\n<\/em>of the tribe of Malik appeared
\n<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0at dawn like ships
\n<\/em>sailing the valley of Dadi<\/em><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The prelude to Tarafa ibn al-Abd\u2019s \u201cMuallaqa,\u201d one of the great \u201cHanging Odes\u201d of pre-Islamic Arabia, is so typically Bahraini that I have to smile whenever I read it. In the third line of the poem, the desert caravans are like ships<\/em> and the valley is likened to a sea. The fourth line references \u2018Adawl, then a ship-building town in the Greater Bahrain region. The fifth line conjures a picture of this caravan only a seafarer could paint: Its forepeak \/ parts the water as it pushes forth<\/em> \/ like a child\u2019s hand plowing<\/em> \/ through soil.<\/em> In the sixth line, he describes his beloved Khawla, whose slender neck<\/em> is adorned with strings of chrysolite and pearls<\/em>.<\/p>\n There are the sailing metaphors. There are the specific place names. There is even a pearl necklace. Our 6th<\/sup> century poet does not dwell on these images very long \u2014 in fact, most of the poem is a passionately detailed description of his camel \u2014 but in the brief introduction, he makes sure you know that a Bahraini has authored this poem.<\/p>\n These flourishes are so very typical. Between Two Islands<\/em><\/a>, an anthology of Bahraini-British poetry that I edited, begins with these lines by Taher Adel: A reincarnated pearl diver \/ diving headfirst into ancestral seas \/ finding pearls that resemble faces<\/em>. My own written drafts are similarly awash with metaphors of pearls, divers, springs and dhows. I recognize that proud signature in Tarafa\u2019s work because I\u2019ve signed it myself. Trademarked Bahraini<\/em>, we want to say, our sea\u2019s got pearls.<\/em><\/p>\n Yes, the sea is ever-present in Bahrain\u2019s idiomatic language. I discovered my favorite in the 18th<\/sup> century biographical dictionary The Pearls of Bahrain<\/em>, by Yusuf Al-Bahrani, in which one early-modern scholar is titled the diver of the sea of knowledge<\/em>. Let us dive into those seas now.<\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n The link between Bahrain and the sea goes much farther back than Tarafa. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, <\/em>the hero\u2019s search for immortality takes him on a sea voyage to a distant land where his immortal, antediluvian ancestor waits. When this ancestor (variously named Utanapishtim, Atrahasis, and Ziusudra) dashes his dreams of eternal life, he offers Gilgamesh a consolation prize: in the Abzu, the sea-beneath-the-sea, is a plant that can return one\u2019s youth.<\/p>\n No sooner had Gilgamesh heard this, This plant is soon stolen by a snake, to Gilgamesh\u2019s dismay, but it is no coincidence that the legendary king uses techniques evoking the Gulf\u2019s pearl divers to reach the sea\u2019s depths. The Abzu in Sumerian mythology represents the freshwater aquifers which Bahrain is thought to be named after. The Two Seas<\/em> in Bahrain\u2019s name are the rich freshwater wells that spout beneath the saltwater sea. These springs spout in countless spots in Bahrain, both on the land and along its seabeds. They are the reason for the island\u2019s richly fertile soils and the enabler of the Gulf\u2019s seafarers, who once depended on knowledge of these freshwater deposits hiding in the sea to supply their drinking water.<\/p>\n Enki was a Sumerian god associated with the Abzu and worshipped in Dilmun \u2013 that is, ancient Bahrain. And Dilmun, to the Sumerians, was seen as the land of eternal life and plenty. No person grew sick, old or hungry in Dilmun. As one Sumerian poem tells us:<\/p>\n Dilmun, land of the pure Overlooking the sea from a hill and situated atop an abundant spring, the Temple of Barbar was built on Bahrain\u2019s north coast and dedicated to the worship of Enki. Five thousand years old, its site is the meeting place of sea, spring, and civilization. Here, worshipers ritually cleansed themselves in the spring. Here, sacrifices were made to Enki. Here, dates were pressed into wines of holy vintage.<\/p>\n Perhaps it is not right to accuse nature of abandoning the place. Perhaps it is we who expelled nature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Temple of Barbar is thrice-abandoned. It was first abandoned by the people of Dilmun who, after at least a thousand years of continuous use (the oldest building dates to 3000 BCE, the most recent to 2000 BCE), left it to vanish, possibly due to changes in their religious or political circumstances. The site lay dormant for millennia and was rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1950s.<\/p>\n Now it has been abandoned again.