Between the accession to power of Shaykh ‘Isa ibn ‘Ali Al Khalifah in 1869 and the establishment of municipal government in 1919, the growth of Manama reflected the evolution of Bahrain's pearling and entrepôt economies and the increasing importance of the Government of India in fostering its semi-autonomous position within the Al Khalifah domains. At the turn of the twentieth century, the urban layout revealed the relative weakness of the tribal administration and the critical role played by trade and immigration in the expansion of the previous decades. Unlike Muharraq, which developed around the residences of the Al Khalifah family, Manama did not have a clearly defined administrative and political centre. Its configuration was to a great extent the result of the spatial and demographic requirements of the maritime economy which dominated urban life. The successive waves of rural and overseas immigrants and the increasing volume of trade were matched by the development of the harbour and the markets, fostering the growth of residential districts along the seafront.

While the town developed gradually throughout the nineteenth century, its political and social orders crystallised in the years of the pearl boom, particularly after the 1880s. In this period the accelerated development of the harbour, markets, neighbourhoods and religious institutions unveils the ‘dynamics of power’ which characterised the rise of a powerful merchant class and the contest, as well as the symbiotic relationship, between merchants and rulers on the one hand and the Al Khalifah and British agents on the other.

Challenging the received wisdom on the Gulf

Over the two centuries between the Al Khalifah occupation and independence from British control, urban development and urban life in Bahrain continued to mirror the broader social and political transformations of the coastal regions of the Persian Gulf. Before oil the dynamics of these frontier societies were expressed in the visual and cultural language of expanding port towns in a way which resembles – albeit in a different economy of scale – the growth of Gulf cities in the age of oil and globalisation. In approaching the city as a separate theme in Gulf history, this study has revisited the political and social evolution of Manama and Bahrain in the age of tribal expansion, British rule and oil. The analysis of Manama's urban history as the world centre of pearling, the hub of British imperial influence and the capital of the modern state of Bahrain challenges standard portrayals of the politics, society and urbanism of the Gulf littoral.

Manama and its agricultural hinterland constitute an excellent vantage point for observing the multiple facets and composite nature of state and nation building in the Gulf before and after oil. The interface between tribe and state in Bahrain, and more generally along the Gulf coast, has thus to be understood in the context of the complex society of its historic port settlement.

With the establishment of a municipality in 1919, Manama entered a new era of modernisation and local government. The reorganisation of the town became an integral part of the process of reform which throughout the 1920s supported the creation of a modern state administration under the aegis of the Government of India. As Manama consolidated its position as the lynchpin of British informal empire in the Persian Gulf, it acquired a dual administrative and political personality as the centre of the modern state of Bahrain (Hukumah al-Bahrayn) and of a municipal administration (Idarah al-Baladiyyah). The merchant elite of the pearl boom effectively took control of local government as members of the town's municipal council (majlis al-baladiyyah). While municipal elections and the enforcement of legislation and taxation became the pillars of baladiyyah rule and the symbol of a new era of modernisation, the council provided the forum for the continuation of patronage politics cementing the traditional alliance between merchants and rulers.

After 1927 the municipal government survived the collapse of the pearling industry, which caused widespread economic dislocation throughout the Gulf and jeopardised the continuation of the reforms in Bahrain. The baladiyyah assisted the development of the town after the discovery of oil in 1932 but its political legitimacy was short-lived. After World War II, in particular, the new social and political forces which had emerged in the first two decades of the oil boom started to challenge municipal government and the old notable class as an integral part of a ‘reactionary’ ancien régime.

Why cities and urban history?

It is peculiar that urban history has been conspicuously absent from the study of the Arab coast of the Persian Gulf in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, peppered as that region is by a chain of city-states – or quasi city-states – stretching from Kuwait to Oman. The history of cities and urban societies in this region has featured only as a corollary to that of tribes, British Empire and oil. Of course the pivotal role of tribesmen, British officials and oil wealth as agents of historical change can be hardly overstated. Tribal communities constituted the backbone of the political infrastructure of the Gulf coast in the nineteenth century and developed a symbiotic, albeit often conflicting, relationship with the British authorities who controlled the region between 1820 and 1971. British protection ensured the political stability of the local tribal principalities within the new regional order of nation-states which took shape after World War I. After the 1930s, the discovery of oil gradually transformed the lives of Gulf peoples beyond recognition, altering their social and political identities and their relationship with their living environments.

The study of the politics of empire and tribalism, which has been the staple of regional historiography, has imposed a number of constraints on our understanding of indigenous societies and political cultures. External factors have been paramount in explaining historical change through the lens of British influence.

