The history of Bahrain

Bahrain is an archipelago of low islands in the Gulf, off the coast of Saudi Arabia, where fresh water springs rising through the seabed once made the main island a green oasis. Over four thousand years ago it was the heart of Dilmun, the trading land of Mesopotamian legend, and it later belonged to Persian empires, the Hellenistic world and the early Islamic caliphates. After centuries under Arab dynasties, the Portuguese and the Persian Safavids, it was taken in 1783 by the Al Khalifa family, who still rule, and from the nineteenth century it was a British protectorate built on pearling and then oil. Independent since 1971, Bahrain is a monarchy with a Sunni ruling family and a large Shia population, whose tensions came to a head in the uprising of 2011.

People lived on the islands from the Stone Age, and in the fifth millennium BCE they were in contact with the Ubaid culture of southern Mesopotamia. In the late third millennium BCE Bahrain became the centre of Dilmun, which Sumerian texts describe as a pure land where the sun rises, the paradise of the flood hero in the myths later echoed in the epic of Gilgamesh. In reality Dilmun was a merchant state. Its seafarers carried copper from Magan (Oman), timber, ivory and carnelian from Meluhha (the Indus region) and goods from Sumer, and its standardised stamp seals and weights show how organised its trade was.

Dilmun's remains are extraordinary. More than 11,000 burial mounds, once around 75,000, cover the north of the main island, including large royal mounds near A'ali. At Qal'at al-Bahrain, the ancient capital on the north coast, successive cities were built over four thousand years, and the temple complex at Barbar was dedicated to Enki, the Sumerian god of fresh water. Dilmun declined in the second millennium BCE as Indus trade faded, but it remained a known land: the Kassite kings of Babylonia controlled it around 1400 BCE, Assyrian kings claimed it as tributary, and Neo-Babylonian records list a governor of Dilmun in the sixth century BCE.

The islands came under the Achaemenid Empire after the fall of Babylon. In 325 or 324 BCE Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander the Great, sailed along the Gulf, and Greek writers began to describe the island of Tylos, with its cotton plantations and pearls. Tylos was drawn into the Hellenistic world, with Greek used by its elite, and was probably linked to the Seleucid Empire and later to Characene, a kingdom at the head of the Gulf. Greek writers such as Herodotus and Strabo repeated a tradition that the Phoenicians had come from the Gulf, though historians treat this with caution.

The Parthian Empire extended its control along the Gulf, and in the third century CE Ardashir I, founder of the Sasanian Empire, conquered the islands. Under the Sasanians the population was a mixture of Arab tribes, Aramaic-speaking farmers, Persian Zoroastrians and Jews, and from the fourth century many people became Christians of the Church of the East; bishops of Bahrain attended church synods until the seventh century, and remains of the period have been found at Samahij on Muharraq.

In early Islamic times the name Bahrain, meaning "two seas", referred to the whole coast of eastern Arabia from Kuwait to Qatar, while the islands were called Awal. The region accepted Islam around 629, when Muhammad sent an envoy, al-Ala al-Hadrami, to its rulers, and it was governed by the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphs. Its main Arab tribe, the Abd al-Qays, played an active part in the politics of early Islam. Under the Abbasid Caliphate the Gulf trade to Baghdad brought prosperity, and the Al Khamis mosque, among the oldest in the region, may have been founded in the Umayyad period.

Around 899 the Qarmatians, a radical Ismaili movement led by Abu Said al-Jannabi, took over eastern Arabia and made al-Ahsa the capital of a remarkable state. Its leaders ruled through a council, shared property among initiates and did not levy taxes on their own members, while relying on the labour of tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. The Qarmatians raided pilgrim caravans, and in 930 they sacked Mecca, massacred pilgrims and carried off the Black Stone of the Kaaba, which they returned only in 951. They extracted tribute from both the Abbasids and the Fatimid Caliphate. Their power waned in the eleventh century, and in 1076–1077 the Uyunids, an Arab dynasty of the Abd al-Qays, overthrew them with the help of the Seljuk Empire.

Under the Uyunids, and then the Usfurids from 1253 and the Jabrids from the fifteenth century, the population of the islands gradually adopted Twelver Shia Islam, the faith of most Bahrainis today. The islands were also drawn into the orbit of the Persian-speaking trading kingdoms of the Gulf, and from the fourteenth century they paid tribute to Hormuz. The traveller Ibn Battuta described the pearl divers of the region around 1331, and the navigator Ahmad ibn Majid wrote in 1489 of Bahrain's 360 villages and its freshwater springs beneath the sea.

The Portuguese Empire, seeking to control the Indian Ocean trade during the Age of Discovery, took Hormuz in 1515 and Bahrain in 1521, killing the Jabrid ruler Muqrin. They rebuilt the fortress at Qal'at al-Bahrain and ruled through the governors of Hormuz, facing revolts in 1521, 1529 and later and an Ottoman attempt to take the islands in 1559. In 1602 a local uprising, provoked by the governor's execution of leading merchants, drove the Portuguese out, and the islands came under the Safavid Empire of Shah Abbas I.

