People may eat and smoke in them, but this is
permissible in some of the mosques. Once when looking at some gardens
in coimeccion with a case the villagers invited me to have luncheon with
them. To my astonishment they led me to a mosque where the meal was
spread. I protested and asked whether it was right that I should eat a meal
in a mosque. My host, a fat jovial man, reputed to be able to eat ten
chickens at a sitting, assured me that it was permissible. We all sat down
and enjoyed a merry meal together.
Some preachers who speak in the matems at Muharram are local
mullahs, but wealthy matems hire ‘readers’, as they are called, from Iraq,
Persia and Katif, paying them four or five hundred pounds for the ten
days of Muharram. On the tenth day, ‘Ashur’, the Shias take part ' m a
great religious procession through the streets of Manama enacting what
has been described as ‘The Miracle Play of Hasan and Husain’. In recent
years less emphasis has been given to the dramatic side of the procession
and the organizers, who are the heads of the matems, have concentrated
on producing larger numbers of flagellants, chest-beaters and head-cutters.
I used to spend one or two nights during Muharram visiting the matems
and listening to the preachers. If I failed to put in an appearance at the
principal matems I got messages enquiring why I had not been to them.
Apart from myself very few, if any, Europeans entered the matems, and
if they had wished to do so I am not sure that they would have been
welcomed. We had to restrain Europeans from watching the procession
in the daytime because they used to laugh at what was to the participants a
religious demonstration; they ran along the side of the procession sticking
cameras into people’s faces. The Shias regarded this as ill-mannered as we
would .regard photographers taking snapshots and movie pictures of the
mourners at a funeral. After we had been in Bahrain for some years
Marjorie was invited to attend a women’s matem; these were similar
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V.