But in the past week or two, the nature of the protest shifted — and so did any hope that demands for change would cross sectarian lines and unite Bahrainis in a cohesive democracy movement. The mainly Shiite demonstrators moved beyond Pearl Square, taking over areas leading to the financial and diplomatic districts of the capital. They closed off streets with makeshift roadblocks and shouted slogans calling for the death of the royal family.

“Twenty-five percent of Bahrain’s G.D.P. comes from banks,” Mr. Abdulmalik said as he sat in the soft Persian Gulf sunshine. “I sympathize with many of the demands of the demonstrators. But no country would allow the takeover of its financial district. The economic future of the country was at stake. What happened this week, as sad as it is, is good.”

To many around the world, the events of the past week — the arrival of 2,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and other neighbors, the declaration of martial law, the forceful clearing out of Pearl Square, the military takeover of the main hospital and then the spiteful tearing down of the Pearl monument itself — seem like the brutal work of a desperate autocracy.

But for Sunnis, who make up about a third of the country’s citizenry but hold the main levers of power, it was the only choice of a country facing a rising tide of chaos that imperiled its livelihood and future.

“How can we have a dialogue when they are threatening us?” Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, the foreign minister and a member of the royal family, asked Friday night at a news conference.

On Sunday, Bahrain was returning to a level of normality, with schools restarting, traffic returning and shops reopening. Indeed, in an overnight report posted on the official Bahrain News Agency, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa said that a “fomented subversive plot,” brewing for 20 or 30 years, had failed.

But many Shiites stayed home from work in protest of recent events, some checkpoints and curfews remained and a sense of political paralysis prevailed. No political dialogue seemed likely soon.

For government supporters here, it was the way protesters blocked the financial district that was especially worrisome. They say they worry mostly about what happened to Lebanon. Beirut was once the financial capital of the Middle East. Then sectarian tensions among Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Druze, exacerbated by meddling of foreign powers, broke out in the mid-1970s, leading to civil war.

Not only did the country tear out its own heart, the financial business there pulled out and never returned. Today, much of that business is here in Bahrain. Downtown Manama has mushroomed. Bahrainis worry that if Sunni-Shiite sectarianism grows out of control, the financial business will again pick up stakes and move to the waiting competitors, Dubai and Qatar.

Urgent measures were therefore needed, the government’s defenders say, and they are grateful they were taken. The demonstrators, they argue, had allowed their cause to be taken over by hard-liners inspired by — or linked to — Iran.

No evidence of such links has been presented, and Shiite leaders here deny that they are doing Iran’s bidding. Still, the walls of some Shiite mosques in Bahrain bear portraits of Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah spiritual figures, and ties to Iran run deep among many Shiites in the country.

The takeover of Salmaniya Hospital by the military especially shocked the world. But Hala Mohammed is a Sunni doctor at the hospital and said that in recent weeks it had turned into a mini-Pearl Square with tents and radical posters.

“The doctors who supported the protesters were suddenly issuing decrees on behalf of the entire medical community,” she said. “They had politicized a medical institution. The government didn’t occupy it, it freed it and I am grateful.”

Rana Abdulaal said that many Sunnis like herself had felt imprisoned in their homes for the past month. She said she expected the Shiite opposition to accept offers to begin a dialogue with the government, but it instead refused to join one. “If the government had not acted, there would have been a civil war,” she said, with Sunnis marching on Pearl Square.