Bahrain's history: a Gulf island ruled from the mainland

Why Dilmun grew rich on Bahrain Island

The first written name for the islands is Dilmun. It appears in Sumerian cuneiform tablets from the end of the fourth millennium BCE, found in the temple of Inanna at Uruk, where the word describes a type of axe, an official and people receiving wool rations. Britannica describes Dilmun as an independent kingdom centred on Bahrain Island that flourished around 2000 BCE as a transshipment point between Sumer and the Indus valley, sending copper, stone beads, pearls, dates and vegetables north in return for farm produce.

Two things made the island the place for that trade. It lay on the sea route between the two river civilisations, and it had water. Artesian springs rose on the land and even in the sea off the north coast, where visitors since antiquity recorded fresh water bubbling up through the salt. The Arabic name Bahrain, "the two seas", is often read as a reference to that mix. The weights used at Dilmun matched those of the Indus rather than those of southern Mesopotamia, and by the Isin-Larsa period, around 2000 to 1800 BCE, Dilmun had come to control the trade between them.

The richest evidence is funerary. UNESCO counts about 11,774 burial mounds across 21 sites in the west of the island, built between about 2200 and 1750 BCE and inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2019. Most began as low cylindrical towers and eroded into mounds; 17 royal mounds were built as two-storey towers, and two of the last Dilmun kings, Ri'Mum and Yagli-'El, have been linked to mounds 8 and 10. The size of the cemeteries is what UNESCO takes as its proof of prosperity: a burial tradition reached the whole population rather than an elite.

The capital stood on the north coast at Qal'at al-Bahrain, a tell of layered settlement about 300 by 600 metres and 12 metres high, inscribed in 2005. UNESCO records occupation there from about 2300 BCE, and Britannica dates the first city to about 2800 BCE. Its own documents disagree on how much has been dug: the summary puts the excavated share at about 25%, the statement of value at less than 15%.

Mesopotamian powers later claimed the islands. An Assyrian inscription of about 1250 BCE names the Assyrian king as king of Dilmun, and Neo-Babylonian records of 567 BCE place Dilmun under the king of Babylon. The name fell out of use after Babylon fell in 538 BCE.

Who held the islands before Islam came

Greek writers called the main island Tylos. Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander the Great, found cotton plantations there in the fourth century BCE, and Theophrastus recorded that Tylos exported engraved walking canes to Babylon. The upper classes wrote Greek while everyday speech was Aramaic, and local coins showed a seated Zeus. In 127 BCE the islands passed to Characene, the state Hyspaosines founded in what is now southern Iraq.

Persian dynasties dominated the rest of antiquity. The Achaemenids kept naval bases on the islands from the sixth century BCE, the Parthians garrisoned the southern Gulf coast from about 130 BCE, and in the third century CE the Sasanian founder Ardashir defeated the Parthian governor and made his son Shapur governor. Under the Sasanians the archipelago formed the district of Mishmahig. From the fourth century to the eighth much of the population followed the Church of the East, and ruins of that period survive at Samahij.

How Islam and the Qarmatians changed the islands

Bahrain accepted Islam in 629, and the Al Khamis Mosque, founded in 692, is one of its earliest mosques. For the next nine centuries the name Bahrain covered a much larger region, the coast from Basra to the Strait of Hormuz, and the islands themselves were called Awal. Ibn Battuta's account of the fourteenth century is among the first to use Bahrain for the islands alone.

Around 900 the Qarmatians, a messianic Ismaili movement from Kufa, took the region and built a state governed by a council of six. From there they raided the pilgrim routes, massacring 20,000 returning pilgrims in 906 according to Wikipedia's history of Bahrain, and in 930 they sacked Mecca and carried off the Black Stone, which was returned in 951. The Abbasids defeated them in battle in 976, and a revolt on the island in about 1058 began their end.

