Where the Small Things Are: Thoughts on Writing Revolutions and their Histories

Cover of Mahbubeh and Rafat Afraz' memoir about the Dhufar revolution. Photo from Naghmeh Sohrabi. Cover of Mahbubeh and Rafat Afraz' memoir about the Dhufar revolution. Photo from Naghmeh Sohrabi.

Where the Small Things Are: Thoughts on Writing Revolutions and their Histories

By : Naghmeh Sohrabi

Somewhere on the border between Oman and Yemen lies the body of Rafat Afraz. Rafat had been a school administrator at the Refah school for girls in Tehran, a site of Islamic revolutionary activism in the early 70s and the temporary headquarters of the Khomeini-led revolutionary forces in 1979. Rafat and her younger sister Mahbubeh[1] joined the Sazman-i Mujahedin-i Khalq (the People’s Mujahedin Organization or Mujahedin) in 1970, a guerilla organization that at its moment of founding was, simply put, a “combination of Islam and Marxism.”[2] By mid-1975, the organization had a violent split between its Marxist and Islamist selves with the former disavowing the latter. Around this time, the sisters left Iran. Traveling via London, Damascus, and Aden, they made their way to the Martyr Fatima Ghanana Hospital in Ghaitha and the border village of Hawf in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen to help the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman. Rafat served as a nurse and Mahbubeh, who had been the youngest woman to graduate from medical school in Iran at the age of twenty-three, as a doctor.

Not long after her arrival, Rafat died of an infectious disease, possibly malaria, at the age of forty. Mahbubeh continued helping the revolutionaries until late December 1975 when she settled for a brief period in Aden. The Mujahedin had an office there and had been given a ten-minute daily slot on the “Voice of the Revolution” broadcast on Aden Radio, for which Mahbubeh wrote and announced the news in Persian. She eventually traveled to France to join her husband, Mohammad Yazdanian, a fellow member of the organization. She has left behind a fascinating account of her time in both Ghaitha and Hawf, including details of the Cuban doctors who worked in the hospital, the comings and goings of the patients and the revolutionaries, details of everyday life for the staff, patients, and villagers, the hygienic conditions of the area, and her assessment of “the Oman revolution’s weaknesses.”

... at a moment in which the global (in its myriad definitions and uses) dominates historical thinking, it is crucial to conceptualize 'small' as the mechanism through which vastness—of ideas, movements, emotions, and events—is both made possible and experienced.

Rafat’s oppositional work lasted a mere five years, a blink of an eye in the history of both the Iranian and the Dhufar revolutions. Even though Mahbubeh was active for a longer period of time, her life’s work is barely remembered, let alone mentioned, by scholars of the revolutions she took part in. Their disappearance from historical writing is undoubtedly connected to how small their lives seem, hidden by the grand brushstrokes of histories of kings and armies, organizations woven indelibly into tales of successful and less successful revolutions, and political figures—men—whom history and historiography have labeled actors and generators of ideas. The fact is, neither sister “changed history” in any visible way.

Should we recount their stories? What, if anything, do their stories offer beyond the pleasures of narrating the romance of globe-trotting revolutionary figures from a bygone era? Does the retrieval of their “small” histories matter to understandings of revolutions nationally, regionally, and globally? In what follows, I argue that at a moment in which the global (in its myriad definitions and uses) dominates historical thinking, it is crucial to conceptualize “small” as the mechanism through which vastness—of ideas, movements, emotions, and events—is both made possible and experienced.

***

The historical connection between Iran and Oman is often told from a monarchical perspective: Sultan Qabus’ three month world tour in 1963 included Iran but no Arab countries and he was invited to the Shah’s extravagant celebration of 2500 years of monarchy in 1971 where “the Shah ‘expressed a desire for close and cordial relations with Oman and had offered military assistance if the Sultan should need it’.”[3] Sultan Qabus did, and he got it. The amusingly named Operation Caviar, launched in 1972, was the beginning of Iran’s military support to the sultan against the Dhufaris. The revolution was eventually defeated in 1975/1976 but it was estimated that “well over 3000 Iranian military men” remained in Oman and the Iranians conducted “unannounced simulated combat missions twice a week near Oman's border with Southern Yemen.” It was not until the victory of the Iranian revolution in 1979 that the troops were withdrawn and brought back home.

