Introduction
Given his background and scholarly education, Yūsuf ibn Aḥmad al-Baḥrānī might well have lived a quiet, uneventful life; he came from a wealthy merchant family, and his grandfather engaged in 
Bahrain's 
most important area of commerce, the pearl trade. Instead, he was destined to live in turbulent times in a region and era often ignored by western scholarship on Middle Eastern history. As his name indicates, he was born on the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, in a Shi‘ite community at the very edges of the waning Persian Safavid dynasty's effective political control. When he was five, the region was shaken by tribal wars. Soon afterward, Bahrain was besieged three times by the Omani Ya‘riba dynasty. At the conclusion of the final siege, Bahrain fell and came under Omani control. A counterattack by the Safavids failed, but eventually they regained Bahrain through negotiations and the payment of a large sum to the Omanis. Next the Huwala Arab tribes again attacked from the west and captured Bahrain . The region was thrown into further disorder by the fall of the Safavid dynasty that had ruled from 1501 to 1722. Fleeing these troubles, al-Baḥrānī traveled to Qaṭīf in what is now eastern Saudi Arabia, then across the Arabian peninsula to Mecca. He returned for a time to Qaṭīf and Bahrain but finally fled to southern Iran. There, however, his luck was no better: in Shiraz he got caught up in a local rebellion and left for Fasā, only to have that region be struck by an unspecified disaster. Finally, in his old age he sought refuge in Karbalā’ in southern Iraq, the site of the martyrdom of the Imam Ḥusayn, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, one of the defining moments of history for Shi‘ite Islam. Here the turmoil that had followed al-Baḥrānī his whole life suddenly ceased. His financial situation improved, and he became respected as both a scholar and a teacher. Composing this account of his life in 1768 at the age of seventy-two, he wrote from the perspective of a secure and peaceful dotage.
The author's autobiography constitutes the final section of his biographical dictionary of Sh‘ite scholars titled The Pearl of Bahrain (Lu’lu’at al-Baḥrayn). He wrote the work as a scholarly legacy to his two nephews and framed the entire opus as an ijāza, or certificate of study, for them in which he detailed his links with earlier generations of Shi‘ite scholars. The ijāza was a document that transferred the authority to teach a given work or a given body of knowledge, similar to the role of the university degree in modern times. The extension of the ijāza from a simple signed statement into a larger document at times involved, as here, the recording of the transmission of that authority back through the teacher to his own teachers, their teachers, and so forth. The Pearl of Bahrain is thus a scholarly biographical compendium, on the one hand, and a family-oriented document, on the other, for in it al-Baḥrānī presents the Shi‘ite tradition of the study of law and ḥadīth, establishes his own place within that tradition, justifies his own authority, and formally passes on the tradition to his two nephews, the recipients of this ijāza.
One striking feature of this short autobiographical section is al-Baḥrānī's repeated mentions of his financial state, debts, losses, and taxes and the abundant use of metaphors of commerce and acquisition such as in this verse of poetry quoted by the author:
If we understand the autobiographical act as an attempt to evaluate one's life by searching for its central or enduring meaning, we may read al-Baḥrānī's text as a literal stock-taking. The central metaphor for his life is accumulation, and through this metaphor he describes his life as a double quest: on the one hand, to acquire material and worldly property, including money, land, date palms, wives, and dependents, and, on the other, to accumulate religious knowledge as embodied in certificates of study, books, and treatises.
Your nearness is my wealth, despite a lack of riches,
and your distance my poverty, despite abundant wealth.