The Ashura processions in Manama and the Shia villages are the largest public religious observance in Bahrain, with black draped streets, majlis recitations of the events at Karbala, and matam houses that serve as community institutions as well as ritual halls. They are also political by necessity, because in a country where the Shia majority has limited access to the security forces and to senior state employment, the one occasion on which that majority assembles visibly carries weight beyond its liturgical content.
The protests of February 2011, centred on the Pearl Roundabout, were framed by participants as a demand for constitutional monarchy and by the government as a sectarian and Iran influenced movement. The crackdown that followed, assisted by Gulf Cooperation Council forces, included the demolition of dozens of Shia religious structures, which the government characterised as the removal of unlicensed buildings; the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, appointed by the king and reporting later that year with unusual candour, documented the demolitions along with torture in custody.
Senior clerics were prosecuted, and Isa Qassim, the most prominent Shia religious authority in the country, was stripped of citizenship in 2016. Bahrain simultaneously maintains a genuine record of accommodation elsewhere: an indigenous Jewish community that has supplied an ambassador and a member of parliament, the oldest church in the Gulf, and the Catholic cathedral opened at Awali in 2021.