BAHRAIN - Inter-Shiite Split.

Also potentially serious, where Bahrain is concerned, is a split among the Shiite militants themselves. This would reflect a split already occurring among the Shiite Arabs of Iraq, with the mainstream including the middle and higher classes following Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, while the mainly young and poor are led by Muqtada Al-Sadr. The same type of split appears to be developing in Bahrain, with a Sistani representative in the island kingdom appealing to mainstream Shiites and rivalled by a Sadr representative.

Most Shiite militants on the Arab side of the Gulf have been influenced since the early 1920s by the then Grand Ayatollah of Iraq, Mohammed Al-Sadr, who from Najaf led the first Arab revolt against British rule. Although his revolt caused the British to lean on the Sunni Arabs for ruling Iraq and to sideline the Shiites, Sadr's writings and utterances in Arab nationalism earned him admiration among nationalist groups in the predominantly-Sunni Arab world, including the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) of Egypt.

His son, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed-Baqer Al-Sadr - an uncle of Muqtada - followed the same Arab nationalist line in Iraq and in the 1960s founded a political organisation called Hizb Al-Da'wa Al-Islamiyah (the party of the Islamic vocation). In the late 1970s Da'wa took up arms against Saddam's regime; but, although this party was predominantly Ja'fari Shiite, its ideology had pan-Arab nationalist leanings.

Clandestine Da'wa branches were subsequently established in Bahrain, the Saudi Eastern Province, Qatar, Kuwait and other countries with Ja'fari Shiite communities, as well as in Iran. By 1979, however, Da'wa had become more conservative in Shiite terms - in order to widen its power base among the mainstream Shiites. Saddam's regime launched an all-out war against Da'wa and had Ayatollah Sadr and his sister executed in 1980, which caused Da'wa members to flee Iraq to Iran. Now Ibrahim Al-Ja'fari, a Da'wa leader, is the mainstream Shiites' candidate for the key post of prime minister in Iraq and has been endorsed by Sistani.

In Iraq and the rest of the Arab world, Muqtada's Sadrist movement is a rival of Da'wa. Da'wa, the most numerous and organised party among Iraq's Shiites, is part of Sistani's conservative mainstream, while the Sadrist movement projects a combination of socialist and Arab nationalist tendencies along with Ja'fari Shiism. This movement was founded by Muqtada's father, Ayatollah Mohammed-Sadeq Al-Sadr, a younger half-brother of the more senior Grand Ayatollah Mohammed-Baqer, who in the early 1990s was promoted by Saddam's Baathist regime because of his socialist and Arab nationalist tendencies; but he was executed in 1999 by the Baathist government for having tried to widen his power base in Saddam City, a Shiite slum of the greater Baghdad area, which is now unofficially called Sadr City.

Those Shiites in Bahrain who follow the Sadrist line at present used to be pan-Arab nationalists in the 1950s and 1960s and used to militate

along the revolutionary lines of Nasser of Egypt who died in 1970. A part of those Shiites also used to sympathise with the Communist ideology. Most of the young Sadrists have been unemployed and in the 1990s spearheaded a revolt against Bahrain's Sunni elite.

However, most of the Shiite merchant clans in Bahrain are of Persian origin, with Bahrain having once been a province of a Persian empire. So one should not be surprised if the split among the Shiites of Bahrain becomes a class struggle between those with a strong Persian identity following the guidance of Sistani and those with a strong Arab identity following Sadr.