Judge Qasim bin Mihza’ and Evangelicalism in the Memory of Bahrain

Abstract

This study investigates the way in which a native discourse has come into being to encounter evangelicalism, during the British colonization of the Arabian Gulf in the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The discourse has been constructed by, along with, the Grand Judge of Bahrain Alshykh Qasim bin Mihza’ (1847 - 1941) and the Bahraini intelligentsia. Methodologically, unlike the previous studies that situate the topic in solely the field of history, reduce the discourse to a binary opposition, and neglect both the necessity of method and the richness of non-historical contexts, the study has exploited some perspectives, drawn from postcolonial studies, comparative literature, and cultural criticism. To conceive of the problem, two questions are addressed: How has been the vision of the evangelical movement that provoked Ibin Mihza’ and the local intelligentsia? How has Ibin Mihza contributed to forming an influential discourse of resistance to such evangelicalism? To respond to such questions, a number of texts that are of historical importance are considered, especially the biographical writing of the historian Mubarak bin Rashid Alkhattir (1935 - 2001) on the life of Ibin Mihza’ as well as the hymn of the Arabian Mission, composed in 1904 by the American evangelist John Gulian Lansing (1851 - 1906). Also, a number of comparisons are held, especially between the resistant discourse and similar cases of the Indian intelligentsia in the era of the British colonization of India as well as between the location of the Bahraini intelligentsia and the entanglement of Third World intellectuals in mimicking their Western counterparts, one of the seminal arguments formed by Franz Fanon, a prominent theorist of postcolonial studies. It is argued that the way in which Ibin Mahzia’ and the local intelligentsia have resisted the evangelical endeavor shifts swiftly from a reactive position to a discourse, compatible, open, flexible, and then because of compexity and emerging new conditions, self-splitting. The multi-faceted conditions of such a discourse have become a threatening agency in the society, endeavoring to decolonize itself and sitting out the construction of its institutions by means of modernity.