interior traps moist air from the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, and during the cool months rain falls in the mountains. The average yearly rainfall over the whole country from 1900 to 2012 was 98.1 mm (3.86 inches).18 This volume provides sufficient moisture for pluvial farms in the mountain valleys, and some people even made their own wine. More important, rain drains from the mountains into wadis that fan into the plains. The wadis filter the water into underground aquifers, and using ancient engineering techniques, inhabitants have tapped these aquifers to extend agriculture far from the central mountains and to water-thirsty date palms, their most important crop.
The falaj (plural: aflāj) irrigation system in the interior connected water sources to distant points underground. These engineered channels, some of which ran for miles underground and others that had shafts more than forty feet deep, awed the British naval officer James R. Wellsted when he visited the interior of Oman in 1835. Wellsted noted that most of the interior towns “owe their fertility to the happy manner in which the inhabitants have availed themselves of a mode of conducting water to them, a mode, as far as I know, peculiar to this country, and at an expense of labour and skill more Chinese than Arabian.”19 This irrigation scheme actually originated in ancient Persia, and an underground channel built sometime before 681 BCE still delivers water to Arbil, in Kurdish Iraq. The techniques of building these qanāt, as they are known in Persian, spread from Persia to Oman and Egypt, among other places, during the Achaemenian Empire (650–330 BCE), and later with the spread of Islam.20 Wellsted was correct, however, in appreciating the expense of labor and skill required to create and maintain aflaj.
The aflaj system was necessary to sustain life in the interior, and organization and management of water resources drove settlement patterns for the villages and towns. The result was self-contained, nucleated settlements spaced wide apart.21 Within villages, the flow of the falaj created the principles for spatial organization. The place where the falaj emerged was a site from which everyone could take drinking water, and the falaj was sometimes divided into channels from there, depending on the size of the settlement and the flow of the water. Residential clusters and mosques were often at the top of the flow, and palm gardens received irrigation first, followed by other permanent cultivation, and then by seasonal crops.22 Unlike the relatively well-watered Batinah, the Omani interior depended on the careful use of water through the aflaj to grow dates, fruits, and fodder. Of these, dates were the most important agricultural product for both individual people (in terms of caloric intake) and the economy (as the most valuable export). Omani farmers thus depended on careful allocations of water to ensure their survival.
Management of the falaj system required an elaborate set of practices for allocating water shares, for measuring both time and water, and for maintaining the upkeep of the water courses.23 These irrigation channels required constant care, which demanded, in turn, a well-organized group to tend to them.24 The Ibadi rules of war made clear the centrality of the falaj systems and the tree crops they supported. People laying siege against other Muslims could remove crops and cut off the water supplies, but cutting down a palm tree was extreme and the destruction of a falaj was verboten.25 Rules also governed access to abandoned or silted up aflaj and the rights of those who undertook the immense effort and expense to build new falaj systems. Those who originated a falaj or renewed a dead (mawāt) falaj could claim permanent shares in the system for a fixed period. The other permanent shares in the falaj were sold, and all shares were subject to Ibadi inheritance law.26 Because the seasonal flows of water varied, these shares were not for units of volume, but for units of time for water flow. Regular auctions of shares that belonged in trust (waqf) to the falaj provided income for the upkeep of this intricate system. Such auctions also allowed people who did not own permanent shares in the falaj to purchase access to irrigation water. This practice was a literal example of people buying time, purchasing units of water flow to ensure that their crops could survive.
The falaj system, a solution to inhabiting marginal lands, created a distinctive form of settlement in Oman that required a delicate balance of human ingenuity and labor with the right amount of rain. Too little—or too much—precipitation had disastrous consequences. During the nineteenth century, drought and its extreme opposite—violent rainstorms—periodically wreaked havoc on the interior of Oman. While some drought was expected, irregular, extreme patterns of drought like the one that left Nizwa without any halwa in the 1840s ended the water supply to some aflaj when the water table fell. These were the kinds of ecological disruptions that temporarily reset Omani society. One can see a halting pattern throughout Omani history: villages were abandoned and reopened at different times when, either through good fortune or hard work, the falaj flowed again. Large-scale expansions of the falaj system tended to occur only when strong imams ruled with links to maritime trade. These were the conditions best suited to major extensive development and falaj building.27
Along these lines, it is worth noting that the nineteenth century emerges as anomalous because new mobility resulted in both the abandonment of settlements (albeit sometimes temporarily) for the coast and for Africa, and in new sources of wealth linked to Indian Ocean commodity trades, which made it possible in a limited number of cases to renovate or extend aflaj. The advent of Omani rule in Africa broadened mobility and could relieve temporary pressure on precarious settlements.28 Even in times of typical rainfall, however, falaj communities faced pressure to divide the irrigation supply fairly among many shareholders, to use the water efficiently, and to ensure the maintenance of the system. The way that each community made these compromises around the falaj system, Wilkinson has argued, reveals “some of the fundamental aspects of social organization in an Omani village.”29
Extreme drought threatened the social organization of villages and the livelihoods of families. Individuals and families had to choose from among a range of limited options open to Omanis in the interior. As water courses slowed to a trickle—or dried up completely—families could no longer water fields, fruits, or fodder. Famine followed drought. Paradoxically, water was not always a blessing. Cyclones or hurricanes sometimes delivered massive deluges, and the compromised hydrology of the country made it vulnerable to flash floods that uprooted palm trees, damaged aflaj, and devastated settlements. Indeed, periodic environmental setbacks undercut livelihoods in interior Oman, and they also provided reasons to abandon settlements. In the nineteenth century, however, a new option presented itself: emigration from Oman to the burgeoning Arab settlement on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa, a route made possible by the Indian Ocean activities of their ruler, Said bin Sultan.
SAID BIN SULTAN AND THE INDIAN OCEAN CONTEXT
For interior Omanis, a new connection to the Indian Ocean world emerged in the nineteenth century because of changes in trade and alliances. Said bin Sultan bin Ahmed al-Busaidi was at the center of these changes. Known by the honorific seyyid (lord), Said had been the ruler of Muscat and its dependencies since 1804, and he had played an important role in an Omani commercial expansion.30 While Europeans insisted on calling him the Imam of Muscat, he was never elected to that Ibadi rank. Instead he focused on external relations, continuing a tradition of Busaidi rulers. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Said’s grandfather, Ahmad, led the resistance to a Persian invasion and cast off the Omani Ya’arubi dynasty that had allowed the Persians in. These heroics—and Ahmad’s exemplary character—led to his election as Imam in the 1740s. Seyyid Said, his grandson, came to the throne through adroit personal maneuvering in the early years of the nineteenth century, and became Oman’s greatest sultan. Domestic politics in Arabia demanded smart tactics, and Said bin Sultan used the same political flair (and willingness to use force) to expand al-Busaidi control beyond Arabia. He deftly balanced the competing interests and animosities of four regions—Oman, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and East Africa—to rule an empire that connected three sides of the western Indian Ocean.31 His family and close allies controlled Oman’s principal towns and both sides of the Straits of Hormuz. Across the Arabian Sea, Oman’s Busaidi rulers claimed the Makran
