Bahrainالبحرين

Around 2000 BC Bahrain was the centre of Dilmun, a trading civilisation that Mesopotamian texts describe as a pure land of sweet water. Its merchants moved copper from Oman, timber and beads from the Indus valley, and grain from Iraq, using stamp seals that archaeologists now find across the region. The capital lay at the site of Qal'at al-Bahrain, where layers of successive towns built up a mound 12 metres high. The dead were buried in mounds, and tens of thousands of them still cover the north of the island.

After Dilmun faded, the island passed through Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian spheres. Greek writers after Alexander's campaigns knew it as Tylos, famous for pearls and cotton. Nestorian Christians had bishops here before Islam arrived in the 7th century, and under the early caliphates Bahrain was part of a wider coastal province of the same name. The Qarmatians, a radical Ismaili movement, ruled from the eastern Arabian coast in the 10th century and famously carried off the Black Stone from Mecca for two decades.

The Portuguese seized the island in 1521 to control the Gulf trade and rebuilt the fort on the old Dilmun mound. Safavid Persia expelled them in 1602 and ruled, often through local Arab clans, for most of the next two centuries. In 1783 the Al Khalifa, a branch of the Utub tribal confederation already based at Zubarah in Qatar, took the island. They have ruled ever since, and their claims over Zubarah fed a long dispute with Qatar that the International Court of Justice settled in 2001.

Through the 19th century a series of treaties with Britain, starting in 1820 and tightened in 1861 and 1892, gave London control over Bahrain's foreign affairs in exchange for protection. In the 1920s and 1930s British advisers, above all Charles Belgrave, built customs, police, schools and courts. Oil was found at Jebel Dukhan in 1932, just as Japanese cultured pearls were ruining the pearl trade, and the new industry, run by a US-owned company, turned Manama into a modern town with a refinery at Sitra.

Bahrain chose independence in 1971 rather than joining the new United Arab Emirates. A short-lived parliament was suspended in 1975, and unrest in the 1990s led to reforms under Hamad bin Isa, who became emir in 1999 and declared himself king in 2002 under a new constitution. In 2011 mass protests at the Pearl Roundabout, largely but not only Shia, were crushed with help from Saudi and Emirati forces; the monument was demolished. In 2020 Bahrain joined the Abraham Accords with Israel, and in 2026 it was drawn into the Iran war when Iranian missiles and drones struck the Fifth Fleet base, the refinery and parts of Manama from 28 February.

Bahrain has about 1.6 million residents, and just under half are foreign nationals. Most of these are workers from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and the Philippines, who run shops, build towers and staff hotels and homes under the sponsorship system. Indian merchants have been part of Manama since the 19th century, and the souq's Hindu temple, founded more than two centuries ago, reflects that long presence.

Bahraini citizens fall into several communities. The Baharna are Arab Shia who trace their roots on the island to before the Al Khalifa, and they form a majority of citizens. Sunni Arab families include the ruling house and tribes that arrived with it, and the Huwala, who came from the Persian coast. The Ajam are Shia of Persian origin, many of them long-established merchants. Accents, family names, villages and mosques often signal which community someone belongs to.

That mix is the fault line of Bahraini politics. Many Shia Bahrainis have long complained of exclusion from senior jobs in the security forces and government, and of naturalisation policies that they say change the population balance. The government describes the 2011 protests as foreign-inspired and points to reforms since. Visitors will rarely see tension directly, but it explains the security presence in some villages and the sensitivity of politics as a topic.

Daily life for Bahrainis centres on family and the majlis, the sitting room where men, and increasingly women, receive visitors, discuss business and drink coffee. Women drive, work and sit in parliament, and dress ranges from full abaya to Western clothes. Weekends are Friday and Saturday, and on those days tens of thousands of Saudis drive across the causeway for malls, cinemas, restaurants and, for some, the bars.

Islam is the state religion. Bahrain is one of the few Arab countries where Shia Muslims are a majority of citizens, and Shia religious life is visible: matams (community halls) in every village, black flags and processions in the month of Muharram, and pilgrimages to shrines in Iraq and Iran. Sunni and Shia mosques stand side by side in Manama, and Friday prayers slow the city at midday.

Ashura, the commemoration of the death of Imam Hussein at Karbala in 680, is the most visible religious event. Processions with drums, chants and banners fill Manama's old quarters and Muharraq for ten days, ending on the tenth of Muharram. It is a public holiday, roads close, and volunteers hand out free food and drinks. Visitors may watch respectfully from the side, but should not photograph participants without permission.

