Global Display—Local Dismay. Debating “Globalized Heritage” in Bahrain

Abstract

This article discusses how “globalized heritage” is perceived and debated in the Arab Gulf state of Bahrain. These debates raise questions about what kinds of heritage count as global, and how categories of local and global are employed by various actors in current heritage debates. The article focuses especially on recent debates concerning the ambitious and internationally oriented Bahrain National Museum, which has received severe criticism from Islamist representatives in the National Parliament in the wake of the museum’s approach to culture and heritage. Focusing on the values variously attributed to “local” and “global” heritage in the public sphere of Bahrain, the article shows how “globalized heritage” has become an empirical, but contested category at the centre of contemporary debates on identity in the modern Arab Gulf.

Keywords:

• Heritage
• Globalization
• Politics
• Islam
• Bahrain

Notes

[1] This is the case in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, but not in Oman, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. These six countries are normally considered the “Arab Gulf states” and are economically and politically united in the Gulf Cooperation Council. Recent estimates in Bahrain have put the relationship between national citizens and migrants at 50/50. Most of the migrants are Asian and, in particular, Indian. See Dresch (2005) for further information on the regional social set‐up. The exclusion of the noteworthy Indian connections from heritage displays and debates in Bahrain is an interesting subject that for lack of space I have had to omit from this article (but see Izady 2002 for a historical survey of the Indian Ocean impact on Gulf Societies).

[2] My use of the term “regime” is thus not intended to denounce either scientific or political systems, but rather, to note how they together form and reinforce particular world‐views.

[3] This development has never materialized, and the museum is still the only institution in that area—but also in this decade the museum department has launched ideas for a theatre and an opera. A new central library has been erected a short distance away, but this has significantly shifted locus since the “civic centre” idea and is now included in the complex of the Grand Mosque (built 1987) and Ministry of Islamic Affairs. For the original idea, see the proposal “Civic Centre—National Museum” (State of Bahrain 1984, Moesgård Museum archives).

[4] Generally, the anthropological scepticism concerning rigid definitions of culture has not generated the same cautiousness in archaeology. It should be noted, however, that the archaeological notion of culture reflects a material, rather than human, coherence.

[5] I discuss these issues of religion, tradition and modernity in more detail in my Ph.D. thesis (Fibiger 2010).

[6] A tell is a hill covering archaeological remains. Before excavations laid bare what had been hidden under this sandy hill, the site was known as Qala‘at al‐Portugal, but was renamed to reflect that the site narrated not only a Portuguese story but a deeper, national story. In this way, notes the historian James Onley (2005: 79), the site has been “arabized”, rather than globalized.

[7] I was not in Bahrain at the time of this performance, but when I came back half a year later, it had certainly not been forgotten.

[8] “Islamist” is a term used by many Bahraini politicians themselves, implying that they seek an Islamic development and platform of their country, thus using Islam as a political ideology. However, the content and aspiration of this is remarkably varied, especially between Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims.

[9] Moreover, Islamic heritage may well be exhibited as contributing to a global civilization. This is the case in many Western exhibitions on Islam, not least Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe; but these exhibitions are rarely concerned with contemporary Muslim imaginaries of past and present as, for example, the Salafi and the Shi‘i positions in Bahrain.

[10] These figures are all based on 2003 statistics from the Bahrain National Museum.

[11] Wiktorowicz (2001: 33) notes this for Kuwait as well, where the Salafi parliamentary group represents the “Society for the Revival of Islamic Heritage”.

[12] For more on Shi‘i history and contemporary identity politics, see Momen (1985); Nakash (2005); Nasr (2006).

[13] For a more detailed discussion of Ashura commemorations in contemporary Bahrain, see Fibiger (forthcoming).