In the Al Khalifah era, Manama developed as part of a network of port settlements which connected the Persian Gulf to the world of trade, merchants and trans-continental routes extending from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea to South East Asia. Viewed from the perspective of this maritime world, these commercial emporia were essentially ‘brides of the sea’. Yet, as clearly suggested by the case of Manama, they also constituted the microcosm of the complex political and economic dynamics which bound coastal societies to their agricultural and tribal hinterlands. That this dual relationship with hinterlands and forelands underpinned the urbanisation of the Gulf coast is evident from the vicissitudes of the tribal and imperial histories of the region before the discovery of oil.

Developments in Bahrain reflected wider processes of political and urban change which were triggered by the resurgence of tribal power throughout the Persian Gulf in the eighteenth century. Alongside the Al Khalifah, a powerful cohort of tribal rulers came to control the Arab coast, favouring the consolidation of a new constellation of maritime outposts. From Kuwait in the west to Ras al-Khaymah in the east, these port settlements under tribal regimes started to compete for the control of regional and long-distance trade with the leading commercial emporia of Basra, Bushehr and Muscat in Oman. As was the case of Manama and Muharraq in Bahrain, fully fledged port towns with complex socio-political organisations only began to take shape in the second half of the nineteenth century under the combined forces of the pearl boom and of British informal empire.

The previous two chapters have explained the evolution of politics and society in Manama before and after the discovery of oil, focussing on the role of networks of patronage, of imperial and overseas connections and, after 1919, of municipal government. This chapter traces the evolution of urban political sociability in the same period through the lens of civic strife, popular politics and ideological contestation. These were the ‘unruly’ activities which reshuffled power between urban groups, and between them and the state. Key episodes of unrest and the performance of Muharram rituals are analysed as contexts of public engagement and as evidence of the changing relationship between the body politic of Manama and the government of Bahrain. Not only did they bring new leaders, social groups and political allegiances into the arena of urban politics but also fostered the growth of new forms of community and public consciousness. Muharram rituals, in particular, marked the evolution of Shi‘i popular politics throughout the period. The lower classes of Manama used them as venues to express values and symbols which addressed issues of power, authority and class in the public arena.

Episodes of unrest in Manama also marked crucial junctures in the process of nation and state building, a further testimony to the importance of urban activism in reshaping Bahrain's political and social orders.

Before the discovery of oil, the presence of water and the rich pearl fisheries of Bahrain supported the growth of towns and agricultural hamlets. The continuity of settlement can also be readily explained by a long history of trade and by the political realities of a frontier society in flux. The strategic position of the islands favoured the consolidation of local administrations under the aegis of the regional powers and of the maritime and land empires which dominated the Gulf coast. Yet until the establishment of the Pax Britannica in the first half of the nineteenth century, the absence of fixed military and political frontiers fostered continuous instability throughout the region. Bahrain was a busy ‘buffer’ zone between the Arab and Iranian worlds and the point of intersection between the tribal and agricultural frontiers of the Persian Gulf. The coastline did not constitute a barrier but a permeable border in a region which had a long history of indigenous seafaring supported by an advanced maritime technology. Over the centuries, migrations from the mainland were the engine of political change as suggested by the sequence of dynasties of tribesmen, merchant seafarers and imperial administrators which ruled the islands. Newcomers had a profound influence on the economic and demographic make-up of Bahrain; the mainland was a reservoir of manpower but migrations could easily carry the seeds of societal and political collapse.

Secular ideologies, particularly Arab nationalism and socialism, dominated the landscape of Arab political thought throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s. But as early as 1966, the Palestinian political scientist, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1929–2001), had begun to detect signs of a “retreat from the secular path” among intellectuals in the Arab region. The waning appeal of secular ideologies became increasingly apparent in the wake of the Arab–Israeli war of 1967, even though many of the first criticisms that emerged as part of the “self-criticism after the defeat” remained largely secular in character, with some intellectuals on the left asserting an even more uncompromisingly anti-religious stance. With the Arab–Israeli war of 1973, the idea that a unified Arab front was a precondition for successfully confronting Israel was challenged by state-based or more particularist Arab approaches to overcoming the weakness of Arab states vis-à-vis Israel. However, it is in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution in Iran that one sees most clearly not only a sharp rise in Islamist critiques of secular ideologies, but also the emergence of “new partisans of the heritage” (turathiyyun judud) from a seemingly unlikely source: within the ranks of Arab nationalists and socialists.

This chapter examines the political thought of various Arab nationalist and socialist intellectuals in whose writings one can detect development over time from a decidedly secular perspective to a reconsidered position that either places greater emphasis on Islamic authenticity as a necessary component of a national awakening or attempts to synthesize aspects of their thinking with Islamism.