by Lin Noueihed
‘After this, we want to bring down the regime. We want nothing else,’ said Abdulaziz's cousin, walking back from the cemetery. ‘Hani had twins under one year old. What a shame to take their father away at that age, but we have no weapons to defend ourselves and our lives … How can they ask the Peninsula Shield in and then accuse Iran of meddling? Did you see anyone with a gun?‘11
The dynamics of Bahrain's uprising and its role in the Arab Spring are bound up in the history of activism in the country, in how a majority Shi'ite country came to be ruled by the Sunni Al Khalifa monarchy, and in the regional rivalries and imperial ambitions that have coloured politics for centuries in this vulnerable state. What happened in 2011 was the latest episode in a long and bleak cycle of uprisings and crackdowns that shows no immediate prospect of coming to an end.
A History of Divisions
Up two flights of rough concrete steps, past a basic kitchen that had seen better days and a small living room where a dozen or so children played on the floor, the roof offered a sheltered view of the main road in Jidhafs, a Shi'ite suburb of Manama. It was just before dusk and the call to prayer was punctuated by the occasional pop of tear gas being fired. A clutch of riot police swung round a corner and into sight, but the youths who had been loitering on the street slipped silently into rundown houses whose front doors opened directly onto the road. The police looked around, buckshot rifles at the ready for any sign of protest, then ran down a side alley. Balaclavas and helmets obscured faces and muffled voices, disguising the identity of these security forces who, according to Shi'ite Bahrainis, were Sunnis recruited from Syria, Jordan, Yemen or even Pakistan.12
Inside, on a wall of the rooftop annex, was a small picture of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah, a Shi'ite political group that receives Iranian military support. On the other wall was a larger framed photograph of an elderly man with a turban and white beard. The Shi'ite cleric was the deceased father of the eleven siblings who grew up in this narrow three-storey home, and a member of Bahrain's first parliament, which was established in 1973 and suspended two years later.
The scene in Jidhafs was not simply one of disempowered civilians demanding more political rights and coming up against the armed might of the state. It was also a microcosm of the overlapping sectarian, ethnic and national loyalties, the glaring social, economic and political disparities, and the conflicting regional ambitions that complicate the uprising in Bahrain.
Huddled in the roof annex with his siblings, waiting for the tensions to calm down, Jaafar explained his alarm at the sudden escalation in sectarian tensions and the intervention of Gulf troops. ‘There is no sectarian problem in Bahrain. We hear on television that our Sunni brothers are guarding their homes and we wonder why. We don't even teach our children anything sectarian. The government has lied to the Sunnis, and said these Shi'ites want to take your rights, but whenever a Sunni would join us at the Pearl roundabout, we were proud,’ he said, offering a glass of fruit juice and turning on the air conditioning against the still spring air. ‘This is our country. We don't accept Iran or anyone else to touch or violate the sovereignty of our country.‘13
That is not how the ruling Al Khalifa family or many Sunnis see it. Like the other Sunni rulers in the Gulf, Bahrain's monarchy has long painted Bahraini Shi'ites as a potential fifth column, more loyal to their co-religionists in the Gulf's Shi'ite power Iran, than they were to Sunni fellow Arabs.14
These insinuations are vehemently denied by Bahraini Shi'ites, the majority of whom identify themselves as Baharna, people of Arab descent and adherents of Shi'ism since the early days of Islam, long before Iran adopted the Shi'ite creed around 1501.15 It is not just their religious sect that differentiates the Baharna from their Sunni compatriots and rulers, but also their historical narrative that identifies them as the settled natives of a territory that once encompassed not only today's archipelago of thirty-three islands, but also stretched from the Qatar peninsula to southern Iraq.16
This historical Bahrain has not existed for 500 years. The sixteenth-century Portuguese invasion of the Bahraini islands severed political ties to the mainland, a divide that was cemented when the Iranian Safavids expelled the Portuguese in 1602 and ruled Bahrain until the eighteenth-century arrival of the Sunni Al Khalifa family, who were still in power when the 2011 revolt broke out.
