Kuwait

Kuwait was founded in the eighteenth century as a merchant settlement whose wealth came from pearling and long distance trade with India and East Africa, and that commercial character shaped its religion. The ruling Al Sabah family governed by consultation with merchant houses rather than by decree, an arrangement that produced the 1938 Legislative Council movement and eventually the constitution of 1962, which established the most powerful elected assembly in the Gulf.

Kuwaiti Shia, many of Iranian, Bahraini and Hasawi descent, were part of the merchant class from early on, and the resulting integration is markedly better than in neighbouring states; Shia Kuwaitis sit in parliament, serve as ministers, and their loyalty during the Iraqi occupation of 1990 and 1991 strengthened their position. That does not mean the divide is absent, and it widened after 1979 and again during the Syrian war, with the 2015 bombing of the Imam Sadiq mosque by the Islamic State killing twenty seven worshippers. The national response, in which the emir attended the funerals and Sunni Kuwaitis prayed at Shia mosques, is remembered as a deliberate refusal of the intended outcome. Failaka island, off the coast, carries a longer record still, with a Greek temple and fort from the Seleucid settlement of Ikaros and, before that, Dilmun era occupation.

Kuwait is the only Gulf state where organised political Islam operates through an elected legislature rather than around one. The Islamic Constitutional Movement, associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and Salafi blocs have contested seats since the 1980s, and Shia deputies have formed their own groupings; between them they have been strong enough to shape legislation and to force ministers out through parliamentary interpellation. The results are visible in law.

Article 2 of the constitution makes Sharia a main source of legislation rather than the only one, a formulation that has been the subject of repeated attempts at amendment. Personal status is administered under three separate codes, Sunni, Jaafari Shia and, for non Muslims, either their own community rules or a residual civil regime, so that inheritance and marriage depend on which register a citizen belongs to. Blasphemy provisions have been used against writers and against social media posts, and the 2012 case of a man sentenced to death for tweets about the Prophet, later reduced, drew international attention. For the expatriate majority the picture differs by faith: several Christian denominations hold legal recognition and worship in their own buildings, the National Evangelical Church dating to a mission of 1931, while Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist communities have no licensed premises at all and worship in private accommodation, a distinction that reflects the region's recognition of scriptural religions and not of others.