In this increasingly connected Indian Ocean world of Seyyid Said’s dominions, the ruler compelled some elites to move with him. Others, facing desperate circumstances, chose to move in his wake.
Temporizing in the Face of Drought
The drought that struck across the Nizwa region in the 1840s created dwindling resources and mounting desperation. People had to make choices about their very survival, and their reactions to the drought demonstrate how and why mobility became a solution. In Manaḥ, seven miles from Nizwa, the prolonged drought dried up seven of the eight springs that watered the town. Formerly cultivated land lay in ruin, and the lack of water destroyed date groves. Dead trees marked the approach to the walled town, where two-storied stone and mud houses lined the narrow streets. In wetter, more prosperous times, the settlement had produced sugar cane in abundance. In the small date groves that persisted, the people had no spare fodder for the animals. Only one plantation northeast of town continued to flourish, presumably because it had access to the only remaining water source. Want of water reduced the population in Manaḥ. In the decade of drought (1835–45), the town lost half of its population: only 500 residents remained.50
As the drought’s realities set in, people had to make difficult choices about how to use the water that came from the falaj and how to guarantee their own survival. We have no intimate portrait of drought in the interior during the first half of the nineteenth century. Given the continuities of agriculture and life ways, however, a more recent example provides a basis for comparison. The experience of the village of Ghayzayn, in Wadi Hawasina on the eastern side of the Hajar Mountains, where “drought began to erode the wealth of the community” in the 1970s, is illustrative.51
The people of Ghayzayn, having faced three years without rainfall, initially tried to use water more efficiently. They opened only one of the two irrigation streams from the falaj, halving the normal irrigation cycle. Next, they filled a cistern above the falaj to increase the flow when they did let the water run. As the months wore on, however, decreased irrigation took its toll. Young palms, which were future assets, died, as did the lime trees growing with them. Villagers took more drastic steps, allowing crops to wither. They first cut water to their field crops (wheat, tomatoes, and onion) and then to their fodder crop (alfalfa). All the remaining water was used for date palms, but the year’s yield was nevertheless diminished. The drought’s effects were both immediate and ongoing. Dates and alfalfa served as feed for domestic animals; the poor date harvest and lack of fodder led to the sale of livestock.52
In addition to the short- and medium-term hits to household economies, the drought created difficult living conditions and exacerbated infrastructural problems. As the volume of water fell in the falaj, the water contained more dirt, and women had to walk further upstream to get drinking water that was only marginally cleaner. The only other source of drinking water, a shallow well in the wadi, had dried up in the early days of the drought.53
The falaj also suffered. Unsealed channels lost more water to infiltration when underground water in the wadi disappeared. Less flow and more dirt resulted in faster silting. The channel needed to be relined and cleaned, and falaj repair was expensive. The village had already delayed maintenance before the rains stopped. Raising money for repair was even more difficult in the depths of the drought. The longer the people waited, the more difficult the falaj was to repair.54
While some members of the community were optimistic that the rain would eventually return, clouds of pessimism hung over the village. The drought “had broken the spirit of the community, and many had begun to accept an inevitable end to the settlement.” Three families left the community as the drought set in, and many others prepared to do so. In a village of five hundred people, this was a tremendous demographic shift. The people who departed were “some of the most dynamic and astute economically,” so the loss to the community was in disproportion to the number who left.55
Although this example comes from the early 1970s, the fact that the village relied so heavily on the falaj and on irrigation provides important insights into the process a century before. Where the people of Ghayzayn used cash remittances to pay for the water, dates, and alfalfa brought in by land rover, individuals in Nizwa and Manaḥ in the nineteenth century did not have these options. The author of the modern study suggests that people in the past, with fewer options, would have most certainly have taken earlier action to repair the falaj and to protect their crops.56 Judging by the extreme drought in Nizwa in the 1840s, however, the people’s ability to palliate was limited; every aspect of their lives was affected; and departure—if only until the end of the drought—was a ready solution. For example, a half century earlier, during an intense drought in the late eighteenth century, date palms died, and some Arabs, like Nasir bin Ahmad al-Riyami, abandoned small villages for larger interior settlements.57 Others, including “the greater portion of the inhabitants,” fled from the interior to coastal towns in the Batinah and near Muscat. In the port city trading town of Muttrah the recent arrivals drove up the price of well water. When the drought broke, they returned home.58 Likewise for the Nizwans, some took temporary refuge at the coast and, given the new circumstances in Africa, others may have made their way there.
Be Careful What You Wish For
The solution to the eighteenth-century drought that had displaced interior Omanis and driven up well water prices in Muttrah was intercession from the sultan. Hamed bin Said al-Busaidi (r. 1784–1792) took decisive action to end the drought: he gathered people and led them in prayer for rain in three different wadis around Muscat on three subsequent days. As a result, “clouds covered the sky, and the rain descended, as if poured from buckets.” Hamed bin Said mounted his horse and rode quickly back to his house in Muscat before waters coursed down the wadis and washed into the sea. The outcome in this case was favorable—great fertility followed, crops were abundant, and prices were low.59 Some storms, however, brought too much rain, and the consequences of downpours were also dire.
Evidence from the nineteenth century shows that, in the face of devastating flash floods in Oman, out-migration to East Africa increased. One exception to this was the Sumayl valley, where a newly robust market for their particular dates created economic resiliency. In most other regions of the interior, however, environmental damage prompted some to move across the Indian Ocean. In general, most Omanis welcomed rain. In 1835, a cold drenching rain from a December downpour delighted the Jenebeh of eastern Oman by ensuring pasturage for the coming months.60 People knew that violent rains sometimes fell, and the community expected them with some regularity, as often as every three years. These rains turned the valleys into dangerous streams, so swollen and swift that camels could not pass through them.61
Voluminous, unseasonable rains could also turn sinister and flash floods in wadis could carry date palms and houses as far as the sea. Writing in the early twentieth century, Ibadi scholar and historian Abdullah bin Humayd al-Salimi recounted Oman’s worst flood, a heavy June downpour in 251 (Hegira) / 865 that swept down the wadis, washed away whole villages, pulled date palms from their roots, and carried bodies out to the sea. The same floods inundated the aflaj.62 In addition to the immediate loss of life and livelihood, floods compromised the irrigation system by damaging watercourses, filling them with detritus, and hastening the silting of the falaj.63 Damage to aflaj increased the cost of maintaining the water source. Beyond their economic consequences, floods and storms contributed to out migration from Oman across the Indian Ocean in an era of new mobility.
Data from the 1870s suggest a variable pattern of heavy rains and storms that destroyed large numbers of date palms, dismantled houses, and led to transoceanic emigration. In 1874 and 1875, unseasonably heavy rains destroyed the date crop in central Oman. The next year, however, rains fell plentifully at the appropriate time (at the beginning of the year), and this precipitation pattern promised an abundant date harvest.64 The following year, severe storms
