Letter From Bahrain

Most young boys do not have a serious clue about the future. Yet 12-year-old Mohamed Al Khalifa is different. He knows he will be the prime minister of Bahrain someday.

Mohamed’s father is the Crown Prince, Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, and his grandfather is his majesty, the King of Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. Mohamed’s older brother, Isa, is in immediate line for succession. In Bahrain, the second oldest son always serves as prime minister. Other close male relatives assume further top government roles. That is a way of life in Bahrain: All in the family.

Throughout Manama and other, older established neighborhoods, there are huge, larger-than-life posters of the King and the Crown Prince and Prime Minister Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa – the ruling Al Khalifa family; always watching over Bahrain, like a benevolent Big Brother triumvirate.

In the American-styled classroom, Mohamed Al Khalifa conducts himself as a normal 12-year-old. He demands no special consideration, and his peers treat him like a regular fellow. Mohammed’s academic ability – at least for English – is above average. He could probably do better, yet he’s only 12-years-old; really still a boy. No matter how Mohammed and his brother perform academically – they both will graduate … somehow.

Since there is no relationship between Mohamed and his teachers that resembles the King and I, no one expects to see his father at parent-teacher conferences. Although the Crown prince graduated from the American school, Mohamed’s Irish nanny - Andi, of County Mayo, always stands in as the authority figure.

Once I remember Mohamed lingered briefly to share some good news with me. What was his good news? Mohamed was going to have lunch with both his parents. For him, this was a special occasion. Typically, his parents - especially his father, are constantly on the go, meeting with world leaders.

Prior to this disclosure, a serious reading assignment was due with a required parental signature. Discretely, Mohamed offered that neither parent had been able to comply because they were on a state visit with King Mohammed VI of Morocco. Moreover, his Irish nanny was out of the country. Extenuating circumstances, indeed.

According to Mohamed, two bodyguards always accompany him whenever he’s in public. The sole exceptions are when he attends classes at the American school, and on visits to France. I’m not sure why France is deemed any safer than other parts of the world, yet this is where Mohamed may enjoy a measure of freedom and normalcy.


* * *
And this just in from today’s Gulf Daily News:

A group of Satan worshippers have escaped an attempt by police to arrest them, it was revealed last night. The police had hoped to trap the group when they held their monthly ceremony at an Italian restaurant in Adliya.

But when police arrived, they were shocked to discover the event had been cancelled.

The report said the Satanists hold monthly ceremonies at different restaurants and hotels that they announce the previous week. Admission is by ticket sale to members only.

Allegedly, during one of the group's ceremonies, members watched as boys and girls danced until they were drunk with hysteria.

Not long after our arrival in Bahrain, we attended a carpet party at the villa of a colleague, and acquired two new rugs, one city carpet - allegedly from Bokhara, Iran; the other a Turkmen tribal carpet - allegedly from Hachloon. Such an extravagance is really unlike me.

In this culture, the customer may take the carpets home and pay for them later.

Esam Saif, of Tehran Handmade Carpets, hosted the event. It felt like he relocated his entire store on Shawarma Alley - a neighborhood featuring numerous Indian sandwich shops - to the villa of a teaching couple. The 21-year-old Esam claimed he travels to Iran frequently and goes to specific villages in search of quality rugs. Supposedly, the carpets are made by villagers and displayed in their homes, until a buyer arrives and makes an attractive offer.

There is not a grain of truth to Esam’s highly entertaining story. Every carpet merchant along Shawarma Alley repeats this same, tiresome monologue for the gullible Americans.

Since Bahrain is across the Arabian Gulf from Iran, there’s a multitude of carpet merchants on this island. Ambitious carpet merchants will even show up at your door – unannounced, selling wares from a little white van. Yet virtually all Oriental carpet store owners in Bahrain acquire their rugs in Dubai and mark up the prices - especially for naive Westerners.

Nonetheless, Easm is a very personable fellow who operates the store for his father, a man with 20 children among four wives in a polygamous, Muslim marriage. The family is from Yemen, and certain old-style Arabic traditions are still relevant today.

Easm has a basic grasp of English; he’s even traveled to the United States - specifically Iowa, and briefly had an American girlfriend. No matter, his fate - as the son of a tribesman from Yemen - is to marry a wife handpicked by his father. By tradition, Easm is not permitted to see his wife until the wedding ceremony. Both the father of the groom and the father of the bride make negotiations in advance. And, it’s incumbent that Easm marries and does so soon, because he’s the oldest child and no sibling in his family may acquire a spouse until he is married. That’s the tradition.

