House of Khalifa
royal family of Bahrain
The House of Khalifa (Arabic: آل خليفة, romanized: Āl Khalīfah) is the ruling family of the Kingdom of Bahrain. They profess Sunni Islam and belong to the Anizah tribe. Some members of this tribe joined the Utub alliance which migrated from Najd in central Arabia to Kuwait, then ruled all of Qatar, more specifically Al Zubarah, which they built and ruled over before conquering Bahrain in 1783. The Khalifa family repressed the indigenous Baharna population in Bahrain.
The family currently heads an authoritarian regime where political and civil freedoms are substantially curtailed. The current head of the family is King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, who became the Emir of Bahrain in 1999 and proclaimed himself King of Bahrain in 2002, in fact becoming a constitutional monarch.
As of 2025, roughly half of the serving cabinet ministers of Bahrain were members of the Al Khalifa royal family, while the country's Prime Minister, Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, is also from the Al Khalifa family and is the son of the current King.
History
Bahrain fell under the control of Ahmed bin Muhammad bin Khalifa in 1783, following the defeat of Nasr Al-Madhkur who ruled the archipelago as a dependency of Persia (see Bani Utbah invasion of Bahrain). Ahmed ruled Bahrain as hakim until 1796, but was based in Zubarah (in modern-day Qatar) and spent summers in Bahrain. Ahmed was the first hakim of Bahrain and the progenitor of the ruling Al Khalifa family of Bahrain.
“House of Khalifa” enters the record as royal family of Bahrain. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what House, Khalifa and royal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “House of Khalifa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.