But the two countries were also bound by revolutionary solidarity. In Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976, Abdel Razzaq Takriti provides one of the most comprehensive works of “historical retrieval, revision, and contextualization” of the misnamed and misplaced revolution of Dhufar.[4] He persuasively argues that for many in the Global South, Dhufar’s revolution served as “a small but essential constituent part” of “the struggle between imperial and popular sovereignties and the larger battle between monarchical regimes and republican movements in the Arab world and beyond.”[5] Takriti’s retrieval of the history of Dhufar and his restoration of the term revolution to this ten-year struggle allows us to understand why the Afraz sisters, at a time of when young activists on the run would have had a great number of places to go to, went to this small country across the gulf. The Dhufari revolution coincided with the rise of a new kind of anti-Shah opposition in Iran: the guerilla movement in the form of Sazman-i Chirikha-yi Fadai-yi Khalq (Guerrilla Organization of the Devotees of the People) and the Mujahedin to which the Afraz sisters belonged. The shah’s support of Sultan Qabus only reaffirmed to the Iranian opposition that their fight against imperialism and the Shah were one and the same.

Even though the revolution in Dhufar may not have produced singular ideas that had global reverberations beyond 1975, it was one of several global nodes (à la Vietnam or Algeria) that embodied the essence of revolution as an anti-colonial struggle and generated enough passions to attract a wide variety of people from Cuba, the Arab World, and Iran into its geographical boundaries. The number of revolutionaries flocking to each and every node may not have been numerous but connecting these nodes to one another gives a picture of a grand transnational movement of emotions, ideas, and people, one that hints at a yet-to-be defined age of revolutions for the twentieth century. In defining the small as a node, we also are brought face to face with contingency and unknowability, two crucial qualities of revolutionary experience that refuse to go away no matter how revolutions are defined, categorized, or analyzed.

***

What does this all mean for the story of the Afraz sisters?

The question, already difficult to answer on the face of it, becomes even more difficult to answer when reading the accounts left behind by the two sisters and published posthumously. Despite the romance that cocoons the lives of revolutionary dreamers in our historical imagination, neither sister comes across as a heroic do-gooder. In fact, by contemporary standards, neither sister is easy to like. In “The Hidden War of Dhofar” published in Le Monde on 14 November 1975, the newspaper revealed that the Dhufari guerilla fighters had shot down an Iranian helicopter in September and taken its pilot prisoner. The article registers a note of surprise that he was still alive, quoting the pilot, Parviz Ashrafian: “I had been told that all prisoners were executed. [But] I’ve been treated very well. They [his Dhufari captors] are very kind.” Mahbubeh’s time in the camp in Hawf overlapped with that of Parviz Ashrafian. She believed he should be pressured to give them intelligence and writes disapprovingly of the comrades’ “dogmatic belief in treating the [Iranian POW] pilot humanely,” namely by not torturing him for information, sacrificing a sheep to feed him, and turning on a battery-operated light for him at night, despite its cost.[6] To her this was just another example of the ways in which “the Oman revolution is lacking ideological political training.”[7] When he was brought to the hospital where she worked for treatment, Mahbubeh left the examination room through another door, refusing to see him.

In their writings, both sisters paint themselves as committed Marxist-Leninists with strict views of what political commitment meant. In her diary, Rafat objects to a South Yemeni elementary school textbook for not being appropriate for a “Marxist revolutionary country and culture” because it depicted a city girl’s birthday party.[8] Mahbubeh writes extensively about the “principle weaknesses of the Dhufar revolution” noting, for example, that their motivations for the struggle are primarily nationalist or even tribal, and that they have a very basic understanding of “revolution and struggle.” The examples she gives are of cheers for “Fidel or any Vietcong” during movie nights at the hospital when they screen Cuban or Vietnamese films.[9] Or the fact that they boast about how no one from their tribe or village had betrayed the cause by accepting the Sultan’s offer of amnesty to the guerillas, thus elevating their local identities over the revolution. It is hard to deny that the sisters’ own urban, and possibly Persian, biases colored their judgments of their tribal, rural, and Arab comrades.