Bahrain has a long record of tolerating other faiths. The American Mission Hospital and a Protestant church date back to the 1890s and 1900s; a Catholic cathedral, Our Lady of Arabia, opened in 2021 near Awali and is the largest in the Gulf. There is a small Jewish community with a synagogue in the souq, and several Hindu temples. Pope Francis visited in 2022. Proselytising Muslims is not allowed.

For a visitor, the practical rules are simple. Mosques welcome non-Muslims at set times, with dress rules: Al Fateh lends abayas and scarves. During Ramadan everyone avoids eating and drinking in public in daylight. Criticising Islam or the Prophet, including online, is a crime.

For centuries Bahrain's wealth came from pearls. Oyster beds north and east of the island produced some of the finest natural pearls in the world, and each summer hundreds of wooden dhows carried thousands of divers to the banks for four months. Divers descended on a rope with a stone weight and a nose clip, gathering oysters for a minute or more, again and again through the day, while pullers hauled them up.

The system was hard. Divers borrowed from captains before the season and many stayed in debt for life, passing it to their sons. Merchants in Muharraq and Manama grew rich, sold to Indian dealers in Bombay, and built courtyard houses with wind towers and carved doors. When Japanese cultured pearls flooded the market in the 1930s, and the Depression hit, the trade collapsed within a decade.

The Pearling Path in Muharraq, listed by UNESCO in 2012, links 17 buildings, three offshore oyster beds and a stretch of seashore. The route runs through the old town past the Siyadi house and mosque, the houses of divers and ship owners, and Bu Maher fort at the tip of the island where the boats set out. Restoration work has also added small museums and cafés.

Bahrain still bans the sale of cultured pearls in its markets, and its national pearl laboratory certifies natural stones. Licensed recreational pearl diving lets visitors dive for oysters under supervision, and the traditional songs of the pearling voyages, fijiri, survive in a few performing groups.

Bahraini cooking reflects the old trade routes: rice and spices from India, dried limes and saffron from Persia, dates from the island's own groves and fish from the Gulf. Machboos, spiced rice cooked in the stock of chicken, lamb or fish, is the national dish, and muhammar, sweet rice with date syrup, is traditionally eaten with fried or grilled fish.

Breakfast is a strong local tradition: balaleet (sweet vermicelli with omelette), khubz rigag bread with egg or cheese, and chickpeas. Harees, wheat and meat pounded smooth, and thareed, bread soaked in stew, dominate Ramadan tables. Bahraini halwa, a translucent sweet flavoured with saffron and cardamom, is made by family firms such as Showaiter and given as a gift.

Coffee and tea mark hospitality. Arabic coffee, lightly roasted and spiced with cardamom and saffron, is poured into small cups from a dallah pot and served with dates; you shake the cup when you have had enough. Karak, the sweet milky tea of South Asian origin, is the everyday drink sold by roadside cafés for a few hundred fils.

The foreign workforce has made Manama one of the cheapest places in the Gulf to eat well: Keralan, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Filipino restaurants sit next to Lebanese grills and Persian bakeries. Adliya's Block 338 is where Bahrainis and expatriates go out, and licensed hotels serve alcohol that the rest of the city does not.

Bahrain's oil reserves are small compared with its neighbours, and it diversified earlier. The Sitra refinery processes Saudi crude as well as local oil; the Alba smelter is one of the largest aluminium plants in the world; and from the 1970s, when Beirut's civil war drove bankers away, Manama became the Gulf's first offshore banking centre and a hub of Islamic finance.

The King Fahd Causeway, opened in 1986, tied the island to Saudi Arabia by 25 km of bridges and embankments. It turned Bahrain into a weekend destination for Saudis and residents of the Eastern Province. A second causeway with a railway, named after King Hamad, has been approved to link to the planned GCC railway, and a metro is planned for Manama, but neither was under construction in 2026.

Land reclamation has changed the map. Much of modern Manama, the Bahrain Bay and Seef districts, the Amwaj islands and Diyar al-Muharraq sit on reclaimed land, and the coastline is kilometres from where it was in 1950. The old shoreline explains why Bab Al Bahrain, once on the water, now stands inland.

Bahrain has hosted the US Navy since 1948 and the Fifth Fleet since 1995 at Juffair. That alliance put it in the path of Iranian retaliation in 2026, when strikes hit the base, the refinery, ports, a desalination plant and parts of Manama, closed the airport until April and forced the Grand Prix to move to Malaysia. Government debt is high and depends on Gulf allies' support, and how the war ends will shape the next decade.