Bahrain's culture: two sects, many origins and a pearling past

Who the Bahrainis are by origin

Wikipedia's article on the culture counts at least eight or nine ethnic groups among Bahraini citizens, and the division that matters most in daily life cuts across the division by sect.

Most Shia Bahrainis are Baharna, Arabs descended from the island's pre-Islamic inhabitants, who speak their own variety of Arabic. The Ajam are Shia of Persian origin with a distinct language and culture, and form large communities in Manama and Muharraq. Wikipedia's history of Bahrain adds that although the Baharna and the Ajam share a faith, they have historically spoken different languages, worshipped at separate sites, lived in separate neighbourhoods and rarely intermarried.

Sunni Bahrainis divide in turn. The urban Arabs descend mostly from families of central Arabia who, alongside the Baharna, were pearl divers, sailors, merchants and fishermen before oil; the ruling family and most holders of government office come from this group. The Huwala descend from Sunnis of the Persian coast, some Persian and some Arab by origin. Smaller groups include Bahrainis of Baloch descent, of East African descent living traditionally in Muharraq and Riffa, the descendants of Indian merchant families known as the Bania, and naturalised Palestinians and other Levantine Arabs.

The citizens are fewer than the residents. The census of 2020 counted 712,362 Bahrainis and 789,273 non-Bahrainis, 650,996 of the latter from non-Arab Asian countries. Wikipedia records about 290,000 Indian nationals living in Bahrain in 2008, most from Kerala.

How the Sunni and Shia shares are estimated

Every source agrees that Islam is the state religion and that the citizen population is divided between Sunni and Shia. They disagree on the proportion, and none of them is a census.

Britannica says only that the Shia are in the majority, and that the ruling family and many of the wealthier and more influential Bahrainis are Sunni, a difference it calls an underlying cause of political and social tension. Wikipedia's article on the country records the claim that Sunni immigration has turned a Shia majority into a Sunni one, and Shia opposition groups have long accused the government of naturalising Sunnis from neighbouring countries to that end. The accusation is what makes the count political.

The census does record religion in outline. It found 81.2% of residents Muslim in 2001 and 70.2% in 2010, the fall reflecting the arrival of foreign workers rather than any change among citizens.

Which other faiths the island keeps

Christians made up about 14.5% of the population in Wikipedia's figure, almost all of them foreign residents; about 1,000 Christians hold Bahraini citizenship. Catholic and Orthodox churches stand on the island, as do Hindu temples. The Shrinathji temple in old Manama was built by the Thattai Hindu community in 1817, and Britannica counts Jews, Hindus and Baha'is among the non-Muslim minorities.

The Jewish community is small and recent by the island's standards. It began with a few families from what were then Iraq and Iran in the late 1880s, and Wikipedia gives its size as 36 to 50 people, with 37 Bahraini citizens. Riots after the Second World War were directed at it, in Wikipedia's history of Bahrain. In May 2008 a Jewish woman, Houda Nonoo, was appointed ambassador to the United States, and the appointed Shura Council has included members of the Jewish and Christian communities.

Same-sex relations between adults over 21 have been legal since 1976, but Wikipedia records arrests under broadly written laws against public immorality and indecency.

Which languages Bahrainis speak

Arabic is the official language, and the constitution requires a member of parliament to be fluent in it. The Baharna speak their own dialect, Bahrani Arabic, which differs from the standard language. Persian is common but spoken mostly at home, in Britannica's description, and the Ajam keep their own dialect of it; the Baloch speak Balochi.

English is compulsory as a second language in all schools, according to Britannica, and road signs and commercial names are in both Arabic and English. The foreign population adds Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Nepali and Tagalog. The press follows the same lines: daily papers in Arabic and English and one in Malayalam, and radio stations in Arabic, English and Hindi.

How pearling shaped the songs and the houses

The pearl banks around the island were worked from antiquity until the Japanese cultured pearl destroyed the trade in the 1930s, and much of what is called traditional in Bahraini culture comes from the boats. The fidjeri are the songs of the pearl divers: a repertoire performed by men, with singing, clapping, drums and dances with earthen water jars, still heard today in Britannica's account. The khaleeji style of Gulf folk music is played with polyrhythms that Wikipedia traces to African influence, and liwa, a music and dance form, is performed mainly in communities of East African descent in Muharraq and Hidd. The ardha is a men's sword dance with drummers and a poet singing the verses.

UNESCO inscribed Pearling, Testimony of an Island Economy on the World Heritage List in 2012. The site joins seventeen buildings in Muharraq, the homes, shops and storehouses of pearl merchants and a mosque, to three offshore oyster beds, part of the seashore and the fort of Qal'at Bu Mahir, from which boats left for the banks. UNESCO singles out the craftsmanship in timber and plaster, and notes that many merchant buildings were demolished during the decades of neglect that followed the trade's collapse. The wind tower, which ventilates a house naturally, survives on old buildings in Manama and Muharraq.

