The Serrated Secret: Why Bahrain and Qatar Share the Same Zigzag — and What Britain Had to Do With It

Open a map of the Arabian Gulf and look at the flags fluttering over Manama and Doha. At first glance, they seem almost embarrassingly similar. Bold fields of red, sliced by a jagged white zigzag. Now consider that these two nations spent the better part of the 20th century locked in one of the Gulf's bitterest territorial disputes, nearly going to war over a cluster of islands called the Hawar. Yet their flags are, in design terms, twins.

The serrated dividing line, that distinctive white-and-red sawtooth, appears on exactly two sovereign nation flags in the entire world. This is not a coincidence. It is a story about colonial administrators with ink pens, tribal merchants with dyed cloth, and how the visual identity of an entire subregion was quietly stitched together by the British Protectorate, often without the full awareness of the rulers who flew the results.

Two Flags, One Motif, and a Mystery Vexillologists Keep Circling

In heraldic terminology, the serrated or "indented" dividing line is a zigzag border. On national flags, it appears nowhere on Earth except Bahrain and Qatar. That alone makes it worth paying attention to.

Bahrain's flag features five white serrations against a red field, a number standardized in 2002 to represent the five pillars of Islam. The white band is relatively wide, giving the flag an airy balance.

Qatar's flag carries nine serrations and uses a noticeably deeper color, often described as maroon rather than red. Even that color distinction has a contested origin story. Some accounts say the maroon resulted from natural dye fading under years of relentless Gulf sun. Others insist it was a deliberate choice to distinguish Qatar's banner from Bahrain's. Nobody agrees.

Here's the thing: if these nations were rivals for territory, prestige, and regional influence, why does no record survive of either ruler consciously choosing this shared motif? You'd expect at least one side to object. "That's our zigzag, not yours." But the historical record is strangely silent.

Most popular vexillology content doesn't help. Your typical "10 Most Unusual Flags" listicle mentions Qatar and Bahrain separately, noting the weird proportions or the unusual color. Almost nobody connects them. That gap is exactly what makes this story worth telling.

To understand the shared design, you have to go back to the 1820s and a British naval campaign that reshaped the entire Gulf.

Red Flags and the General Treaty of Peace

In 1820, the British East India Company's naval forces concluded the General Treaty of Peace with the sheikhdoms along the Gulf coast. The treaty's purpose was straightforward: end maritime raiding (what Britain called "piracy") and establish a system of identification for friendly vessels.

The practical problem was simple. Hundreds of dhows sailed the Gulf flying plain red flags, a traditional color for Arab maritime communities. British naval patrols couldn't tell friend from foe at a distance. The solution? Require treaty signatories to add white to their flags, creating a recognizable category of "protected" vessels.

This imposed a colonial taxonomy on Gulf identity. Sheikhdoms that had never used standardized flags were suddenly required to carry British-approved designs as a condition of protection. The flags weren't expressions of national pride. They were more like maritime license plates, issued by an occupying power that controlled the sea lanes.

At this stage, the dividing line between red and white was plain. Straight. The serration had not yet appeared. So when did the zigzag show up, and why?

The key actors in this story are the Political Residents, British officials stationed first in Bushire (on the Persian coast) and later in Bahrain itself. These men served as de facto design authorities for an entire coastline, approving or modifying flag designs with the casual authority of someone reviewing a building permit.

Three Competing Theories for the Serrated Line

The zigzag's origin sits in a frustrating zone of historical ambiguity. Three theories circulate among flag historians, and none has a knockout piece of evidence.

Theory 1: British Colonial Differentiation. By the mid-19th century, Britain's Indian Ocean portfolio was getting crowded. Oman flew a plain red flag. Zanzibar had its own red banner. Multiple Trucial States were using variations of red and white. The Political Residents needed a way to visually separate the Gulf Protectorate flags from all the other red-and-white designs in the region. The zigzag, in this reading, was a bureaucratic fix. A design flourish applied to solve a visual crowding problem. It has the ring of truth because it sounds exactly like the kind of thing a colonial administrator would do.

Theory 2: Tribal Textile Tradition. Some historians point to the serrated and scalloped edges found on traditional Gulf khanjar (dagger) sheaths, tent borders, and woven textiles. The zigzag motif was familiar in the material culture of the region. Local rulers or their advisors might have incorporated a recognizable decorative pattern into their flag designs. This theory gives more agency to Gulf actors, which is refreshing. But it lacks documentary proof. No letter survives in which a sheikh says, "Make the edge like my tent flap."

Theory 3: The Pinking Shear Solution. The most prosaic explanation holds that the zigzag was a functional innovation. Straight-cut cloth frays in salt air, wind, and heat. A serrated edge, like the cut from pinking shears, resists unraveling. In this reading, someone, either a local sailmaker or a flag supplier in Bombay, hit upon the zigzag as a practical response to the Gulf's harsh maritime environment. National symbolism as an accident of textile engineering.

British Political Resident correspondence from the 1860s through the 1880s, held in the India Office Records at the British Library, shows standardization instructions for Gulf flags. These documents confirm that London cared about flag uniformity. They do not, frustratingly, explain the serration's rationale.

The mystery of the origin is itself revealing. Whoever introduced the motif, no ruler appears to have objected to sharing it with a neighbor. That tells us something important about how "national" identity worked in the pre-nation-state Gulf. These were not yet countries in the modern sense. They were tribal polities, merchant families, fishing communities. A shared flag motif wasn't an insult. It was barely noticed.

The Hawar Islands Dispute and the Absurdity of Twinned Flags

Then things got complicated.