In late 1978, most likely November or December, Mahbubeh Afraz died alone in Paris. The narratives of her death to this day split along the Islamist-Marxist line that cleaved the Mujahedin in 1975. According to her husband and some of her Marxist comrades, she had been struggling with depression for a while and finally committed suicide. Taqi Shahram, the figure in the Mujahedin most closely associated with the 1975 split, allegedly claimed that Mahbubeh committed suicide after her husband’s insistence that she, once again, get an abortion. The radio broadcast she had worked for in Aden announced her death in December 1978 noting that she had overdosed on Valium. But her story did not end there.

Marzieh Hadidchi was a well-known Islamist guerilla fighter in Khomeini’s inner circle before the revolution who would eventually head the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Hamedan and become a member of parliament. In her memoir, she writes that one day in 1978, when she had gone to visit Khomeini in Paris, a man arrived and introduced himself as Mahbubeh’s cousin and told her that Mahbubeh had died and he needed help to get her body. Hadidchi knew the Afraz sisters, particularly Rafat, from their time in the Refah school. Mahbubeh’s family had tried to contact her from Iran for several days to no avail and so finally the French police had entered her apartment only to be “confronted with the smell of decay and Mahbubeh’s body.”[10] She had been killed, Hadidchi speculates, by the Marxist Mujahedin for remaining a practicing Muslim in secret. Months after the revolution, Mujtaba Taleqani, a member of the Mujahedin and the son of one of the most important and beloved clerics of the revolutionary movement, was arrested in Tehran (along with a few others) and charged with having killed Mahbubeh as part of this Marxist-Islamist conflict. As a result of his arrest, his father, Ayatollah Taleqani, threatened to leave Tehran in the midst of post-revolutionary fervor and power struggles until his son was released. The charges were dropped but both sides still cling to their versions of Mahbubeh’s death.

The narratives of Mahbubeh’s death (along with her life and that of Rafat) refuse to be contained within narrow political categories, connecting instead to a broad spectrum of revolutionaries and to Iran’s post-revolutionary history. In doing so, they reveal how conceptualizing the small can train a bright flashlight on the ways in which a world filled with revolutionary passions was deeply interconnected, its events often contingent, and its histories messy. It is easy to see Rafat and Mahbubeh as two sisters who went somewhere mountainous, helped some people, at times criticized them, and then died. But standing as they do between two revolutionary movements within a span of a decade, neither of which Rafat saw succeed, both of which Mahbubeh possibly felt let down by, their lives become impossible to turn away from.



[1] They have a third sister, Behjat who died in 2019. Behjat was a steadfast supporter of the Islamic Republic of Iran and was celebrated as umm al-usara or mother of POWs for her work on their behalf during the Iran-Iraq war and after. Her story, while fascinating in its own right, lies beyond the purview of this piece.

[2] Ervand Abrahamian, The Iranian Mojahedin (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1989), 92.

[3] Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976 (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), 227.

[4] Ibid., 5.

[5] Ibid., 4.

[6] Mahbubeh Afraz and Rafat Afraz, Hamrah ba Iqilabiyun-i `Umani: Yaddashtha-yi Jang-i Zofar [Alongside Omani Revolutionaries: Notes from the Dhufar War], (Frankfurt, Germany: Andeesheh va Peykar Publications, 2015), 225.

[7] Ibid., 224.


[8] Ibid., 257.


[9] Ibid., 84-85.


[10] Marziyeh Dabbagh and Mohsen Kazemi, Khaterat-i Marziyeh Hadidchi Dabbagh, (Tehran: Intisharat Sureh Nur, 1381/2002), 163-4.

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New Texts Out Now: Ala'a Shehabi and Marc Owen Jones, Bahrain's Uprising: Resistance and Repression in the Gulf

Alaʾa Shehabi and Marc Owen Jones, editors, Bahrain`s Uprising: Resistance and Repression in the GulfLondon: Zed Books, 2015.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this book?

Alaʾa Shehabi and Marc Owen Jones (AS & MOJ): Bahrain is small, but significant. Sadly though, it is often overlooked when it comes to writing on the region. We wanted to address the relative gap in the literature on Bahrain, and write a book that analyzed the recent uprising from multiple points of view, yet especially by those who had been directly affected somehow.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

AS & MOJ: Much of the literature on the region tends to come from a political economy, sectarianism, or even post-colonial angle. Given the contentious politics of the Arab Uprisings, and Bahrain`s own history of it, we thought resistance and repression would work as a more appropriate lens through which to frame a study of Bahrain. This concept-driven approach allowed us to study Bahrain from numerous disciplinary angles and methods, ranging from historical analysis to cultural studies and communication approaches. Across the book, the chapters generally reflect themes of social justice, postcolonialism, the role of foreign actors, human rights, and social media.

