Dr Kanwal Hameed is a RACE.ED Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow, visiting from the University of Exeter.
She is an inter-disciplinary historian with a background in Middle East Studies, and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Mapping Connections: China and Contemporary Development in the Middle East project. After receiving her PhD from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Affairs (IAIS) at the University of Exeter in 2022, she was a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut.
‘Sectarian organisations are the enemy of Arabism (al-‘Uruba) and Islam!’, cautions an editorial in the August 1954 issue of Sawt Al Bahrain (Voice of Bahrain), the magazine produced by the Arab nationalist intellectual class involved in the anti-colonial movement in Bahrain. Sawt Al Bahrain was printed in Beirut and distributed at various locations - Zanzibar at its most southerly reach, and Tunisia furthest West, as well as in Sana’a, Yemen, Unaiza, Saudi Arabia and Cairo, Egypt. The article was responding to what is widely remembered as a period of ‘sectarian sedition’ or strife (fitna) in Bahrain between 1953 and 1954, against the backdrop of an anti-colonial struggle enfolding ethno-sectarian, class, gender, and political groupings which was taking form.
My research engages with the salience of ethno-sect and citizenship as social categories at local, national and supra-national levels in the Gulf region, while contesting that the idea of ‘continuity’ of ethno-sectarian and national division. I draw on social histories to show how ethno-sectarian and national ordering is produced and operates in particular ways that were materialised through capitalism, colonialism and state formation. Rather than stable categories, I argue that these classifications were (and are) fractured, deeply contested and often in flux. I think with Stuart Hall’s idea of race as a ‘floating signifier’ to try and unpack how different articulations of ethno-sect and racialised nationalism operated within a system of meaning, and as ‘a way of organising and meaningfully classifying the world’ of mid-20th century Bahrain.
This project is structured around two main questions. Firstly, can we think with racial difference (Stuart Hall, Cedric Robinson) and racialisation to inform our understanding of the ethno-sectarian and national system of classification in Bahrain? Secondly, what happens to this classification system through colonialism – how were sect and national identity produced, structured, and contested?