Kuwait was founded in the eighteenth century as a merchant settlement whose wealth came from pearling and long distance trade with India and East Africa, and that commercial character shaped its religion. The ruling Al Sabah family governed by consultation with merchant houses rather than by decree, an arrangement that produced the 1938 Legislative Council movement and eventually the constitution of 1962, which established the most powerful elected assembly in the Gulf.
Kuwaiti Shia, many of Iranian, Bahraini and Hasawi descent, were part of the merchant class from early on, and the resulting integration is markedly better than in neighbouring states; Shia Kuwaitis sit in parliament, serve as ministers, and their loyalty during the Iraqi occupation of 1990 and 1991 strengthened their position. That does not mean the divide is absent, and it widened after 1979 and again during the Syrian war, with the 2015 bombing of the Imam Sadiq mosque by the Islamic State killing twenty seven worshippers. The national response, in which the emir attended the funerals and Sunni Kuwaitis prayed at Shia mosques, is remembered as a deliberate refusal of the intended outcome. Failaka island, off the coast, carries a longer record still, with a Greek temple and fort from the Seleucid settlement of Ikaros and, before that, Dilmun era occupation.