Religion and History in Bahrain

Bahrain has been settled and contested for a very long time, and its religious history has correspondingly many layers. The Dilmun civilisation of the third millennium BCE buried its dead in tens of thousands of mounds still visible on the island and appears in Mesopotamian literature as a pure land where the sun rises. Nestorian Christianity had bishops on the island in the fifth and sixth centuries. Islam arrived early, and in the tenth century Bahrain was the base of the Qarmatians, an Ismaili movement that raided Mecca in 930 and carried off the Black Stone for over twenty years.

The population became predominantly Shia, and the Baharna, the indigenous Shia Arab community, have village based religious institutions of considerable antiquity, including the Khamis mosque, among the oldest in the region. The Al Khalifa family, Sunni and originally from the Najd, took the islands in 1783, which produced the configuration that still defines Bahraini politics: a Sunni ruling house governing a Shia majority. Bahrain was also the first Gulf state to find oil, in 1932, and the first to exhaust it, which made it a financial and service centre and gave it a comparatively open society earlier than its neighbours.