The Shia of Bahrain
Shi’ism, which came to Bahrain in 1500, is the island’s dominant religion. Between two thirds and three quarters of the Shia population is native in origin, the remainder being of Iranian descent. This division is social as well as cultural. The Iranian Shia, known as Ajam, are well represented in the middle class professions and politically inactive. They see their relative privilege as contingent on the good will of the ruling Sunni al-Khalifas and are reluctant to jeopardize their position. Their native counterparts, known as Baharna, occupy the lowest strata of society and constitute ninety per cent of the labour force. The two communities inhabit separate districts and there is little intermarriage between them. Defining themselves in opposition to the Ajam as well as ruling Sunnis, the Baharna have retained a strong Arab identity. Despite the segregation of the the two communities, antagonism arose in the 1950s and 60s as the schism between conservatives and Arab nationalists came to mark not only a division between Arab and Persian, but between rich and poor across the Arab world.
Soon after their rise to power in the late eighteenth century, the al-Khalifas invited the Dawasir tribes from the mainland to send forces to the Western side of the island to help displace the resident Shia. The 313 Shia villages that then existed are reduced to fifty today, while the encouragement of selective immigration as a counterweight to the Shia population has sincebeen a constant feature of al-Khalifa policy.
A 1928 uprising went some way to break the feudal bond between Sunnis and Shia, after which the Shia began to prosper under more egalitarian British rule, which allowed them greater access to education and the civil service.
Shia political activism began in earnest with the democratic movements of the 1930s. At the outset, these contained both Sunni and Shia were aimed at ending colonial rule. Despite periods of Shia unrest in the early 1950s. Revolutionary Arab nationalism, always Sunni in orientation, was equally attractive to wealthier Sunnis and disenfranchised Shia. It was not until the arrival of political Shiism in the shape of the 1979 Iranian revolution that a wholly Shia opposition arose.
Labour disputes in the 1970s weakened the security of Shia employment. In the following years, as Shia opposition gathered momentum, the proportion os Shia in the armed forces (all enlisted men, not officers) was reduced and with the crash in the oil price in the mid-eighties, unemployment rose further. The government was the major employer and, as elsewhere in the GCC, there was no private sector to take up the slack. The Shia, of course, bore the brunt of the recession. The huge influx of oil wealth after 1973 had widened the gap between rich and poor, while the revolution in Iran had radicalized Shia across the Arab world. Iranian backing of a growing number of dissident groups grew after 1981, less as a consequence of revolutionary ideology and more through necessity of discouraging GCC support for Iraq. All Shia opposition in this period was viewed through the prism of the Iran-Iraq war, which provided ample excuse for government repression.
In recent years, Shia opposition has been one of two political currents in Bahrain, the other being a general push toward democracy, which has the support of a cross-section of society. In 1992 a group of fourteen reformers, most of them Sunni, presented to the Emir a petition calling for the restoration of the abortive 1975 parliamentary constitution. This was summarily dismissed. In 1994, a mostly Shiite group of reformers presented a second, longer petition. Largely secular in nature, the petition nevertheless had the support of two Shiite clerics, Abd-al-Wahhab Husayn and Sheikh Abd -al-Amir al-Jamri. The second petition provoked a much fiercer reaction form the government, with raids, arrests and confiscation of property, accompanied by polarizing propaganda to deoict the movement as purely Shia in conception. Sunni families were harassed into retracting there support and al-Jamri was jailed. Al-Jamri’s moderate stance prevented him being labelled a fundamentalist, however, and bi-confessional support for the petition movement continues.
