Heritage erasure and heritage transformation: how heritage is created by destruction in Bahrain

Abstract

This article suggests that heritage erasure is also heritage transformation. The article is an analysis of alternative contemporary heritage processes in the Arab Gulf state Bahrain. I use three cases to illustrate the diversity of what heritage means in Bahrain and how heritage is transformed through erasure. First, I discuss the vast burial mound fields of ancient Dilmun, which in the process of their destruction due to modern development have been appropriated as some of the most significant national heritage of the Bahrain state. Secondly, I point to a heritage allegedly neglected by the state, the religious shrines of the Shia community, which to this group signify an alternative heritage and history of the islands. Finally, I discuss a potential heritage of the future, based on the recent destruction by Bahraini authorities of the Pearl Monument, which was the centre of the 2011 uprising in Bahrain as part of the so-called Arab Spring. Besides their political differences, the three cases are three different modes of engaging the past, either as past preserved, as a living past in the present or as a past that will change the future.

Keywords:

• heritage
• ethnography
• historicity
• Arab Gulf
• Islam

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the editors of this volume as well as the anonymous reviewers for their valuable thoughts and comments to previous versions of this article.

Notes

1. The title changed formally from Shaykh to King in 2001, when Hamad replaced his demised father, and Bahrain inaugurated a new constitution turning the country from a shaykhdom into a monarchy. For more on these political processes, see below.

2. For a critique of UNESCO’s concept of world heritage, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2006). For a discussion of the idea of ‘globalised heritage’, and ethnographic examples of its local effects, see Daugbjerg and Fibiger (2011).

3. On the contemporary objectification of Sunni and Shia see Nasr (2006). Elsewhere in the Muslim world, this is not a sectarian issue but an issue of lay and learned Islam (cf. Gellner 1992, 9; Eickelman and Piscatori 2004). In Egypt, for example, visits to saintly graves (ziyara) is a widespread phenomenon (Schielke 2009; cf. Eickelman and Piscatori, 1990).

4. Well documented and passed on to later generations not least because a so-called Bahrain school of thought supplied Persia with Shia scholars upon the appropriation of Shia Islam as state religion in Persia after 1502 (see al-Oraibi 1992; Cole 2002).

5. As a sect, the Shia is distinguished by following a number of Imams as leaders of their community after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The dominant branch of Shia, also in Bahrain, follows twelve Imams, from Imam Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, to Imam Mahdi, who went into occultation 250 years after the death of the Prophet and is expected one day to return to the visible world. All Imams are descendants of the Prophet (ahl al-bayt, the family of the house) and are recognised as infallible. For an introduction to Shi’ism see Momen (1985).

6. A customary Shia praise (salawat) to God, asking God to bless the Prophet Muhammad and his family (ahl al-bayt).

7. See also Talal Asad’s strong and classic essay on ‘Islam as a Discursive Tradition’ (1986), in which tradition is described precisely as a transformative agent of society.

8. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Oman. These countries together form the Gulf Cooperation Council, which was established in 1981 (bolstering Gulf Arab identity and unity as a response to the Islamic revolution in Iran). The monument was inaugurated on the occasion of the first Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in Bahrain.

9. In Spring 2011, around 40 people died and by the end of the year the estimate was 80 people. During an earlier uprising in 1994–1999, a total of 40 protesters were killed, and in various incidents since the 1950s a number of people died in their struggle for political reforms (see Khalaf 2000).