Safavid Bahrain was ruled loosely from the Persian coast and became a centre of Shia scholarship, whose clerics trained students from across the Shia world. The collapse of the Safavids after the Afghan invasion of 1722 brought chaos. Omani forces invaded in 1717, Nader Shah reasserted Persian control in 1736, and by the 1760s war and economic decline had reduced the islands' villages to a fraction of their earlier number.

The Al Khalifa belonged to the Utub, a group of Arab clans who had migrated from central Arabia to Kuwait in the early eighteenth century and later settled at Zubarah, on the coast of Qatar. In 1783, after Persian-backed forces attacked Zubarah, the Utub under Ahmad ibn Muhammad Al Khalifa took Bahrain from its Persian-appointed ruler, and the family moved to the islands in the 1790s. They were briefly threatened by Oman and by the First Saudi State. The new rulers were Sunni and of tribal origin, ruling a mainly Shia population of farmers, known as the Baharna, a division that has shaped Bahraini history ever since.

The British Empire, anxious to protect the sea route to India, drew the Gulf rulers into treaties after its campaign against Gulf shipping in 1819–1820. Bahrain signed the General Maritime Treaty in 1820, and in 1861 a perpetual truce made it in effect a British protectorate; agreements of 1880 and 1892 gave Britain control of its foreign relations. Pearling was the basis of the economy, and by the early twentieth century Bahrain was among the world's leading pearl markets, its divers bound to boat captains by debt. In 1923 the British forced the abdication of Sheikh Isa bin Ali, and from 1926 to 1957 the British adviser Charles Belgrave ran much of the administration. Slavery was abolished in 1937. Iran repeatedly claimed sovereignty over the islands.

The Japanese cultured pearl and the Great Depression ruined the pearl trade, but in 1932 the Bahrain Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of California, struck oil, the first discovery on the Arab side of the Gulf. A refinery opened in 1936, and oil revenues paid for schools, hospitals and a modern civil service. During World War II Italian aircraft bombed the refinery in October 1940. In 1948, after anti-Jewish riots linked to the Palestine war, most of Bahrain's small Jewish community left. In the 1950s the Higher Executive Committee, a movement uniting Sunni and Shia reformers and inspired by the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, demanded an elected assembly and the removal of Belgrave, until its leaders were arrested in 1956. A labour uprising followed in 1965.

When Britain announced its withdrawal from east of Suez, Bahrain considered joining the federation of Gulf emirates but chose to stand alone. In 1970 a UN survey found that Bahrainis wanted an independent Arab state, and the Shah of Iran dropped his claim. Bahrain became independent on 15 August 1971, with Sheikh Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa as emir and his brother Khalifa bin Salman as prime minister, a post Khalifa held until his death in 2020. The United States, which had kept a small naval presence since 1949, leased facilities in Bahrain from 1971.

An elected National Assembly met in 1973, but the emir dissolved it in 1975 and ruled by decree. The Iranian revolution of 1979 inspired a failed coup attempt by Shia militants in 1981, the year Bahrain joined the Gulf Cooperation Council with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The King Fahd Causeway to Saudi Arabia opened in 1986, and Bahrain, with dwindling oil reserves, built itself into a banking centre, profiting from the civil war in Lebanon. It supported the US-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War, and the US Navy's Fifth Fleet has been based in Manama since 1995. An uprising from 1994 to 1999, led mainly by Shia activists demanding the restoration of parliament, left around forty people dead.

Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, who succeeded his father in 1999, released political prisoners and put a National Action Charter to a referendum in 2001. In 2002 Bahrain became a kingdom, with Hamad as king, and parliamentary elections gave women the vote, though the elected chamber shared power with an appointed upper house. The International Court of Justice settled a long dispute with Qatar in 2001, awarding the Hawar Islands to Bahrain and Zubarah to Qatar. The Shia opposition society Al-Wefaq became the largest group in parliament.

Inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, tens of thousands of Bahrainis, mostly but not only Shia, gathered at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama in February 2011 to demand a constitutional monarchy and an end to discrimination. Security forces cleared the camp, and in March troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE entered under the Gulf Cooperation Council's banner, a state of emergency was declared and the Pearl monument was demolished. Thousands were arrested, and an independent commission appointed by the king found that detainees had been systematically tortured. Dozens of people were killed in the unrest of 2011 and the following years. Al-Wefaq was dissolved in 2016, its leader Ali Salman was later sentenced to life imprisonment, and many activists lost their citizenship. Bahrain joined the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in 2015 and the boycott of Qatar in 2017.

In September 2020 Bahrain and the UAE established diplomatic relations with Israel under the US-brokered Abraham Accords. Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad became prime minister on the death of Khalifa bin Salman that November. Relations with Qatar were restored in 2023, and in 2025 Bahrain launched its first domestically built satellite.

When the United States and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February 2026, Iran retaliated across the Gulf, and Bahrain, as host of the Fifth Fleet headquarters, was among the first targets. Iranian missiles and drones struck near the naval base in Manama, residential towers, hotels, the port, the Bapco refinery, a desalination plant and the aluminium smelter over the following months, though most were intercepted and the death toll in Bahrain remained small. In July 2026 Bahrain, with Kuwait, carried out its own strikes on Iran.