Arab dynasties followed: the Uyunids from 1076 for 163 years, the Usfurids from 1253, tribute to the rulers of Hormuz from 1330, and the Jabrids from the mid-fifteenth century. The historian Juan Cole places the establishment of Twelver Shi'ism on the islands in this period, as the population moved from the Ismaili tradition to the Imami branch. That is the origin of the Shia majority the island still has.

How Portugal and Persia fought for the islands

The navigator Ahmad ibn Majid counted 360 villages on Awal in 1489, with pearl fisheries all around them and a thousand ships working the trade. Three decades later a combined Portuguese and Hormuzi force under António Correia conquered the islands in 1521, and Portugal rebuilt the fort at Qal'at al-Bahrain as its garrison. Revolts broke out in 1529 and 1534. In 1602 an uprising led by Rukn ed-Din, set off by the governor's order to execute the island's richest traders, drove the Portuguese out.

Shah Abbas I moved a Persian garrison into the fort almost at once, and Safavid rule lasted from 1602 to 1717. The Safavids governed at a distance, through the Shia clergy, and the island's seminaries produced theologians such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Bahrani. Oman invaded in 1717 and a period of short, destructive rule followed: Nader Shah retook the islands for Persia in 1736, and a family from Bushehr governed them in Persia's name from 1753. When the German traveller Carsten Niebuhr visited in 1763 he found that the 360 towns and villages of earlier accounts had fallen to 60.

How the Al Khalifa came to rule Bahrain

The present dynasty arrived from Zubarah, on the Qatar peninsula, where the Bani Utbah clan had built a prosperous base. Persia, through the ruler of Bahrain and Bushehr, attacked Zubarah in 1782 and was driven off, and in retaliation the Bani Utbah invaded Bahrain Island. Wikipedia's history of Bahrain gives 28 July 1783 for the completion of the conquest and notes that some historians put it in 1782, while the government's own flag guide dates the taking of the islands to 23 July 1783; J. G. Lorimer's account has Ahmed Al Fateh defeating the Persian governor outside Manama. The sources also differ on the family's origin. Britannica traces the Al Khalifa to Al-Hasa in eastern Arabia, while Wikipedia records them leaving Kuwait in 1766.

The family moved to the island in 1797, and fought off Omani invasions in 1799, 1800 and 1802. Its rule rested on patronage: allied Sunni tribes received autonomy and tax-free access to the pearl banks in return for loyalty. Beneath them lived the Baharna, the Shia Arab majority, alongside the 'Ajam, Shia families from Iran, and Sunni merchants from Najd and from the Persian coast. The ruling family and its allies were Sunni and the majority was not, and every later political settlement on the islands has had to deal with that fact.

What Britain's treaties gave the ruling family

Britain signed its first treaty with the Al Khalifa in 1820, recognising them as rulers. Britannica dates the protected status to 1861, when the sheikh agreed to refrain from "the prosecution of war, piracy, or slavery" and Britain took over defence and foreign relations. Further agreements in 1868, after a war with Qatar, and in 1880 and 1892 barred the ruler from ceding territory or dealing with any other government without British consent. In return Britain promised protection by sea and, in Wikipedia's summary, to support the Al Khalifa's rule, which until then had been insecure.

Peace brought trade. By the 1870s Bahrain had overtaken Basra, Kuwait and Muscat as the leading trading centre of the Gulf, and Persian, Huwala and Indian merchant families settled in Manama. The pearl trade reached its peak at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, and the merchant houses of Muharraq were built on it.

Britain also reshaped the state. It removed the ruler Isa ibn Ali in 1923 in favour of his son, and from 1926 to 1957 its adviser Charles Belgrave ran much of the administration. The first modern school opened in 1919 and the Gulf's first girls' school in 1928. Opposition was exiled: some clerics to Saudi Arabia and Iran, some merchant heads abroad.

