Mapping the past

A visual history of the ever-transforming islands of Bahrain could be showcased at an exhibition next year.

By comparing and overlaying old and current maps of Bahrain, MapBh offers a pertinent visual narrative – a multi-layered story about the country’s past, present and future.

To track the expansion of Bahrain’s coastlines as well as the retreat of its green spaces in favour of urban growth, 27-year-old Ahmed Al Mutawa launched MapBh in January this year.

“Our experience of Bahrain today is very far from Bahrain just half a century ago,” Ahmed told GulfWeekly.

“My parents, who lived in Jidhafs, remember a time when their town faced the sea. And isn’t it really difficult to imagine that the Bahrain Exhibition Centre was once a seafront?”

The Bahraini software developer, based in the US, collated a timeline of Bahrain maps from various countries, languages and eras, ranging from 1828 to 2030. Select maps can be viewed on the project’s website, mapbh.org, which are superimposed on a constantly evolving Google Maps view of Bahrain.

“Visualising the extent of this change brings about powerful emotions,” he added.

“It allows people who had never seen the coral reefs, fisheries, beaches, palm groves and freshwater springs, to discover where they once were.

“Each piece of farmland – now filled with concrete – veils the irreplaceable memories of countless generations.”

By building on his education in computer science and applied maths, Ahmed learned the principles of cartography and geographic information systems (GIS) entirely on his own. He had his start in GIS when, in 2016, he created a viral Internet sensation: A map that helped Pokémon Go players spot Pokémon regardless of their current location.

Obtaining Pokémon Go data may be fairly straightforward, but obtaining Bahraini maps is not, and Ahmed had to dig through internet archives and often scarce government reports as well as visit public libraries all over Colorado State, and even further, to procure them.

Once he found a map, he had to scan it, stitch together the images on Photoshop, and finally, use specialised computer code to make the old map conform to its modern counterpart.

“You have to use a lot of applied maths to warp the maps to fit on top of Google Maps’ standard projection,” Ahmed explained.

A projection is a two-dimensional way of depicting a three-dimensional sphere, like the Earth.

Asked what drove him to create MapBh, Ahmed said he wanted to show young people what old Bahrain looked like.

“Bahrain is very small, so every little change can be felt,” Ahmed added.

In the past 10 months, MapBh has inspired several academic and art projects. Ahmed said people from different Gulf countries reached out to him for advise, as they wanted to make similar projects about their own countries.

However, MapBh faces two major limitations and the first is Ahmed’s lack of time. “It’s a long and painstaking process,” he said. “It takes me an average of 12 hours for each step — around 36 hours from start to finish.”

The second and more significant limitation is lack of access to the maps themselves, since many are either scattered in libraries around the world or owned by private collectors.  Fortunately, Ahmed’s friends contributed to the project by digitising maps from libraries close to them.

There are many more maps in queue, waiting to be edited and published, and Ahmed plans to travel to Washington, DC specifically to acquire them.

He also wants to add new content to the website, like a page for stories and analyses, a page featuring all the research and art derived from the project, and a section for an upcoming personal art project about Bahrain’s green belt.

An art event based on the project “is currently in the works and will be announced in a couple of months”, he added. MapBh accepts help in all aspects of the project, like translation, programming and social media.

Follow @mapbh on Instagram or email mapbh.org@gmail.com for more details.