Can Bahrain’s division between Sunnis and Shias be healed?

For the first time since her childhood, Mariam not too long ago went again to the shrine of Nabi Saleh, a tiny island off the shore of Bahrain’s capital, Manama. She reverentially held inexperienced drapes over the tomb of the 14th-century holy man whose identify was given to the island. She stopped close to the spring the place her household used to barbecue a sacrificial goat. She remembered tasting the candy dates from the orchards and regarded on the waves lapping the island the place she as soon as swam. A lot had gone. The ocean is sullied with sewage. The spring is a dry gap. A parking lot has changed a lot of the orchard. And Sunni households, like hers, gave up visiting the shrine a long time in the past. “Why did we cease?” she requested the custodian of the shrine, a Shia. “We had been collectively. It was such a lovely age.”

For the reason that Islamic revolution of 1979 that convulsed Iran and threatened the thrones of Sunni Arab monarchs throughout the Gulf, Bahrain has been on the fault line of the Sunni-Shia division. It’s the solely nation within the six-member Gulf Co-operation Council the place the indigenous majority is Shia; most people within the different 5 are staunchly Sunni. And it lies awkwardly squeezed between two massive ideological foes, Iran and Saudi Arabia. After the ayatollahs took over Iran, Bahrain’s two sects sought succour from these greater brothers, typically accusing one another of unbelief. Slim-minded Sunni clerics denounced shrines, like these of Nabi Saleh, as insults to monotheism.

But sectarian feeling could also be softening. Saudi Arabia has muzzled its extra excessive Islamists and launched into a extra secular drive. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain’s different massive patron, has banned Sunni Islamist events and inspired different Gulf governments to comply with swimsuit. Sunni Islamist events did badly in Bahrain’s latest election to decide on members of an meeting that advises the omnipotent monarch, Hamad al-Khalifa. Bahrain’s Sunni clergy could also be shedding its sectarianism too.

Youthful Shias might want their very own clergy to reciprocate. The cries of protesters in search of to topple the Shia theocracy in Iran are being heard in Bahrain. Some Bahraini Shias are irritated by the assist their theologians are giving to the Iranian ayatollahs. “It’s hypocrisy,” says a Shia activist. “They’ve slogans for human rights right here, however they’re very conservative and don’t need girls to have higher possibilities.” So Bahrain’s Shia non secular institution can also be underneath strain to be extra liberal and fewer in thrall to their counterparts in Iran.

Social concord between Shias and Sunnis in Bahrain could be enhanced nonetheless extra if the ruling household bestowed equal political rights on the Shia majority. The primary Shia celebration, al-Wefaq, is banned, so the latest election passed off with out its participation. Furthermore, the ruling household grants a lot of the prime military and safety posts to Sunnis. Radio and tv are broadcast in a Sunni dialect. The Sunni model of Islam is the one taught in faculties. The names of Shia villages are sometimes erased from signposts; medieval Shia mosques are unmarked on maps.

Maryam desires Sunnis and Shias to worship collectively on the island shrine. That will not be to the style of the Khalifas. If the sects co-operated in politics in addition to in faith, the individuals of Bahrain would discover it simpler to carry their ruling household to account. They could even demand a constitutional monarchy. The latest election is a good distance from permitting that. ■