The Hawar Islands are a group of 16 small islands lying between the Qatar peninsula and the main island of Bahrain. From the 1930s onward, both countries claimed them. In 1939, the British government controversially awarded the islands to Bahrain, a decision Qatar never accepted.

The dispute simmered for decades. In 1986, it nearly boiled over into armed confrontation when Qatari forces briefly seized a coral reef being developed by Bahrain. The matter was eventually referred to the International Court of Justice, which issued a landmark ruling in 2001, splitting the contested territories between the two nations. Bahrain kept the Hawar Islands. Qatar received Zubarah and other areas.

Here's where the flags become surreal. During the decades-long standoff, both nations flew nearly identical flags over rival military and administrative outposts on contested territory. Imagine two soldiers staring at each other across a disputed border, each flying a banner that looks almost exactly like the other's. The visual echo was absurd, a reminder that the symbols of sovereignty both countries were fighting to defend had been designed, in large part, by the same colonial power.

Qatar's response to the similarity was gradual but persistent. Over the 20th century, Qatar's flag shifted from a brighter red toward a deeper maroon. The number of serrations grew. These weren't dramatic redesigns. They were slow acts of differentiation, a nation trying to pull its visual identity away from its neighbor's without admitting that the two had been nearly identical in the first place.

Bahrain's approach came later and more decisively. In 2002, Bahrain formalized its flag, reducing the serrations to exactly five, one for each pillar of Islam. This was a nation-building act. It took a design inherited from colonial administration and reinterpreted it through an Islamic symbolic framework, effectively "nationalizing" an inherited motif. The colonial substrate remained. The meaning layered on top was new.

The Hawar dispute makes the shared flag design not a curiosity but a pointed case study. Colonial visual frameworks outlasted, and complicated, the political relationships they were meant to organize.

Kuwait as Contrast: Breaking the Pattern

If Bahrain and Qatar kept the serrated motif, Kuwait shows us what happens when a Gulf state walks away from it entirely.

Kuwait was a British Protectorate too. It historically flew red-and-white designs, fitting the same regional pattern. But upon independence in 1961, Kuwait adopted a completely new flag: a green, white, red, and black horizontal design with a trapezoid at the hoist. The colors were drawn from pan-Arab symbolism, the palette of the Arab Revolt, shared by Jordan, Palestine, and others. The new flag represented Kuwait's post-independence alignment with Arab nationalism under Emir Abdullah III.

Kuwait's break is important because it serves as a control case. The fact that Kuwait was able to completely shed the British-imposed red-and-white framework while Bahrain and Qatar retained and elaborated on it reveals that the serrated design's persistence was a choice. Not always a conscious, deliberated choice. But a choice nonetheless.

Other Gulf states made their own decisions. The UAE adopted a design using pan-Arab colors.

Oman developed a distinctive national flag with a khanjar emblem.

The region had real options. Bahrain and Qatar's retention of the serrated red-and-white motif stands out precisely because alternatives existed and were taken by their neighbors.

What this implies about Bahraini and Qatari identity formation is worth sitting with. Both states found enough meaning in the inherited design to keep it. They layered new interpretations onto the colonial substrate. Islamic symbolism. Color distinction. Adjusted proportions. The foundation, though, remained.

What the Zigzag Reveals About Colonial Aesthetics and Gulf Identity

The British Protectorate era did not govern the Gulf only through treaties and trade agreements. It visually categorized the region. And those categories became sticky. Within two or three generations, designs imposed by colonial administrators started feeling "traditional" to the people they were imposed upon.

This is a textbook case of what historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger called "invented tradition," a practice that appears or claims to be old but is quite recent in origin. The serrated flag line fits the framework perfectly. A 19th-century administrative decision calcified into perceived heritage. Nobody alive today remembers a time before the zigzag.

Both Bahrain and Qatar's governments have, in the 21st century, promoted their flags as ancient symbols of national identity. Tourism materials, National Day imagery, school curricula, all present the flags as organic expressions of the nation's character. The British Protectorate origin is rarely acknowledged.

This is politically sensitive territory. In a region where sovereignty and independence carry deep weight, tracing a national flag to a colonial administrator's standardization circular is not a comfortable narrative. It explains, in part, why the design history remains underexplored. Scholars who work on Gulf flag history note the difficulty of accessing certain archives and the reluctance of official sources to engage with the colonial layer of the story.

But here is a fair observation to close on: the serrated line is both a mark of colonial imposition and a genuinely shared Gulf aesthetic heritage. These things are not mutually exclusive. The zigzag did not arrive from nowhere. It was grafted onto a region with its own textile traditions, its own sense of color and pattern. Whether or not a local craftsman suggested the serration, Gulf societies absorbed it, lived with it, and made it theirs. The flag's ambiguity mirrors the Gulf's own complex relationship with its Protectorate past.

Two Flags, Two Nations, One Inherited Line

Return to the opening image. Two flags, two rivals, one unmistakable zigzag. The serrated line between red and white on the flags of Bahrain and Qatar is the residue of a 19th-century British administrative project that sought to bring visual order to a maritime world Britain was beginning to control.

That the design survived independence, survived the Hawar Islands crisis, survived Qatar's deliberate effort to deepen its red into maroon and multiply its serrations, tells us something important. Flags are rarely designed from scratch. They accumulate. They gather meaning the way a river gathers sediment.

The zigzag that a British Political Resident once sketched into a standardization circular now flies over two sovereign stadiums, two central banks, two separate national identities, each of which has convinced itself the design was always its own. That is perhaps the most revealing thing the serrated line tells us: not what it says about Britain, but what it says about how nations absorb, naturalize, and ultimately own the marks that were first placed on them by others.