As well as different disciplinary approaches, the research was formed very much by the axiological considerations of the transformative paradigm, which focuses on social justice and the inclusion of marginalized or persecuted voices in the actual writing of texts. As such, it was important to include authors who had experienced the uprising in different ways, and the book includes chapters by local politicians, activists, poets, academics, and even an expatriate worker.

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[Alaʾa Shehabi. Image via the author.]

The book is split into three parts. The first part, entitled ``voices of the condemned,” is a collection of three chapters written by those who have been persecuted in some way by the Bahraini government. Chapter one is a translation of the court testimony of Ebrahim Sharif, the secular Bahraini politician imprisoned and tortured for exercising his right to freedom of expression. In it, Sharif sets the foundations for the book, outlining the reasons, motivations, and demands of many of Bahrain`s restive citizens. In chapter two, Ali Al Jallawi, one of Bahrain’s best writers, retells with incisive humor and wit his experience of torture and imprisonment in Bahrain before the 2011 Uprising. The third chapter, perhaps a surprising inclusion, is the witness account of Tony Mitchell, an Australian expat, who gives a moving account about how seeing government oppression from his high rise overlooking the Pearl Roundabout made him realize the extent of government propaganda. The reason for the inclusion of Mitchell`s chapter is that it highlights an uncommon instance of a western expat speaking out against the brutal excesses of the Bahraini regime. Usually, such expats are expected to be politically acquiescent in exchange for a good job and a tax-free salary.

The second part of the book focuses on the different methods of resistance, and includes Amal Khalaf`s work on how the Pearl Roundabout became both a symbol of the movement and a tool of resistance. John Horne too expands on techniques of creative resistance, while Ala`a Shehabi and Luke Bhatia track the shifting trends in oppositional discourse and the government`s response to the recent human rights turn. Part three is more focused on repression, and includes Zoe Holman`s in-depth analysis of Bahrain`s often toxic relationship with Britain, and Marc Owen Jones’ writings on the emergence of the Bahraini Police. Postcolonial scholars will find much here of interest. The last chapter, still dealing with repression, moves away from history, and takes a critical look at social media and the cyberpolitics of the recent Bahrain Uprising.

A very strong theme that emerges in the book is the internationalization of both repression and resistance. The book really stresses how the ambitions and foreign policy objectives of outside powers have shaped contentious politics in the country. Bahrain, trapped between the rivalry of Saudi Arabia and Iran, and geopolitically important for the US and UK, has only nominal sovereignty. Yet the role of non-state actors is explored and stressed too. Foreign companies and states, from Korea to France, benefit from selling weapons, spyware, and other products to Bahrain. Deterritorialized and despatialized, repression has become a big global business, and we are increasingly seeing the transnational repression of local protest, especially in the realm of surveillance technologies or the supply of arms and advice. Conversely, the same is true of oppositional movements and the human rights turn, where we see more and more the transnational protest and lobbying over local issues.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

AS & MOJ: The book does not so much depart from our previous work as collate it. It also collects the disparate efforts of those who have written on Bahrain, but whose work has not necessarily formed a holistic, multifaceted narrative.

MOJ: For my own part, the work provides insight into the critical aspects of social media, and how they were used as a tool of repression in Bahrain. I also delve into the historical, cultural, and social reasons for the embedding of police deviance in Bahrain. My aims in both these chapters ties in with my general interest of seeing what factors influence repressive methods.

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[Marc Owen Jones. Image via the author.]

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

AS & MOJ: Everyone really, but of course we would say that. We did not want the book to be an ivory-tower, niche account of what was going on in Bahrain, which is why the collection of authors, and the partitioning of the book, is so eclectic. With our background in fact-based activism and academia, the book has been rigorously edited in order to ensure not only the quality of the knowledge, but also the extent of the detail. We wanted it to be comprehensive, both in content and style, and as such, there should be much in this that appeals to historians, social movement scholars, area experts, casual readers, and those interested in politics.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MOJ: Personally, I am working on a monograph based on my PhD, which looks at the historical evolution of methods of repression in Bahrain over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book is quite expansive, but provides interesting details into the multifaceted layers of control Bahraini citizens have been, and still are, subjected to. I also have some work coming out in the next few months on democratic transition in Bahrain, and the role of social media in P2P diplomacy. I am also working on aspects of digital authoritarianism in the wider Gulf, and in particular how surveillance ought to be taken seriously as a form of political violence.