Yet the notion of belonging to a territory that predated the modern borders imposed on them by successive conquerors is a cornerstone of the Baharna narrative of an oppressed native identity that is inherently hostile towards the established Sunni dynastic rulers.17 It is everyone else, the Baharna contend, who hail from elsewhere and whose loyalties are in question.
Arriving from Qatar, the Al Khalifa family had a tribal background, dialect and historical narrative that differed significantly from that of the Baharna, whose family and social relationships revolved around sedentary farming communities and whose villages retain that character despite being swallowed up by the city.18 Like their predecessors, the Al Khalifa family faced consistent external and internal threats to their rule and may not have survived as long as they did without more than a century of support from Britain, which had brought the islands under its protection in 1861 and subsequently made the country an administrative centre for its interests in the Gulf.19, 20
Over the ensuing century, Britain received and rejected several Iranian claims to Bahrain, which Iran declared in 1957 to be its fourteenth province.21 Iran did not drop its assertion until 1970, a year before Britain finally left Bahrain and ended its Pax Britannica in the Gulf. Already advanced among its Gulf Arab neighbours, Bahrain enjoyed a long history not only of trade but of political and cultural vibrancy. Its people were among the first in the Gulf to be formally educated, and Bahrain was producing doctors, bankers and engineers when many Gulf natives still lived in palm frond shacks. It was the third Gulf country to strike oil, in 1932, and the first to start running out of oil and diversifying its economy. From the mid–1970s, when Dubai was still a small port, Bahrain was the Middle East's financial capital, taking on the mantle lost by Lebanon as it slipped into civil war. Bahrainis have a long history of political and labour activism. Uprisings, strikes, clashes or protests broke out virtually every decade throughout the twentieth century, so, by the region's standards, Bahrain could boast an established and resilient civil society and widespread political awareness.22
Invited to join a nascent federation of Gulf states by Abu Dhabi ruler Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan in the aftermath of Britain's retreat from the region, Bahrain's rulers felt confident enough to go it alone despite their lack of oil wealth. In 1973, Sheikh Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, then the ruler of Bahrain, promulgated a constitution that allowed for a powerful elected parliament and raised hopes of increased political participation by Bahrainis. But the first elections in 1973 ushered in outspoken politicians, alarming Sheikh Isa, who set about clamping down on dissent.
In 1975, just two years after Bahrain's experiment with parliamentary politics, Sheikh Isa dissolved the assembly, suspended the constitution and imposed a State Security Law that severely curbed political freedoms. Through the ensuing decades, thousands of Bahrainis were jailed, the media was tightly controlled, and the ruler concentrated absolute authority in his own hands.
Without British support, it quickly became clear that the Al Khalifa family lacked the financial and political clout to survive against a politically active population without Saudi help. Despite its poverty, relative to the vast hydrocarbon wealth of its neighbours, its negligible land mass, small population and diminished strategic importance as an oil, pearl, trading or administrative centre, Bahrain's unusual position as a majority Shi'ite country ruled by a Sunni family saw it once more become a proxy battlefield in the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
When Saudi troops crossed the causeway linking the two countries in March 2011, they highlighted the historical web of regional and international ambitions that complicate Bahrain's crisis
and make it extraordinarily difficult for any uprising to either topple the Al Khalifa monarchy or secure deep political reform. The intervention also exposed the limits of Bahrain's sovereignty and of any internal efforts to resolve the political crisis without the blessing of Saudi Arabia.
The Al Khalifa monarchy was not financially independent. More than 75 per cent of Bahrain's oil comes from the Abu Safa field, which is under Saudi sovereignty and administration but whose revenues are shared as part of a contract that has left the Bahraini monarchy beholden to its wealthier neighbour.23 While Bahrain's government had worked hard to diversify its economy before the uprising – the financial sector alone comprised a quarter of GDP – oil still provided 80 per cent of government revenues on the eve of revolt.24
In 1986, the 25-kilometre King Fahd Causeway joined Bahrain to Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province and highlighted just how close the island was to the Arab littoral. The opening of the bridge was not just a practical or commercial venture, but consolidated Riyadh's strategic and economic influence over its tiny neighbour and sent a strong message to Iran. Bahrain was literally no longer an island.
