Bahrain Analysis: The Kingdom's "Sunni Awakening" (Gengler)
Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 7:56
Sunni activist Mohamed Albuflasa, detained February 2010The Sunni state-vs.-Shi‘i rebel narrative, then, is not without substance. But its use as a framework for analyzing Bahraini politics, including the present impasse, obscures other important elements of the story --- even whole characters. The prevalent storyline tells little, for example, of ordinary Sunni citizens, who make up more than a third of the island’s population and are about as far removed from power as the Shi‘a. These Bahrainis have been no less decisive than the Shi‘a or the state in shaping the country’s political trajectory over the past year. Nominally pro-government, the Sunni population has functioned, perhaps unwittingly, as the foundation of the Al Khalifa monarchy, a captive ethno-religious constituency conditioned to care more for combating the perceived march of collective Shi‘i ambition than for advancing an independent political agenda.
Yet there are signs that the social forces unleashed by the uprising, and the wider Arab awakening, have made Bahraini Sunnis more cognizant of their perennial position as political counterweight --- and more resistant to it. The same grassroots movements that rose in defense of the regime in February and March are now daring to articulate reform demands of their own, albeit not yet with a coherent purpose.