Excerpt from Bahrain`s Uprising: Resistance and Repression in the Gulf

From the Introduction: Bahrain’s Uprising: The Struggle for Democracy in the Gulf

14 February 2011, the Day of Rage, arrived. Protests began very early that morning across several villages with hundreds of citizens participating. They were met with tear gas and birdshot. By the evening, the protests had spread into the capital Manama and its suburbs. By nightfall, news and images of the first death emerged: ʿAli ʿAbdulhadi Mushaymaʿ; twenty-one years old; shot in the back with birdshot. The next day, during his funeral, another participant, Fadhel al-Matruk was again shot in the back. The funerals turned into massive protests and mourners, having just buried Mushaymaʿ in the village of Al-Daih, turned their sights to the Pearl Roundabout that happened to be just one kilometre away. A mixture of good timing, luck (given the location of funeral), and the imaginings posted earlier on Bahrain Online came together to unite people in an unplanned march towards the Pearl Roundabout. As they marched, news spread and others spontaneously left their cars to join in. Approaching the Roundabout, or al-dawar as it later became known the crowd chanted “silmiyya, silmiyya (peaceful, peaceful) and “the people and the land are furious, our demand is a contractual constitution” (dustur ʿaqdi).

With not a policeman in sight, the Pearl Roundabout welcomed its new guests. Thousands swarmed into the space euphorically, some bowing and kissing the ground. Ibrahim Sharif, one of the older veterans to arrive at the Pearl that day, was carried along by the thronging crowds like a groom on his wedding night. A former banker, Sharif would later describe in his letters how he became consumed by this experience at the Pearl and how it allowed him to fulfil those revolutionary dreams of his youth. He spent day and night at the roundabout, becoming heavily involved in behind-the-scenes negotiations. However, it was in the early hours of the night, in small tents discussing strategies for the future with protesters and youth leaders, that Ibrahim Sharif emerged as a revolutionary leader.

On 17 February, just as protesters were settling down in their tents, the unexpected shooting began. Without warning, the area was drowned with tear gas and old and young were shot in a pre-dawn raid by the security forces. Four were killed in cold blood that night Ibrahim Sharif, having barely slept the previous two nights, ferried the injured to hospital. Tony Mitchell, an Australian expatriate, gives a blunt account of what he saw that night in Chapter Three. From his block of luxury apartments, aptly named the Pearl Towers, Mitchell had a vantage point over the roundabout. Grabbing his camcorder, he simply filmed what he saw. He did not intend to be a “citizen journalist,” nor a participant in the protests, but the next day the video footage he recorded was aired by international news channels. What was to happen to Tony after that was to change both his views and his life.

As the hospitals filled up with the dead and injured, footage of stunned doctors, agonized relatives, and the bullet-ridden bodies of young and old men punctured the stereotype of Bahrain as a calm, oil-rich Gulf backwater. Collective shock and disbelief soon escalated into collective rage. Undaunted, a few brave protesters attempted to return to the dawar, which was now besieged by tanks. This was a totally different situation to that of a few days ago. Now protesters, much smaller in number, faced the inevitable prospect of confrontational state violence. In a video that was shared millions of times over, shots fired from a barricade of tanks were seen shooting dead a young man in a green T-shirt. His name was ʿAbd al-Redha Buhmayd. Following this, the army was ordered to withdraw and the protesters returned to the Pearl Roundabout.

