I spotted a story on “A'ali pottery” in a magazine while I was in Bahrain. As the local industry was situated just down the road from where I was standing at the moment, I thought it would make a great little side trip. According to the article, Bahrain is renowned for a variety of traditional crafts. Chief among them is pottery making at A'ali in the middle of Bahrain Island. A'ali is also famous for its burial sites which have the densest concentrations of burial mounds found anywhere in the world from any period. In Bahrain, there are rare archeological sites that date back to the Dilmun civilization that flourished during the Bronze Age around 3,000 BC. The heydays of this civilization started as Bahrain was along the ancient sea trade route which linked Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilizations. Amazingly, pottery at A'ali is still practiced in almost exactly the same way it used to be, with little or no resort to modern devices. Skills have passed down, generation-to-generation; although the number of craftsmen has declined, the potters still in the trade remain true to their traditions. The process of preparing the clay has barely changed. Bahrain's potters use a mixture of one part yellow clay or asfar, and three parts red clay (ahmar). “Using only yellow clay will result in pots of poor quality, while using only red clay will make the pots too heavy,” says Jaffer, a potter by profession. Earlier, a donkey cart would transport clay from the wadis to the factory – a journey that would take up to two hours. Today, a six-wheel truck takes just 10 minutes to transport the load of 100 donkeys. Jaffer Pottery is one of a few family run establishments with only a hand full of artisans practicing these ancient crafts. Bahrain's potters believe the local craft originated during the Dilmun era and expanded into a large industry. However after the Industrial Revolution, change caught up, by the seventies there were only 15 family units left in the business. Today there are just seven, of which Jaffer's A'ali Pottery is the biggest and best known. Jaffer has four sons, Mohammed, Majid, Abdulla and Zakariah; and all except Mohammed have followed him into the business. The hiss of the espresso machine bought me back to my last sip of coffee. I decided I would like to know more about this local industry and headed off to Jaffer Pottery. Once there, we spoke to his cousin Majeed and had a great chat. It seems that everyone at A'Ali is related, but Majeed told us that his children would not be joining the family business. Instead, he would encourage them to pursue relatively more modern careers. Majeed very kindly also gave us a lesson in hand and wheel ceramics. The potter's wheel is a rudimentary device little changed over the past centuries. It consists of two horizontal circular plates, spaced apart and held together by a vertical stake driven through their centers and into the ground. The potter sits astride the sprindle and uses his feet to spin the lower large wheel, which generates enough torque for him to be able to mould the clay on the upper wheel. It is wonderful to watch a master potter at work, shaping the wet clay with his hands. With the wheel spinning steadily, he repeatedly moistens his hands as he encourages the lumpy clay with softly contoured palms, gently pushing up, goading, until there appears almost magically before your eyes an object of pure beauty. It takes about five minutes to make a medium sized piece; larger pieces can take several hours and may even need two people, one to turn the wheel while the other shapes the pot. Freshly made pots are left to dry in the shade for two days. Sun drying is avoided as the pots may develop cracks. Next, the pots are placed in the kiln, usually built close to one of the nearby burial mounds. Pots are baked for around 16 hours, then left in the kiln for one or two days to cool off. A'ali potters craft – using a wide variety of styles – pots of virtually every size. The most popular items with visitors are moneyboxes, flower vases, incense burners and hubble-bubble shisha pipes (Arabic water pipes). Many Bahrainis and foreigners resident in Bahrain prefer the bigger, decorative pots. We ordered four lamp covers with our names scribed in Arabic around the center, left our phone number and were rewarded with the promise: “Your order will take four weeks”, indicating business must be good.