The villages of the north kept a different architecture: flat-roofed houses of stone or concrete, and among fishermen and the poor, Britannica records, huts called barasti built from date-palm branches.

The boatyards still work. Britannica describes dhow building at Manama and Muharraq as a highly respected art, and village crafts that continue with state support: pottery at A'ali, baskets woven from palm leaves at Karbabad, goldwork, tinsmithing and textiles.

How modern schooling came to the island

At the start of the twentieth century the only schools were Qur'anic kuttab, where children learned to read the Qur'an. The first government school for boys, Al-Hidaya Al-Khalifia, opened in Muharraq in 1919; a second opened in Manama in 1926, and in 1928 the first government school for girls opened in Muharraq, the first girls' school in the Gulf in Wikipedia's history of Bahrain. The Ministry of Education's public library network followed, its oldest branch opening in Manama in 1946.

Schooling is now compulsory from 6 to 14 and free for citizens in government schools, which teach boys and girls separately; 126,981 students attended them in 2011. Private schools teach British, American and Indian curricula, and Pakistani and Indian community schools serve the migrant population. The University of Bahrain is the state university, the Royal University for Women opened in 2005, and the National Action Charter of 2001 opened the way for private universities.

What Bahrainis eat and wear

Coffee, flavoured with cardamom and saffron, is offered to guests and drunk in coffee shops that serve as meeting places. Britannica lists fish, shrimp, meat, rice and dates as the base of the cooking. Machbous is fish or meat cooked with rice; muhammar is sweet brown rice with sugar or dates; shawarma is spit-roasted meat.

The traditional dress for men is the thobe, white cotton in summer and black wool in winter, with a white skullcap under a ghutra, a square scarf that in Bahrain is red and white checked or plain white, held by a black cord, the agal. On formal occasions a wool cloak, the bisht, goes over it. Women's traditional dress is the black abaya and the hijab. Western clothing is common, and Britannica describes the rules for women's dress as relaxed by regional standards, while women in rural and conservative communities keep the veil.

How the religious calendar marks the year

The public calendar is Islamic: the two Eids, the Prophet's birthday and the month of Ramadan. Ashura is observed by the Shia, and Britannica notes that it has become a public holiday only more recently. Gargee'an, on the fifteenth night of Sha'ban and again in mid-Ramadan, sends children in traditional dress door to door to collect nuts and sweets and sing.

On 1 September 2006 Bahrain moved its weekend from Thursday and Friday to Friday and Saturday, to share one day of it with the rest of the world. The secular calendar has grown around festivals: the Spring of Culture each March and April since 2005, run by the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities, and a music festival held annually since 1991. The Arab League named Manama the Arab Capital of Culture for 2012.

Where the culture is kept and played

The Bahrain National Museum opened on 15 December 1988 on an artificial peninsula facing Muharraq, in a white travertine building of about 20,000 square metres with halls for graves, Dilmun, Tylos and Islam, customs, crafts and manuscripts. The museum describes its collection as covering 6,000 years of history; Wikipedia's article describes artefacts reaching back to the first inhabitants some 9,000 years ago. Beit al-Quran holds Qur'ans, some dating to the seventh century, and there are museums of oil and of pearl diving. The first public library opened in Manama in 1946.

A modern art movement took shape in the 1950s with the founding of an art society, and calligraphy, expressionism and abstract painting have followed. Poetry remains the prestige literary form. Most established writers keep to classical Arabic metre, while younger poets write in free verse, often on political or personal themes. The press is mostly private and, in Britannica's words, not censored as long as it refrains from criticising the ruling family; the opposition daily Al-Wasat, which reached a circulation of 15,000 by 2011, has since been banned. Feature films are few: the first, the Disney production Hamad and the Pirates, was made in 1971, and The Barrier, directed by Bassam Al-Thawadi, followed in 1990.

Football is the most popular sport, and Bahrain won the Arabian Gulf Cup in 2019. Horse racing is older: more than twenty types of Arabian horse are bred on the islands, in Britannica's count. The country first competed at the Summer Olympics in 1984. Sport has also become an instrument of state promotion: the government sponsors a professional cycling team that rode the Tour de France in 2017, and on 3 August 2020 Bahrain bought a minority stake in Paris FC, a French second-division club, a purchase that critics described, in Wikipedia's account, as an attempt to improve the country's image abroad after its human rights record. Falconry and camel racing continue alongside, and Britannica records camel racing as a popular public entertainment. The Bahrain Grand Prix, first held on 4 April 2004 as the first Formula One race in an Arab country, was cancelled in 2011 during the uprising and moved to Malaysia in 2026 because of the war with Iran.