<\/p>\n When I visited the site recently, a bored guard watched over the only entrance. A low fence marked its boundaries. The small visitor center, little more than a glossy portacabin, was thrown together in the hope of attracting national and UNESCO interest. There is a picture of the Danish archaeologists who led the excavations smoking pipes and wearing ghutras, and another of the crowds of local villagers hired to do the real work of digging. Yet another picture shows the great bull\u2019s head, the religious icon displayed proudly in the national museum and the best-known symbol of Dilmun\u2019s civilization. One color photograph shows a man ankle-deep in the spring, which was still flush with life in the 1950s, five thousand years after our ancestors first lined it with limestone walls and built their temple complex. But after the bout of activity that threw this little visitor center up, the Ministry of Culture\u2019s attentions shifted its attention to projects more glamorous than an old temple in an old village.<\/p>\n The third abandonment is by nature. The hill has disappeared; the land leveled over the millennia. The sea cannot be seen, heard, or smelled, and reclamation projects are remaking the coast so that it lies farther north. The spring, which gushed forcefully for millennia, has been dry for several decades. Perhaps it is not right to accuse nature of abandoning the place. Perhaps it is we who expelled nature.<\/p>\n Absence thickens in Barbar\u2019s still air.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Malchiyya\u2019s beach is still beautiful. The sea laps playfully at the sands. It stretches out from Malchiyya village which, unlike Barbar in the rural heartlands, neighbors a royal palace as well as the kinds of neighbors that palaces attract. It is one of Bahrain\u2019s few remaining public beaches \u2014 most belong to hotels, companies, and private individuals. Malchiyya is situated on the island\u2019s west coast, and on a clear day one can make out the Arabian mainland in the distance.<\/p>\n The people of Malchiyya claim Tarafa as their own. He was from the Malik tribe, and Malchiyya \u2014 the vernacular pronunciation of Malikiyya \u2014 was one of the tribe\u2019s homes. Some 1,500 years ago, a young Tarafa may have sat at this same beach composing poetry about caravans like ships and valleys like seas.<\/p>\n Of course, it would not really have been the same beach, nor the same sea. The nature Tarafa knew was unlike today\u2019s in two key details: the land\u2019s contours and the sea\u2019s health.<\/p>\n Neoliberalism demands unlimited growth. In Bahrain, that has become a desire to grow the land beyond its natural limits. The islands are already one of the most densely populated places in the world. In 1941, the first census year, the island population was just 90,000; today, it is over 1.5 million. These islands have a landmass of 786.5 km2<\/sup>. A significant proportion of that landmass is uninhabited desert \u2014 those life-giving freshwater springs are concentrated along the northern quadrant of Bahrain, and its inhabitants have long congregated around them. The entire country is smaller than many major cities \u2014 Riyadh, 2,000 km2<\/sup>; Cairo, 1,200 km2<\/sup>; London 1,600 km2<\/sup>; New York, 1,200 km2<\/sup>. And Bahrain, unlike those cities, has virtually no hinterland on which to draw for food, water, and materials.<\/p>\n Over the past 50 years, the neoliberal addiction to ever-ascending annual GDP figures has pushed Bahrain\u2019s natural reserves to the brink. The land was the first to go. Villages and towns were expanded substantially. The farmlands my grandfather worked and played in as a child of the 1930s became the neighborhood where he raised his family in the 1970s. Incrementally, the \u201cLand of a Million Palm Trees\u201d became the \u201cLand of a Million Villas.\u201d But nothing disrupted the water aquifers \u2014 the Abzu \u2014 more than the drilling for oil. Once, hundreds of man-made irrigation channels criss-crossed the land and watered countless date groves and orchards. My mother can remember playing in these in the late \u201960s, and the largest were nicknamed rivers. Yet I struggle to imagine them. When the \u2018Ayn Adhari spring \u2013 one of the largest in the country \u2013 dried up, a swimming pool was constructed there instead.<\/p>\n With most of the land used up by the end of the 20th<\/sup> century, Bahrain turned towards the sea. Bahrain had reclaimed small parcels of land for decades, but the turn of the century saw the pivot towards mega projects. First came the Financial Harbour, with all the ugly grandeur of pre-Crash skyscrapers. Then came vanities like Amwaj Islands, with their silken promises of a glamorous lifestyle. Lately, projects have included the North City, which houses a new generation of Bahrainis where their sea once was. Land reclamation is a misnomer: how are we \u201creclaiming\u201d from the sea that which never belonged to any of us? The north coast that Barbar\u2019s temple once overlooked has been completely transformed. There are now virtually no natural coastlines left on Muharraq or Sitra, the second and third largest islands of Bahrain.<\/p>\n Every time I visit Bahrain from Britain, it has changed again. I remember the first time I had the misfortune of visiting Amwaj Islands in 2014. These islands have pipe-fed gardens, broadways to walk down, and restaurants to feast in. After we lunched at one such restaurant, we walked along the seafront. I leaned over the railing. Below this cancerously beautiful island were the corpses of some dozen fish floating listlessly.