Can Bahrain’s division between Sunnis and Shias be healed?

first time since her childhood, Mariam recently went back to the shrine of Nabi Saleh, a tiny island off the shore of Bahrain’s capital, Manama. She reverentially held green drapes over the tomb of the 14th-century holy man whose name was given to the island. She stopped near the spring where her family used to barbecue a sacrificial goat. She remembered tasting the sweet dates from the orchards and looked at the waves lapping the island where she once swam. So much had gone. The sea is sullied with sewage. The spring is a dry hole. A car park has replaced most of the orchard. And Sunni families, like hers, gave up visiting the shrine decades ago. “Why did we stop?” she asked the custodian of the shrine, a Shia. “We were together. It was such a beautiful age.”Since the Islamic revolution of 1979 that convulsed Iran and threatened the thrones of Sunni Arab monarchs across the Gulf, Bahrain has been on the fault line of the Sunni-Shia division. It is the only country in the six-member Gulf Co-operation Council where the indigenous majority is Shia; most of the people in the other five are staunchly Sunni. And it lies awkwardly squeezed between two large ideological foes, Iran and Saudi Arabia. After the ayatollahs took over Iran, Bahrain’s two sects sought succour from those bigger brothers, sometimes accusing each other of unbelief. Narrow-minded Sunni clerics denounced shrines, like those of Nabi Saleh, as insults to monotheism.