By 2008, an average 50,000 vehicles were crossing the bridge each day.25 With bars, clubs and even cinemas banned in Saudi Arabia, and shopping centres, coffee shops and fast food outlets gender-segregated, Bahrain became a regular weekend haunt for Saudis, making regional tourism a mainstay of its economy. Though Saudi Arabia had not, like Iran, laid claim to Bahrain as a lost province, in the four decades since independence it has exploited the financial weaknesses and political insecurities of its ruling family to bring the island firmly into its sphere of influence.
Adding to the confusion over the divergent identities of Bahrainis, and central to the wider tensions in the whole region, is the transnational nature of Shi'ite religious affiliation and its peculiar relationship to politics. The split within Islam goes back to the struggle for succession that followed the seventh-century death of the Prophet Mohamed. Most Muslims accepted the election of the next four caliphs from among the senior leaders of the Muslim community, who were followed by a succession of dynastic sultan-caliphs. The Shi'ites believed the succession should have passed directly through a line of the prophet's descendants beginning with Ali, the Prophet's cousin and trusted associate and the husband of his daughter Fatima. The Shi'ites became a permanent community in Islam who followed a hereditary line of what they believed to be infallible imams who could guide Muslims. With the disappearance of the twelfth imam as a young boy in ninth-century Iraq, these so-called Twelver Shi'ites became a messianic sect who believed that this ‘Hidden Imam’ would return at the End of Days to bring justice to the earth.
In the absence of this imam, the faithful choose a senior scholar or jurist as their marjaa al-taqleed, or source of emulation, to whom they would turn for spiritual guidance. Given that a source of emulation is usually an ayatollah or a grand ayatollah, meaning he has reached the highest ranks in the Shi'ite hierarchy of religious learning, only a few men qualify at any one point. This means that a Bahraini Shi'ite might emulate an Iraqi or Iranian jurist. To the chagrin of Sunni political leaders, some Shi'ite clerics do not limit themselves to issuing fatawa, or edicts, on matters of religion, family or social affairs, but issue them on political affairs too, advising followers on questions of whether to join or boycott elections, accept or reject governments.26 For Sunnis, including those in Bahrain, the Shi'ites could not be trusted because they recognized an authority, often a foreigner, above the political leadership in their own country.27
There is also little doubt that Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, which allowed Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to transform his theory of wilayet al-faqih, or the vice-regency of the jurist, into an experiment in direct political rule by religious clerics, both emboldened Shi'ite activists in Arab countries and alarmed Sunni political leaders. Khomeini, who in theory installed himself into the immensely powerful position of the representative of the infallible imams on earth, set about trying to export his revolution – and many Arab Shi'ites were keen to import it.
Whereas Gulf governments were previously focused on suppressing leftist and Arab nationalist activists, in the 1980s their attention turned to this new threat. In 1981, Bahrain's government uncovered what it said was an Iranian-backed plot to overthrow the monarchy and install a theocratic state.28 Though most of the seventy-three people eventually sentenced over the failed coup were Bahraini, and none were Iranian, the coup attempt and a spate of attacks by Iranian-inspired Shi'ite groups in the Gulf and Lebanon during the 1980s were serious enough to encourage the nascent Gulf Cooperation Council, a six-member economic and political bloc of Sunni-ruled Arab countries formed in response to the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s, to push ahead with joint security arrangements and move towards setting up the joint defence force that was dispatched to Bahrain in 2011.29
Tensions with the new Shi'ite Islamic Republic across the Gulf inflamed sectarian tensions around the region, not least in Bahrain, where Shi'ites comprised a larger proportion of the population than in any other Arab country except, depending on which statistics you believe, Iraq. Sectarian feelings were so sensitive that breakdowns of Bahrain's demographic balance had not been published since 1941, when a survey conducted under British auspices estimated that Shi'ites comprised 53 per cent of the population and Sunnis 47 per cent. The population of Bahrain was less than 90,000 that year and had grown to more than 1.2 million on the eve of revolt, though half of them were expatriate workers.30 Of the Bahraini nationals, estimates vary from claims by Shi'ite activists that their community accounts for 75 per cent, to claims by establishment Sunnis that the population is split broadly in half. The truth, as is often the case, probably lies somewhere in between.31
Divisions in Bahrain were further inflamed by the fact that the sectarian divide was broadly mirrored by the class divide. Most of Bahrain's Shi'ites are descended from peasant farmers and have tended to occupy the lower socio-economic classes, suffering disproportionately from unemployment and lower incomes compared to other communities, who tend to hail from wealthier merchant families or be tied to powerful tribes or landowners.32
Of course, this is a generalization. There are also struggling Sunni families and wealthy Shi'ite families. Big-business families such as Jawad, who own a chain of supermarkets, and Hawwaj, who are behind the country's foremost chain of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals stores, are Shi'ite multi-millionaires. Shi'ite doctors, engineers and architects have built large, gated villas on the edges of their villages. Bahrainis are well-educated in general, and Shi'ite professionals are well-represented in the private sector. But the overall economic divisions exacerbate feelings of discrimination among Bahrain's Shi'ites, who point to the dilapidated roads in their villages and the poor state of housing as evidence of institutional preference for their Sunni compatriots.