In a Yemen village, once the marriage ceremony is over, bride and groom immediately consummate their new status in a small house filled with guests and well wishers. There is a glaring lack of privacy. If the bride is a virgin, the bed sheets are paraded proudly through the village. If, it turns out, the bride has already bestowed this prized favor, the groom may reject her automatically and her father for bringing shame on the family can put her to death. And, still later, if the bride simply does not please the groom and proves a poor wife, she may be returned to the village - no questions asked. Life could be worse; farther East in India, a disappointing bride is often burned to death.

After an absence of several months, I stopped by Easm’s shop recently at mid-morning. There were no customers. Easm’s right-hand man, Mohammed - a skillful expert from Pakistan, remained in the background administering care to a village carpet. The smell of vegetable dyes from the myriad of Middle East carpets filled the shop, like subtle incense in a Roman Catholic Mass.

Following a brief exchange of greetings, I asked to see Easm’s hands. There on the ring finger of his left-hand was a silver band. So, it was true: young carpet merchant Easm married his 14-year-old, handpicked bride earlier this month at his father’s village in a remote area of Yemen.

According to Easm, he survived a four-day wedding celebration that included meeting his bride for the first time; a wedding ceremony that, by tradition, excludes the bride’s mother and all females from her side of the family; the blood-stained bed sheets of a virgin paraded around the village; the throat of a wailing cow slit right outside the marriage bedroom window for a sacrificial feast; scores of lambs offered by wealthy family friends as gifts for a similar fate; four days of constantly smoking hashish with his father and other male relatives from the village; and firing off guns with the other pistol-packing males of the village [Yemen is an unruly place, not much different than the Wild West of Hollywood films]. The new bride, Samer, never away from Yemen before, now lives with Easm and his family in an 11-bedroom villa here in cosmopolitan Manama. According to Easm: so far, so good.

One of the many charms of Bahrain is the selection of restaurants. There is an endless variety from every conceivable culture. For instance, one evening – not long after my arrival in Bahrain, the family went to Bennigan’s, the Irish-themed American franchise. Saturday afternoon, we went to the Hash House, a Thai Restaurant, for a late lunch. Later that evening, we joined numerous Americans at the exclusive British Club for a five-course meal. The ambiance was entirely patrician, replete with elegant paintings of the current House of Windsor monarch, her husband and the aging Prince of Wales.

Like all Bahrain, the waiters – that is the servant class, are Indians from the subcontinent. Although the heyday of the British Empire is long over, vestiges of colonial rule remain quite evident. The discourse of the waiters is elegant and clearly enunciated English, very proper, very refined: “would madam care for red wine with her entrée?” “Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.”

So far I haven't seen much evidence that the Arabs here do anything more than drive around in expensive American cars, talking on cell phones, going to American-style malls and buying American designer clothes - no doubt complaining of the American influence upon the Muslim culture. The Indians work in the food industry; Pakistanis do the hard physical construction labor; the maids are from Sri Lanka; nannies for the affluent Arab families are usually poor Muslim girls from either Indonesia or the Philippines. There is a lower class of Arab women who work as cashiers in the grocery stores - like Al-Jazira, a popular expatriate spot for the Americans and the Brits.

Which reminds me: in the Muslim culture the call to prayer occurs multiple times daily. The Islamic version of the cantor emits an uninspiring dirge that one might expect to hear from the suffering patient of a proctologist. There is no telling when the “drop, rock and pray” routine will happen. It’s contingent upon the cycle of the sun.

Last evening, as we returned home there was the usual caterwauling from the nearby mosques. We passed numerous little Central Asian men who work as groundskeepers at the school for expatriates. It appears they maintain the grass with fingernail clippers – it’s difficult to grasp just what they do, but they’re always milling around the fauna, probably sleeping in the bushes. Anyway, it was prayer time. Off to the left, there was a man with a prayer rug on the front lawn [he keeps the rug tucked away in a lower tree branch]; he was virtually prostrate with his ass high in the air, muttering to Allah. The little Muslim appeared ready for a visit from his prison boyfriend. How can this culture keep pace with the modern world when the women are cloaked in dark robes like penguins and the men spend a good portion of time groveling on rugs?

Recent stories from the Gulf Daily News, of Bahrain, with some modified headlines which reflect another dimension of life among the Arabs.

Table for Two
A Sri Lankan housemaid, who claimed she was tied to a table and raped three times in five hours by her Bahraini employer, flew home last night after she withdrew the case.

Fatima Reshana, 25, left the country on a Qatar Airways flight to Colombo to be reunited with her five-year-old daughter.

She has been allowed home following intervention of the Sri Lankan Embassy, in Kuwait.

Her Bahraini employer, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had initially demanded BD300 [$831] for handing over her passport, according to sources close to the case.