The encampment was rebuilt, but the innocent euphoria of reaching al-dawar on 15 February was now replaced by a melancholic and righteous defiance. Both times, the protesters were victorious in reclaiming their now sacralized territory, but at greater cost and sacrifice—literally transcribing the path in the blood of “martyrs” and adorning every corner with their images. These were needless victims but, at the same time, their exercise of agency nourished the moral faith in the movement. For another three weeks, protesters invested in rebuilding a settlement, complete with tents, stages, and sound systems. The tents represented an array of identities and purposes, and pre-existing political leftist groups as well as human rights groups, artists, women’s groups all set up stalls and tents. A media center, and a lost and found tent, as well as plentiful food and drink were available. The palm trees circling the monument were numbered to serve as signposts and meeting points, and a media center was installed. Village identities emerged as a focal point of congregation, whilst religious or sectarian identities were visibly absent. Press conferences were organized in the morning and seminars were held in the evenings, and a central stage was used for public expression all day. Protesters even brought air conditioners in preparation for the hot summer: “we will protest until the regime falls” (ʿitisam hata isqat al-nizam). Notable was the equal presence of women as both protesters and organizers, as discussed by Frances Hasso. Yet they were to stay there for only another three weeks.

On 14 March 2011, the Gulf Cooperation Council Peninsula Shield Force (GCCPSF), an armed force representing the ruling class of this eponymous coalition of five neighbouring states (excluding Oman), entered via the highway linking the island to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain’s pernicious protector. The following day, the Government of Bahrain (GoB) declared a “State of National Safety,” a euphemism for martial law. As in Libya, Bahrain was now confronted with direct foreign intervention. While the misnomer Bahrain’s GCCPSF attempts to confer some sense of regional consensus, Robert Fisk argues that the decision to cross the bridge was unequivocally a Saudi Arabian one. Writing in The Independent, Fisk stated, “they [the Saudis] never received an invitation. They simply invaded and received a post-dated invitation.” Indeed, what has been a decades-long process of Saudi cultural and political encroachment suddenly became what many opposition activists called “an invasion,” with many, including Ibrahim Sharif, referring to the Saudi troops as quwat al-ihtilal (the forces of occupation) in the perception that the primary goal was to quell the protests.

With their Saudi enablers, the Bahraini regime began to manufacture the pretext that the brutality of the crackdown and the entrance of Saudi troops were necessary in protecting Bahrain’s sovereignty from Iranian interference. The government wished to paint the movement as an Iranian-sponsored, exogenously instigated, uprising and a smokescreen intent on using democracy to install a Shiʿa theocratic state in Bahrain—a tactic that has been deployed since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. For this reason, the authorities continued to whip up sectarian discord. They demolished numerous Shiʿa religious structures and severely punished the most prominent Sunnis who participated in the protests, including a former military officer, in order to depict the opposition as almost exclusively Shiʿa. This included Ibrahim Sharif of the National Democratic Action Society, whose speech before the Court of Appeal forms Chapter One of this book.

On 21 March 2011, King Hamad announced that the security forces had foiled a foreign (read Iranian) plot. As government confidence increased, so did their assertiveness on the alleged Iranian link. The die was cast and the authorities were now unabashedly pushing the sectarian line that the opposition were agents of Iran, further inflaming sectarian tensions in Bahrain and the region as a whole. Even when the King’s appointed commission of inquiry ruled that it found no evidence of Iranian involvement, state discourse introduction barely changed. With the authorities positioning themselves as defenders against a foreign threat, repression continued with muted international criticism. As American comedian Jon Stewart noted, while US politicians and policymakers were busy galvanizing public support for intervention in Syria and Libya, their message to the Bahraini government was simply, “Hey, tone it down will ya.”

Yet the Bahraini government did anything but tone it down. Between February 2011 and May 2014, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights reported that up to ninety-eight people were killed directly by the government’s excessive use of force. This figure now is likely to be higher due to recent alleged killings by the state security services. In addition to physical coercion, killings, and the torture of activists, the government has resorted to multilayered tactics of repression to discourage dissent. During February and March 2011, at least 2,075 public sector employees and 2,464 private employees were dismissed from work “for their support for or participation in strikes during the protests.” However, it was revealed by an independent team of legal experts in the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report that the strikes “were within the permissible bounds of the law.” Other punitive measures included withdrawing scholarships from students on government stipends who engaged in dissent. Hundreds of students were even dismissed from university for their alleged role in demonstrations and criticism of the regime. In one case, a student was reportedly dismissed for simply liking a comment on Facebook that criticized the regime. Indeed, this broad-spectrum repression targeted everything, from the banal tweet to the Pearl Monument itself.

[Excerpted from Bahrain`s Uprising: Resistance and Repression in the Gulf, edited by Alaʾa Shehabi and Marc Owen Jones, by permission of the editors. © 2015 Zed Books. For more information, or to purchase this book, click here.]