Part of Camille Zakharia’s work ‘Cultivate Your Garden’, 2012
Unlike other cities in the Arab world, Bahrain’s capital Manama received few mentions in historical documents before the 19th century. It bears little resemblance to the traditional Islamic city. Typically, the history of the state in the Gulf is simplified as a transition between pastoral nomadism and petroleum tribalism, but Manama and Bahrain did not enter the modern age through the oil boom from the 1930s to the 1950s; their point of departure lay in the 1880s, during the first era of global capitalism and the boom of the pearl trade in world markets.
The flourishing of the pearl trade was not only due to small-scale exploitation; it was also assisted by an organized bureaucracy that towards the end of the 19th century merged colonial intervention with centralized government. The abolishing of the tribal feudal states gave rise to a series of reforms that unavoidably opened Bahrain to the rest of the world. The heterogeneous society concentrated in the small island – consisting of traders and professionals from Iran, South Asia and more distant countries, as well as Arabs from Bahrain and neighboring states – created complex social and urban dynamics. In short: it wasn’t oil as much as the island’s cosmopolitan outlook which radically transformed Bahrain.
Aware early on of their limited oil resources, the rulers of Bahrain planned for a post-oil economy since independence; a number of policies and projects reflect this. The further modernization of Bahrain and its full integration into the Arab context of the Gulf, nevertheless, altered the texture of this cosmopolitan society. The late 20th century Arabization of the country was a half-hearted attempt to create a more homogeneous society on par with neighboring oil-rich countries, quite different from the pluralistic nature of old Bahrain. Political commentators such as J.E. Peterson and Nelida Fuccaro have observed that it was precisely globalization and oil wealth that homogenized Bahrain, at the expense of social and cultural diversity.
As was the case with Lebanon – the one other Arab country that modernized very early – the price that Bahrain paid for entering the global stage was high: continued political unrest nearly every decade since the end of the 19th century – culminating in the 2011 uprising. It became increasingly difficult to reconcile advanced state bureaucracy and the existence of an open civil society with a persisting and intact syndrome of tribalism and unequal distribution of wealth (in the words of Fuad Khuri). Nonetheless, none of this prevented Bahrain from developing a modern artistic movement decades prior to other Gulf states. It might even be argued that art and political movements developed in Bahrain not simply in spite of the on-going conflict but because of it.
An art movement emerged already in the 1950s with the establishment of an art and literature club which served the interests of both professional and amateur artists, musicians and actors. The first art exhibition in the Gulf region was held in Bahrain as early as 1956 and other than modernist Arab painting also expressionism, surrealism and abstract expressionism have been popular genres among local artists (the first generation of Bahraini painters, including Abdul Aziz bin Mohammed al Khalifa, Ahmed Qasim Oravid, Rashid Oraifi, Nasser Yousif, Rashid Swar and Abdulla al Muharraqi have nearly all been expressionist). Theater has been popular in the country since the 1940s and a decade later the first Bahraini plays (and Arabic translations of classics) began to appear; the Awal Theater and the Al-Jazira Theater were both founded before independence. Arab music has also been particularly popular in the country.