If, on a Friday, you take your lunch at the Bahrain International Hotel, you would have to very hard of hearing not to catch the sounds of revelry wafting down a nearby corridor. And you would need to be ignorant of local culture not to be a little shocked at this disturbance of the Muslim holy day.
Your curiosity leads you to a nightclub called Al Janibiyahthe Arab Troupe, and to the greater shock of learning that it is already in full swing - not despite but actually because of the holy day. For the rest of the week it confines itself to the night.
On Friday, however, the Salat al-Dhuhr, or noon prayers, are barely over before the club's clientele is installed behind glasses of beer and Black Label whisky. In their immaculate white dishdashas and chequered headdresses, most of them could have come straight from the mosque. All male, they occupy the tables around a central dais on which a half dozen girls from Morocco and Iraq shuffle about, bored and listless, in the barest pretence that they are dancing.
In a fit of exuberance, a young man leaps up and performs a solo jig. Then, as the technomusic and garish flashing lights fade, note pads appear in the hands of the well-trained staff; the messages which the clients write on them are conveyed to the dancers before they file out for a break. "Assignations," murmurs the waiter. There is nothing unusual about places like Al Janibiyah: Bahrain teems with them. The clients are almost exclusively from Saudi Arabia. And they are there on Friday simply because it is the only day they can be. At weekends - not to put too fine a point on it - the tiny island state becomes a bar-and-bordello for its giant neighbour. It all began 14 years ago with the completion of the 15 km King Fahd Causeway which links Bahrain to the Saudi mainland. Some say this had a mainly strategic purpose; in any emergency the House of Saud could come to the rescue of their fellow-dynasts, the Khalifas. Perhaps.
Meantime, however, the most dramatic consequence of the causeway has flowed from the different mores of the two countries. The relative tolerance of the trading nation that Bahrain has always been contrasts with the rigid puritanism of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabite school of Islam.
Overnight, Bahrain became the place where the ostensibly most devout, and (at least till the Taliban came along) most religiously regimented society on earth could have easiest, speediest and cheapest access to pleasures denied it at home.
"The heavens opened," said a Bahraini dissident, "and they left their Wahhabism at the gate - or at least at the other end of the causeway." Such irreverence doesn't find its way into the heavily controlled local press. The island's tourism, wrote the loyalist Bahrain Times recently, is "the jewel of the region". Last year an island of 400,000 was host to 3.3 million visitors, overwhelmingly Saudi. Saudis also come here to buy books they cannot find at home. These are not just Marx, Freud or Western philosophers, but, most significantly, works that offer progressive interpretations of Islam.
But the tens of thousands of weekend visitors go mainly to hotels like the Bahrain International. Like it, most are owned by members of the ruling family, or close associates, and most contain an extraordinary number of bars and cabarets. They also contain the "guests" whom the Saudis want to meet. These are predominantly Russian nowadays and they come to the country on ordinary visitor visas. Some can be seen just cruising from spot to spot on Exhibition Avenue, the main thoroughfare. With the long-suppressed parliament about to be restored, the emergency laws facing abolition, the expected release of all political prisoners, and the return of exiles, promising reforms are underway in Bahrain. With them may come a change in the entertainment industry.
The Islamist opposition favours an end to "indecent tourism". Their secularist allies would object to the wholesale closure of bars and nightclubs; they would simply clean the business up. They don't mind if Bahrain continues to be a destination for pleasure-seeking Saudis, rather than just a waystation to somewhere else.
For it is that too, as I discovered when stuck for hours at the airport car park because of two simultaneous, triumphant returns - an opposition leader who had been exiled for 33 years and the Bahraini football team from victory over Kuwait. There seemed to be a plethora of parked Saudi cars.
"Bangkok," explained my host. There were three flights a week, instead of just one from Riyadh. "And from here they can get a drink on the plane."