Bus Stop
Mean thieves kidnapped and bludgeoned a man waiting for his bus in Jidhafs.

They left him bleeding and bruised in someone's garden after stealing his purse containing a friend's BD130 [$350].

The two Bahrainis even stole his 450 fils [80-cents] bus fare!

He is a helper at Al Hekma Pharmacy in Jidhafs and was waiting for the bus after closing up shop.

"Two fat Bahraini men came in a white car and one of them got out and dragged me into it. I was too shocked to react."


Burning Down the House
A candidate in the municipal council elections arranged for his own house to be torched so he could blame it on one of his competitors, a court heard yesterday.

Mohammed Mansour Na'ma planned to discredit a fellow candidate by accusing him of arson in the climax to the elections, which took place in May 2002.

He got one of his friends to pour kerosene over the back door of his house in Hamad Town.

The friend broke the glass door panel with a hammer to gain entry to the house and also poured kerosene over windows and doors before setting it on fire.


For the Love of God
A Bahraini was stabbed to death for playing his car cassette recorder too loudly near a mosque, which enraged some worshippers.

The Bahraini attacker, named only as AA, aged 20, was jailed for five years for the murder of HA.

Both were workers living in the Sitra area before the tragedy last November 22.

The Higher Criminal and Appeal Court heard that the victim took three hours to bleed to death after being stabbed repeatedly in his chest.


Room Service
A Bahrain court has jailed both a Bangladeshi man and woman who operated a “home delivery” prostitution service for Asian clients.

The Lower Criminal Court jailed the 43-year-old man for two years and the woman, in her 20s, for six months.

They will each be deported once they have served their sentences.

The man admitted the vice charges but the woman denied prostitution, claiming that she was beaten by the man and forced to have sex with his clients.

They plied their illegal trade amongst Asian workers, charging BD2.5 ($6.75) to BD3 ($8.10) a time for sex with the woman, the court heard.

The man would take bookings from clients and then take the woman to their flats.

Sometimes there would be just one client in the flat, but at other times there would be groups of men living together, who each paid for sex with the woman.


Where’s the Love?
A heartless passer-by stole a hit-and-run victim's wallet as he lay in agony on the roadside.

Newspaper deliveryman Bilal Miah suffered multiple leg and hand fractures after being hit by a car in A'ali.

He was in too much pain to identify the man who snatched his wallet containing cash
and driving license.

Police say the car that smashed into Mr. Miah's motorcycle at 8.30am on Monday was beige colored.

Mr Miah earns BD160 ($432) a month including commission [that’s $5,184 a year] and is his family's sole breadwinner. He has a wife and three children back in his native Bangladesh, who depend on his wages to pay their rent and children's education.


“Yes, Sir! May I Have Another?”
Two Bahraini teenagers stopped a boy of 12 outside a Hamad Town cold store and asked if they could have sex with him, a court was told yesterday.

When the boy said he had no objection, the youths aged 14 and 17 took him to a storeroom inside a house and sexually assaulted him.

The boy's father told Hamad Town police that the youths had threatened to beat his son if he revealed what they had done.


Pimp Daddy
A husband who forced his two wives to operate as prostitutes from Bahrain hotels was jailed for seven years yesterday.

The second wife, whom he had married after operating a “flourishing business” with the first, eventually exposed him as a pimp to vice-squad police.

Police posed as paying customers wanting sex at a Manama hotel before raiding it and arresting all three.

The husband, described as an Arab expatriate aged 29 grew to depend totally on the money earned by the two women aged 23 and 30.

But it all backfired when the second wife decided she hated having sex with strangers and contacted CID officers.

After the police raid, both wives admitted prostitution, but claimed their husband forced them into it.


All My Children
A 14-year-old child bride was caught working as a prostitute in a Bahrain hotel, a court heard.

She was arrested along with another 18-year-old married girl in a sting operation staged by undercover vice squad officers, the Lower Criminal Juvenile Court heard.

The two Syrian girls were arrested after the undercover officers went to the hotel, posing as clients.

Fellow officers swooped after the girls agreed a price for sex and then went to their rooms to wait for the "clients", the court heard.

Their husbands, also Syrian were later arrested in a flat they had rented after traveling to Bahrain from the UAE, said the prosecution.


Hole In One
An Indian committed suicide by jumping into a manhole in Riffa yesterday despite a round-the-clock vigil by his friends.

Chothe Khan, 35, had told his friends that he would commit suicide since he had some trouble back home.

Sources said that his roommates were keeping a close watch on him, but Mr. Khan managed to slip out of his accommodation at around 3am yesterday and jumped into the manhole in their compound.