How oil replaced pearls as the island's income

Two events of the early 1930s changed the economy within a decade. In Japan, cultured pearls grown in freshwater mussels reached the market, and UNESCO describes the Gulf pearl industry's collapse as sudden. On the island, the Bahrain Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of California, struck oil near Jabal al-Dukhan. Wikipedia and Britannica date the discovery to 1932; the BBC's timeline dates it to 1931 and the start of production to 1932. It was the first oil found in the Gulf outside Iran.

Oil brought Britain closer. The Royal Navy moved its Gulf command from Bushehr to Bahrain in 1935, and in 1967 Britain moved its main regional naval base there from Aden. It also brought a working class. The National Union Committee, formed in 1954 with the labour unions, demanded an end to British interference and was banned after riots during the Suez crisis in 1956. In March 1965 the layoff of hundreds of Bahraini workers at the oil company set off the March Intifada, in which several people died.

How independence came without Iran

Britain announced in 1968 that it would end its treaty relationships in the Gulf. Bahrain joined talks on a union with Qatar and the seven Trucial States, and when the nine had not agreed terms by mid-1971 it chose independence alone.

Iran still claimed the islands. In 1970 Britain and Iran asked the United Nations Secretary-General to sound out Bahraini opinion, and his personal representative reported that "the overwhelming majority of the people of Bahrain" wanted a fully independent state. The Security Council endorsed the report in Resolution 278 on 11 May 1970 and Iran renounced its claim the same month. The BBC's timeline adds that the Islamic government that took power in Iran in 1979 refused to recognise the renunciation. Bahrain declared independence on 15 August 1971 and became the State of Bahrain on 16 December 1971; the United States Navy took over the British naval site.

The first constitution followed in 1973, and male voters elected a National Assembly that December. The Assembly refused to pass a State Security Law allowing detention for up to three years without trial, and on 25 August 1975 the emir dissolved it, enacted the law by decree and suspended the constitution's legislative articles. The next parliamentary election came in October 2002.

The border with Qatar took longer. Britain had decided in 1939 that the Hawar Islands belonged to Bahrain; Qatar took the dispute to the International Court of Justice in 1991. The judgment of 16 March 2001 held the British decision binding and gave Bahrain the Hawar Islands and Qit'at Jaradah, and gave Qatar Zubarah and Janan Island.

Why the Pearl Roundabout protests divided Bahrain

Unrest in the 1990s, after the arrest of a Shia cleric who had called for the Assembly's return in 1994, cost about forty lives. A new emir, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, released prisoners after his accession in 1999, and a referendum in February 2001 approved the National Action Charter with 98.4% in favour. In February 2002 Bahrain became a kingdom under a new constitution with an elected lower house. The opposition objected that the appointed upper house had been given at least equal powers, and the main Shia society, Al Wefaq, boycotted the 2002 election before taking part in 2006.

Protests began on 14 February 2011, the charter's tenth anniversary, calling for a new constitution, a more representative parliament and the release of prisoners. A police raid on the Pearl Roundabout camp on 17 February killed four people, and on 22 February more than 150,000 gathered there. On 14 March about 1,000 Saudi soldiers and 500 police from the United Arab Emirates crossed the causeway under the Gulf Cooperation Council. The government said it had invited them to preserve public order; the opposition called their arrival an occupation. A state of emergency followed on 15 March, the camp was cleared, and the monument at its centre was demolished on 18 March.

The two sides told the story differently, and still do. The king described the unrest as "an external plot" fomented over decades and thanked the Gulf states for their help. The opposition and most human rights groups described a peaceful reform movement from the Shia majority, met with force. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, which the king appointed on 29 June 2011, reported on 23 November 2011. It counted 35 deaths between 14 February and 15 April 2011 and held the government responsible for 20, found systematic abuse of detainees, and found no evidence for the claim that Iran had instigated the protests. The king accepted the report. Government officials later said 18 of its 26 recommendations had been fully implemented; the Project on Middle East Democracy counted three in November 2012. Al Wefaq was dissolved by court order in 2016, and the secular society Wa'ad in 2017.