Such institutional bias is difficult to prove or quantify, but a drive around Bahrain reveals a glaring contrast between the manicured lawns and well-lit streets of Sunni towns and the dilapidated warrens of ramshackle housing in some Shi'ite areas.
It was in the midst of rising unemployment and falling incomes that the 1990s uprising broke out. The suspension of the constitution and the crackdown on freedoms had been painfully felt by all Bahrainis and the economy had suffered. Leading Bahraini clerics and opposition leaders including leftists and nationalists had begun in 1992 to petition the then ruler, Sheikh Isa, to restore the constitution and hold elections. They had been ignored and the 1994 arrest of three Shi'ite clerics, accused by the government of being ringleaders in an attack on scantily-clad runners in a relay race, inflamed Shi'ite anger.33 Their arrest came as unemployed Shi'ites picketed the labour ministry demanding jobs and that protest swelled in size as demands escalated. Security forces cracked down heavily on the protest and a new cycle of violence was sparked that would wrack Bahrain for the rest of the decade. While the worst unrest and the most violent crackdowns of the 1990s took pla
ce in the Shi'ite villages, the end of emergency rule and the restoration of elections and political freedoms were demands that resonated among religious leaders, political activists, intellectuals and beleaguered businessmen across both religious communities.34 Bahrain's constitutional movement was a national one, involving several high-profile Sunnis as well as the long-suffering Shi'ites, but it was fiercely resisted by the Al Khalifa family who feared losing power after two centuries of treating Bahrain largely as a personal fiefdom.
A Decade of Hope and Frustration
The 2000s had been a decade of both hope and frustration for Bahrainis. On the death of his father in 1999, the new emir, soon to rename himself as king, had promised an era of reform. In 2000, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa stunned the people of Sitra when he popped up through a sun roof on a visit to the Shi'ite area that had been a hotbed of rebellion during the 1990s uprising. Sitra, home to most of Bahrain's oil facilities, was paradoxically one of the poorest parts of the country, with youth unemployment rampant and schools and health services lacking. Here was a king who was mixing with ordinary people, listening to their needs, and who genuinely seemed determined to turn a page on the bitter past. The people of Sitra and Shi'ites around Bahrain were jubilant. To many Bahrainis, it seemed the new king was serious about implementing reforms that would restore political life to the country and addressing the grievances of Shi'ites, who complained that their villages had been neglected during years of unrest.35
In 2001, Hamad put forward the National Action Charter, a constitutional declaration that promised to protect individual freedoms and equality, to restore the rule of law and to work towards a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral parliament and separation of powers, ending the strife that had convulsed the country since 1994.36 Following assurances to Shi'ite religious leaders that the elected parliament would be empowered, an extraordinary 98.4 per cent of Bahraini voters approved the document.37 The new ruler lifted the despised State Security Law that had been in force since 1975 and had effectively suspended the political freedoms and constitutional rights of Bahrainis. Political prisoners and exiles were pardoned and the State Security Court, used to try political opponents in the 1990s, was closed down.38 It seemed the country really was changing and Bahraini society was buoyed up by a genuine excitement about what the future might bring.