<\/p>\n In the heart of Sitra lies Sheikh Ahmed bin Sa\u2019ada\u2019s tomb. It is located in a parched graveyard, though young trees planted by loving caretakers provide some shade still. To reach it, we had to park some distance away and walk past the memorials of Sitra\u2019s sons killed by police. This is the old Sitra, which remembers armies that slaughtered them and leaders that failed them. Even 200 years ago is recent memory to this land.<\/p>\n Like Gilgamesh, I am visiting an ancestor from a bygone age. Sheikh Ahmed lived in the 13th<\/sup> century and was one of Bahrain\u2019s great scholars of the medieval period. He corresponded with Rumi and was contemporary to that other great rationalist scholar, Sheikh Maytham Al-Bahrani, whose own shrine stands grandly in his home village of Mahooz. But this tomb is a miserable little building. When we entered it, a single air conditioner blew silently from its place above crumbling plaster that revealed bullet wounds in the wall.<\/p>\n Sitra\u2019s name translates to \u201cjacket.\u201d When Sheikh Ahmed was buried here, on the island of his birth, it would have been jacketed by its thick forests of palm trees. We catch a glimpse of Sheikh Ahmed\u2019s island in this early 19th <\/sup>century poem by Abduljalil Al-Tabataba\u2019i, whose words channel the more ancient \u201cDilmun, land of the pure\u201d:<\/p>\n By the grace of God, we were borne by the sea Today, a visitor might be forgiven to miss the fact that Sitra is its own island. The land reclamation between Sitra and Bahrain has been so extensive that only a small channel separates the islands now. Extensive projects are pushing Sitra\u2019s landmass eastwards into the sea, doubling the island\u2019s size. They may also be forgiven if they fail to see the island\u2019s beauty. Much of the island is now industrial. The air is polluted. There are virtually no trees. Sitra is naked and bare and riddled with bullet holes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was made foreign from my land. Political repression in the 1980s forced my parents to build their lives in the West, where I was born. We returned to Bahrain only following some reforms in 2001 (as to the endurance of those reforms, one may refer to the bullets in Sheikh Ahmed\u2019s tomb as a symbolic indicator). Growing up in London, I was enamored of the image of Bahrain as an oasis in the sea. A prose poem of mine in Zindabad Zine<\/em><\/a> explores the disappointments encountered on our return to this promised land:<\/p>\n \u201cAll this was palm trees in my day,\u201d my Baba would say, overlooking Bani Jamra from the hill where Mulla Yusuf\u2019s house once stood. Our sight stretches from the pockmarked graveyard to the paved-over farms, where dust rinses the sun-bleached walls of a modern villa with garage space for three cars.<\/em><\/p>\n I never saw the verdant Bahrain. Truthfully, I wouldn\u2019t have seen it had I been born there, as the desertifying economic processes began before my time. Because I had to imagine Bahrain before I saw it, two lands exist in my head: the real one I know and touch and experience, and the spiritual one I can access only through literature and oral histories.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Land is profitable, so what do you do when you run out of land? In Bahrain, you create more: www.mapbh.org<\/a> is a project inspired by Visualizing Palestine<\/em>. The Google Earth technology that enables it was originally banned in Bahrain, as it had exposed the extent of the lands held by a private minority. By transposing older hand-drawn maps onto modern satellite imagery, we can see with grim immediacy the devastation wreaked upon the coastline. With a click of a few buttons and sliders, we can easily compare the transformation of Bahrain. A 1937 map outlines the shallows, which look like an aura surrounding the island. With a semi-transparent overlay, we can see that today\u2019s land reclamation across the north coast, Muharraq, and Sitra fill in the space between the original coastline and that aura.<\/p>\nAli Al-Jamri<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/between-two-islands-ali-al-jamri-cover-the-markaz-review.jpg\")
<\/a>
\n<\/em>He opened a shaft, threw away his tools,
\n<\/em>He tied heavy stones to his feet<\/em>,
\nThey pulled him down into the watery depths
\n<\/em>He took hold of the plant and pulled it up, it pricked his hand
\n<\/em>He cut the heavy stones from his feet,
\n<\/em>The sea cast him up on its shore.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Where no crows caw
\n<\/em>Where no lions roar
\n<\/em>Where none grow old
\n<\/em>May Dilmun be a port
\n<\/em>Where all the world will call<\/em><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/1-Barbar.jpg\")
\n![\"Bahrain](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/2-MapBh.jpg\")
![\"Bahrain](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Bahrain-today-looks-like-a-sci-fi-city-photo-Diyar-Al-Muharraq.jpg\")
\n<\/em>to anchor our ships at this fine harbor.
\n<\/em>Like a curtain drawn back, like a veil raised up
\n<\/em>we rushed ahead to the shores of Sitra.
\n<\/em>The palm trees rain a great harvest of dates
\n<\/em>divine delights, like Eden\u2019s nectar.
\n<\/em>Her springs of freshwater gurgle and spurt
\nin wilderness and waters, they flourish and burst.<\/em><\/p>\n
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