Baharna in Kuwait

The Baharna in Kuwait (Arabic: البحارنة في الكويت‎) migrated from their home country of Bahrain to Kuwait in the second half of the 18th century due to commercial opportunities or persecution or political instability in the Al Khalifa sheikhdom.[1][2] The Baharna of Kuwait were typically shipbuilders, lived in their own quarter (فريج البحارنة firīj il-Baḥārna), although not segregated and were not prohibited from living elsewhere. The quarter itself was not exclusively Baharna either.[3] and together with Hasawi and Iranian Shia, constituted 15,000 out of 50,000 Kuwait Town inhabitants in 1918.[4]

The 18th century German explorer Carsten Niebuhr visited Failaka Island in 1765 and found that a disproportionate amount of its inhabitants were Baharna and whom worked as pearl divers.[5]

References
  1. Steffen Hertog; Giacomo Luciani; Marc Valeri, eds. (25 April 2013). Business Politics in the Middle East. C. Hurst & Co. p. 72. ISBN 978-1-84904-235-2.
  2. Laurence Louër (2011). Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf. C. Hurst & Co. p. 47. ISBN 9781849042147.
  3. Clive Holes (2001). Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia: Ethnographic texts. Brill. p. 347. ISBN 9789004144941.
  4. Farah Al-Nakib (2016). Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life. Stanford University Press. p. 75. ISBN 9780804796392. LCCN 2015048590.
  5. "هجرة البحارنة إلى الكويت ونشأة صناعة السفن". 27 October 2014. Retrieved 2 July 2018.
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