The winter season brings many events to Gulf cities. In stark contrast to their European and U.S. counterparts, Gulf citizens are drawn outside by the favorable weather. Riyadh Season 2024-25 brought people out in droves to Boulevard World, where they could experience world cultures in Disney-like fashion, or Dunes of Arabia, where tourists and locals alike headed to the desert outside Riyadh to experience the “richness of Saudi culture and create unforgettable memories.” Doha held an international food festival that included a Michelin star village, food zones and kiosks, and live entertainment to attract tourists from around the Gulf and beyond.

In December 2024, Bahrain held its annual Celebrate Bahrain festival, with concerts and other events and activities intended to bring people together to celebrate Bahrain’s culture and history. Beyond commercial projects aimed at attracting tourists and investors, the festival sought to bring the narrow streets of Muharraq’s and Manama’s old souqs to life with local art and cultural events. Bahrain’s Authority for Culture and Antiquities and Ministry of Tourism, aided by local vendors, artists, architects, merchants, researchers, and writers, came together to design a festival that spoke to Bahrainis and visitors alike. Citizens and tourists came in droves, on weekends and weekdays, to attend Layali al-Muharraq, Manama Retro, Budaiya Farmers’ Market, Heritage Village, and other events intended to showcase Bahrain’s many villages and towns.

Manama Retro was a two-week festival that animated a handful of central blocks in downtown Manama, evoking memories of the neighborhood in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Street signs were made to look as they did in the souq’s heyday. Old Bahraini-owned businesses, including restaurants, cinemas, and shops, sold old-fashioned products. An abandoned mall was refurbished to host an arcade, two museums, antique shops, and, to the delight of young and old, a haunted house. Named after Um Humar, the house told the story of a well-known character from Bahraini folklore, who was invoked to scare children to prevent them from leaving their homes at noon, when the streets were at their hottest. One of the highlights for many visitors of the festival was a museum, The Soul of Manama, which laid out a brief history of Manama in short, exhibit-style narratives incorporating oral histories and showcasing antiques from Manama’s residents. Old magazines, typewriters, uniforms, cutlery, and plates evoked a simpler era that was nonetheless rich in culture and community.

The Past Captured Through the Voices of Residents

Fadhel al-Sharaf is the founder of Manama Story, an online museum and oral-history archive that designed and curated the “Soul of Manama” exhibit for Manama Retro. Fadhel started Manama Story in 2008 with the intent to make a book preserving old pictures of Manama from its residents’ personal archives. He grew up in the city and watched as its families slowly began moving out of the densely populated central neighborhoods into newer towns and residential developments. He felt that the city was beginning to lose its soul, and he wanted to preserve its memory, even if its original facade was diminished and its buildings were torn down to make way for showpiece architecture and multilane highways. 

Manama has undergone many changes in the past century, notably in the last 25 years. Its central souq, which used to contain 24 specialized markets, once bustled with activity. Today, its narrow streets have given way to vast highways, parking garages, and massive skyscrapers. Its gate, once right on the coast, is now miles away from the water, hidden behind the grandeur of the Financial Harbor and Bahrain Bay, both of which were constructed on reclaimed land.

With his team of volunteers, Fadhel released six editions of the book “Manama’s Features,” each focused on a different theme, including Manama’s schools, merchant families, and traditional architecture. The books were a precursor to what eventually became an e-museum that catalogues not only the pictures Fadhel collected from Manama’s past residents but the stories of some of the neighborhoods’ oldest residents. These oral histories Fadhel hopes will become the foundation of a national oral-history archive of daily life of the city of Manama.

Enabling Access To Archival Material

Fadhel created the e-museum to provide a platform to help increase engagement with the collective memories of Manama. He explained, “Bahrain and the Gulf more widely do have massive archives collected that are available in national libraries and in people’s homes, but they are difficult to access. What we aimed to do when starting Manama Story was to preserve and enable access and interaction with the material we collected.”

Fadhel’s vision has been a success. Manama Story is widely followed across social media. People from around the Gulf regularly reach out with messages of appreciation and expressions of nostalgia for Manama’s old days. The team has also helped put together exhibits and festivals to enable interaction with the material they have collected. Soon they hope to launch an interactive map that helps residents and tourists view the older parts of Manama based on the archival pictures that Manama Story collected. The team also arranges tours that take visitors on a journey through Manama’s culinary, architectural, and archeological history.

A Return to History To Invest in the Future

Everyone from the region will tell you that the city they live in is the “pearl” of the Gulf. Yet many Gulf citizens also hold Manama in special regard. According to Fadhel, “Manama is not only the capital of Bahrain, it is a cosmopolitan city that has and continues to absorb residents from different walks of life and parts of the world. Its streets and its souqs are colored with the multicultural lives that are brought to them. They say Berlin is multicultural, but Manama has a mix of religions, races, and cultures that are unusual for such a small place. This narrow space contains four religions along with houses of worship that represent them. It is also a city of many firsts. It is in Manama that the first municipality in the Gulf was built, and the first bank and the first cinema, first school, and first hospital. Many firsts happened within the relatively small part of a small country. It is not your run of the mill casual city, and it deserves pause to record, archive, and admire.”

Like Manama, cities across the Gulf have begun similar archiving initiatives to record the history of their residents. The collected archival material is then used in festivals like Manama Retro as part of an overall strategy to encourage both local and international tourism. Fadhel spoke about this shift to preserve the past instead of simply destroying and rebuilding for the future: “There is an active interest in preserving the history of the region, not only for a scholarly purpose but for an economic and social one.” He noted that Saudi Arabia launched the festival Youm Badaina, which brought out large crowds to commemorate the founding of the kingdom. He continued, “Malls and fancy residential buildings and luxury hotels are important as well for the economy and the development of the Gulf, but it is its history that gives it a competitive edge in the global tourism market. It is the stories we tell that bring people to our shores.” 

When asked what motivates him to continue the archive of the history of Manama, Fadhel said, “seeing people’s interactions with the archives we’ve collected, especially when they take actions on it to further their own careers and create something for themselves and for the country. If they are encouraged to preserve their own heritage and be proud of it, this is what motivates me and the team to keep going. Some people walk into our exhibits and begin to cry because it brings back a memory that they thought was lost. Creatives in Bahrain feel encouraged to start a new business or learn a craft that we thought was lost to the times because of the archives that we’ve collected and made accessible to them. It makes me proud to see and pushes me to keep going and keep recording.”

Fadhel admitted that it wasn’t just the immediate impact that motivated him to continue to create and add to Manama Story. “The value of archives is one that isn’t really seen immediately. Hardly anyone watches our hourlong videos of the first female teacher in Bahrain, for example, but one day a researcher may want to write about her. Someone might be motivated by her story.” When uncovering those stories, a new generation may be inspired by Manama’s spirit.