also undermined Ibadism’s ideal form of governance, the imamate.7 These forces have also tempted scholars to mistake the country for a static interior cutoff from the littoral, a view derived from the country’s twentieth-century history, when it was known as the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, than from the preceding century, which is our focus.
Geography is inherently visual and most easily understood through maps or metaphors. It is useful to imagine the Arabian Peninsula as a boot. Viewed from the side, the boot has a heel, Yemen, which nearly rests on the Horn of Africa. The boot’s spiked toe pokes into the Straits of Hormuz, the passage into the Persian Gulf. The countries of the eastern Mediterranean (Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan) serve as the boot’s pull straps at the top, and Saudi Arabia is the boot’s thick shaft. Oman is the boot’s toe box. The top of the toe box curves out into the Persian Gulf’s entrance, and the toe box meets the outer sole at Ras al-Hadd, the eastern-most point of the peninsula, which juts out into the Arabian Sea of the Indian Ocean.
As it turns out, this particular boot is steel-toed: mountains line the inside of the toe box and seem to cut off (or protect) the interior from the outside world.8 These mountains, called the Hajar range, run for more than three hundred miles (500 km), are seventy-five miles (110 km) at their widest, and reach to nearly ten thousand feet (3,000 m) at their highest point, Jebel Akhdar (green mountain). The range only breaks at a few points, where drainage has created passes through the mountains. On the sea side of the mountains, a coastal plain known as the Batinah (al-Bāṭinah) fills the gentle arc at a width of twenty miles. The mountains draw close to the shore again, and the Batinah ends at an important pass—the Sumayl Gap—through the mountains, right before the twin ports of Muttrah and Muscat. The steep mountains plunging to the sea create the natural harbors of Muttrah and Muscat, and the Sumayl Gap is the broadest break in the mountains. Historically, Sumayl was a vital link between the coast and the interior for the movement of people and goods; control of the pass had military implications for the ruler and those who wished to challenge him.
The Omani interior lies between the landward side of the Hajar range and the desert forelands of central Arabia. This region was historically known as Oman, so the modern nation-state derives its name from its interior rather than its more famous coasts. Thus, referring to the “Omani interior” is something of neologism. In the interior, the mountains give way to a bajada zone of alluvial fans that reach out to a vast waterless plain before running into the desert sands.9 Primary settlements exist in the mountains, on the piedmont, and out in the plain. Movement along the outwash fans is much easier than crossing the mountains or the desert, facilitating exchange between interior settlements. In this sense, if we imagine the desert as the sea, the Omani interior shares characteristics with littoral societies: greater similarities in location, occupation, and culture to those on the littoral than to those in the hinterland.10 The interior settlements fall into two general regions, al-Dakhiliya and al-Sharqiya. Al-Dakhiliya (literally, “the interior”) is the central region, snugged south and west of the Jebel Akdhar massif. To the east, al-Sharqiya (literally, “the east”) is hemmed in by the Hajar Mountains to the north and east. The region gives way in the south to the Wahiba Sands. The Sumayl Gap connects Dakhilya and Sharqiya to the ports of Muscat and Muttrah, and Sharqiya also has a connection to the port of Sur to the southeast.
IBADISM
Another defining aspect of the Omani interior has been its religious character. Oman has been the home of Ibadi Islam for 1,200 years. Ibadism (Ibaḍiyya) is a sect that separated from mainstream Islam in 37 AH/657 CE, before the better-known divisions of Sunni and Shia took place. Ibadis refer to themselves as “the people of straightness” (ahl al-istiqāma), and they believe they are the practitioners of “the oldest and most authentic form of Islam.”11 Ibadi theology centers on a longing for a righteous imam who scholars and pious leaders select to facilitate the believers’ ability to live in an ideal society defined by piety and justice.12 Striving to achieve this righteous imamate has been a touchstone of Omani history, and Wilkinson has proposed an “Imamate Cycle” as a means to explain the Omani past. In this view, new imamates have strong ideological power, but when the ideological basis of the Ibadi imamate weakens, the struggle for power and wealth increases, and this struggle leads to a revival of tribal factionalism.13 Elected imams ruled Oman from the interior towns, generally Nizwa or al-Rustaq.
While the first Busaidi ruler of Oman, Ahmad bin Said, was proclaimed an Imam in 1749, his descendants who have ruled the country have not been elected as imams since the late eighteenth century. In 1785, Imam Ahmad’s grandson, Hamed bin Said bin Ahmad (r. 1784–1792), shifted his seat of power from al-Rustaq, where his father had ruled, to Muscat in order to take advantage of the Indian Ocean trade.14 While trade connections and migration to Africa led some Ibadis to adopt Sunnism, Ibadism thrived in the Omani interior and remained a potent political discourse for challenging the Busaidi sultanate over the last two hundred years. Ibadism has only recently attracted broader scholarly attention, and the Omani interior’s distinctive relationship with this religion contributed to broader misunderstandings of the region.
MISREADING THE INTERIOR
While the coastal Indian Ocean port cities of eastern Arabia have long been cosmopolitan centers, scholars have considered the interior of Oman to be isolated, static, and conservative. Yet it was interior Arabs, from Oman proper, who took to the Indian Ocean in great numbers in the nineteenth century. The imagined dichotomy between an outward-looking coastal people and an inhospitable interior inhabited by backward, fearsome people echoes the view that both contemporaries and scholars held about East Africa’s coast and interior. In this false geographical determinism, the mountains and deserts of Arabia played the same role as the supposedly impenetrable “jungles” in Africa. Some scholars mapped this geography onto Omanis themselves. One historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Oman declared, “The coastal Omani often considered the entire western Indian Ocean his world; his vision was not restricted by the rim rocks of a narrow mountain valley as was so often the case with an inhabitant of Oman’s interior.”15 In this view, the interior was “a highly static society” organized to “preserve a fundamentalist, conservative Ibadi environment.”16 Following this argument, geographical barriers limited residents’ mobility, and their particular practice of Islam further narrowed their horizons. A picture of an isolated, simple people dominated by Ibadi Islam emerges from this view.
These characterizations, however, break down under scrutiny. A typical historical account from the twentieth century imagined an Arab of the interior within an isolated, static society and noted that his “idea of wealth was limited to such things as the number of date palms trees, camels, goats, wives, or slaves” he might possess. Spiritual possessions supposedly trumped material ones: “Even these material belongings would have to rank behind the spiritual virtues of knowledge of the Koran and Ibadi law in the hierarchy of desired possessions; ostentatious display was, of course, forbidden.”17 During the nineteenth century, however, the primary market for dates was overseas; slaves arrived from distant shores; and the seat of Ibaḍi learning and scholarship moved to Zanzibar. While dichotomous thinking about Oman is suspect in any period, the nineteenth-century connections between Oman and East Africa thoroughly undercut imagined distinctions between coast and interior. These new patterns of migration to East Africa that began in the nineteenth century did not subside until the last third of the twentieth century. Only the 1964 anti-Arab revolutionary bloodshed in Zanzibar and a new 1970 regime in Oman—led by a man who committed newly found oil wealth to transforming his Arabian sultanate—would reverse the flow of interior Omanis to Africa. In the nineteenth century, however, new links to Indian Ocean networks and the wealth generated in East Africa expanded settlements in the Omani interior, attracted migrants, fueled political rivalries, and discounted the myth of an isolated interior.
WATER AND PRECARITY
Oman’s geography—or more accurately, its topography—has allowed for irrigated agriculture in all but the most arid parts of the country. The mountain
