The Bahrain crackdown on Shia clerics has become the sharpest domestic consequence of the Iran war for the smallest state in the Gulf, according to a Reuters investigation published on November 6. Shaken by the accuracy of Iran’s attacks on Bahrain, and by the support some Bahrainis voiced for them, the authorities have moved against clerics they accuse of fostering allegiance to Tehran at home.
Bahrain is the only Gulf country ruled by a Sunni Muslim family while being populated mostly by Shia Muslims, and its officials have framed the campaign in existential terms. They say Iran seeks to undermine and ultimately topple the kingdom’s leadership. Lt. Gen. Tariq Al Hassan, who heads the Public Security agency responsible for internal security, told Reuters that the country is confronting an ideology that demands obedience to Iran’s leadership above Bahrain’s sovereign authority.
Critics see something else. Rights groups say the arrests, and the stripping of citizenship from 69 citizens of Iranian heritage, amount to a new blow to free speech and religious freedom in a country that crushed pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring of 2011.
Inside the Bahrain crackdown on Shia clerics
Between May and June, the Bahrain crackdown on Shia clerics saw authorities arrest more than 50 clerics and religious orators. The public prosecution accused them of trying to run a terrorist group that sought to incite rebellion and overthrow the country’s ruling order with help from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by promoting followers’ subordination to Iran’s supreme leader.
The clerics’ relatives and lawyers reject the charges. They say the authorities are trying to criminalize belief, and they deny that the detained men sought to overthrow the state or acted on behalf of Iran. A relative of one of the clerics on trial, speaking anonymously for safety, said the campaign directly targets Shia citizens and anyone who criticizes the Americans or the Israelis for the war.
On November 6, twenty rights groups including Human Rights Watch and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy issued a statement raising allegations of torture, coerced confessions and other due process violations in the case, describing the mass prosecution as a serious concern for religious persecution. Al Hassan denied that the Bahrain crackdown on Shia clerics targets Shia citizens as such, saying most of them are law-abiding and loyal citizens. A verdict in the clerics’ case was expected on November 8, with the kingdom braced for potential protests.
Why the Bahrain crackdown on Shia clerics began with the war
The trigger for the Bahrain crackdown on Shia clerics was the war itself. When the United States and Israel launched the war on Iran on February 28, Tehran answered with drones and missiles against neighboring Gulf states, including Bahrain, home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Western diplomats and Gulf officials said the strikes were worryingly accurate: one hit a hotel shortly after US military personnel arrived there after fleeing their base. Officials were further alarmed by social media posts from some Bahrainis praising attacks seen as targeting US interests.
For many Bahraini Shia, Iran’s supreme leader is also a spiritual guide, under the doctrine of Wilayet al-Faqih, the Guardianship of the Jurist, which is Iran’s official ideology. Gulf governments have long preferred strands of Shiism that do not combine the political with the religious. Al Hassan said the war exposed the extent to which some individuals had been indoctrinated by Iran-linked ideology, and that the issue had to be addressed at its roots. Around a dozen people have already been sentenced to between five and ten years in prison for allegedly expressing support for the attacks.
The campaign also reverses a recent detente. In 2024 the government freed hundreds of prisoners jailed for political activity through royal pardons, and Bahrain and Iran began talks to restore diplomatic relations severed since 2016. That opening is now closed. A Manama-based researcher on Islamist movements, speaking anonymously, cautioned that the authorities must distinguish between Shia identity and the doctrine of Wilayet al-Faqih, arguing that Bahrain’s strongest answer to Tehran is a sovereign state in which religious freedom is secure for all.
Whether the verdict calms or inflames the kingdom, the Bahrain crackdown on Shia clerics has already redrawn the line between security policy and religious life in the island state, and its effects are likely to outlast the war that set it in motion.
Source: Reuters