Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern

The Politics of Time in the Sultanate of Oman

Amal Sachedina

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501760020, 9781501758614
• eBook ISBN: 9781501758638
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern explores how and why heritage has emerged as a prevalent force in building the modern nation state of Oman. Amal Sachedina analyses the relations with the past that undergird the shift in Oman from an Ibadi shari'a Imamate (1913–1958) to a modern nation state from 1970 onwards.

Since its inception as a nation state, material forms in the Sultanate of Oman—such as old mosques and shari'a manuscripts, restored forts, national symbols such as the coffee pot or the dagger (khanjar), and archaeological sites—have saturated the landscape, becoming increasingly ubiquitous as part of a standardized public and visual memorialization of the past. Oman's expanding heritage industry, exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, street montages, and cultural festivals, shapes a distinctly national geography and territorialized narrative.

But Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern demonstrates there are consequences to this celebration of heritage. As the national narrative conditions the way people ethically work on themselves through evoking forms of heritage, it also generates anxieties and emotional sensibilities that seek to address the erasures and occlusions of the past.

1

REFORM AND REVOLT THROUGH THE PEN AND THE SWORD

In May 1913, the Arab tribes in the Omani interior rose up in rebellion against Sultan Faiṣal bin Turkī (r. 1888–1913) and elected Salim ibn Rashid al-Kharusi as imam, establishing the last Ibadi Imamate (1913–1955), an entity that had been almost fifty years in abeyance. This act effectively created two governing bodies that held sway over a much-contested region—the imamate in inner Oman, with its capital in Nizwa, and the Sultanate of Muscat, supported and enabled by the British along the coastal regions, with its centers in Muscat and Matrah.¹ This was a climactic moment in the colonial struggle. The British were attempting to secure geostrategically important communicative routes to the British Raj at a time when imperial influence in the Arabian Peninsula had reached its zenith.

The British and the Ibadis alike perceived the rise of the imamate as the culmination of three active policies. First was the regulation and blockade of trade in slaves and arms, which the Ibadis saw as permitted in Islam. Second was the presence of British troops and naval squadrons in Oman. Finally, the general economic circumstances, already exacerbated by the First World War, were characterized by a blockade on all goods into the interior and enforced duties paid by all ships passing through Muscat—part of Britain’s economic pressure on the crucial date trade, engaged by the increasingly strident rebels in the interior.

This chapter argues that the rise of a resistance movement among the Omanis who rallied around the revival of the Ibadi Imamate resulted from two types of temporal consciousness that gave rise to distinctive modalities of action and ways of being: (1) a distinctive religious movement that sought to establish an imamate grounded in Ibadi doctrine and law and (2) British geopolitical maneuverings to secure the Indian Ocean trade networks. Each temporal project differed in its understanding of the nature of historical change. The restoration of the Ibadi Imamate was a utopian ambition that addressed the external onslaught on daily living brought about by British imperial interventions in Omani affairs from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The uprising called for overthrow of the sultan’s regime, widely considered arbitrary and “corrupt,” and ousting of the British, on whom the sultan increasingly depended. As the political agent and consul Major L. B. H. Haworth conceded in Muscat, “his government is so bad that to continue to support it in its existing condition is nothing short of immoral.”²

However, to understand the conceptualization and nature of the Ibadi state that arose from the 1913 rebellion, we must also examine the competing temporal vision of the colonial administrators who were attempting to transform the coastal region by rendering it consonant with the geostrategic goals of safeguarding the Raj and fulfilling such liberal goals as suppressing the slave trade. Through analyses of the temporal assumptions embedded in textual narratives, ranging from colonial correspondence to historic texts that were widely disseminated in the imamate, I have found that even as each endeavor unfolded within divergent senses of history, each vision was constitutively implicated in the other, in terms of both material constraint and imaginative possibilities of defining an enemy and acting accordingly. Implementing these two visions of the future culminated in a series of imamate conquests of the interior over the next two years, including the forts of Nizwa, Izki, and Samāʿil. Despite repeated warnings, the imamate tribes attacked, convinced that the war with Germany would keep the British government from its obligation to support the sultan. In April 1914, owing to interior tribes’ forays into the coastal areas, where large numbers of British Indian merchants were centered, the ports of Barka and Qaryat were bombarded by the HMS Fox and the HMS Dartmouth (Persian Gulf Political Residency 1873–1957, vol. 7, 41). Tribal incursions ended in a rout in Muscat in 1915, when they faced Indian army troops at Bait al Falaj Fort. On January 7, British reinforcements arrived—950 men of the 102nd King Edward’s Own Grenadiers and the 95th Russell’s Infantry—furnishing a protective shield for the towns of Muscat and Matrah and fulfilling an 1895 guarantee to the sultan that no attacks would be allowed on these towns, whatever differences the sultan might have with the tribes (Persian Gulf Political Residency 1873–1957, vol. 7, 105). The guarantee extended to the Batinah coast in the northwest.³ Until 1955, however, the rebels had complete control over Oman proper and an organized government. They remained thereafter in undisputed possession of Oman, posing a constant threat to the coastal towns and cities. In his correspondence, as will be noted below, Haworth leaves little doubt that the Ibadi tribes could have taken the coast, if not for the British garrison at Bait al Falaj and the presence of British gunships along the coast.

This vision of the imamate promised to restore a mode of governance grounded in the will of God, as embodied in Ibadi sharīʿa, part of a sectarian tradition that had predominated for more than a millennium. Guided by that ubiquitous injunction amr al-maʿrūf wa nahy ʿan al-mūnkar (commanding the right and forbidding the wrong), it undertook the return of an imam who, in accordance with the fundamentals of Ibadi doctrine, would be elected through consultation by the ahl al-hal wal ʿaqd (leading scholars and tribal leaders of the region) rather than through seizure of power. Justice would once more be conducted in accordance with the opinions and rulings of the ʿulamāʾ (scholars and jurists) and grounded in the Quran, the exemplary words and deeds of the Prophet (sunna), his companions, and the righteously guided imams across the ages. The British would be driven into the sea, and God’s law would return. Arms and ammunition would once more be sold in Muscat, slave dealing would prosper, and wine and tobacco would no longer be sold. In temporal logic, the imamate movement was tethered to a recursive vision of restoration and renewal.

Yet these aspirations existed side by side with equally complex visions articulated in the textual correspondence and reports of colonial administrators and soldiers, who sought a complete innovation of the Omani coastal region’s religiosity and sociopolitical order—a more linear vision of progress. In this vision, reconfiguration of the coastal regions would come about through harnessing technology (gunships, steamboats, and the telegraph) and financial instruments (loans). These were embedded in a set of underlying assumptions that necessitated radically transforming the mode of governance in the Omani coast by “developing” it in unprecedented ways that not only were amenable to long-term British imperial interests in the region but also aimed to create a new “man,” transformed by new institutions put in place by the British to ensure an institutionally durable rule under the sultan rather than the instability of tribal war.

Developing a Futurist Vision of the Sultanate of Muscat

Colonial correspondence of the early twentieth century is replete with descriptions of the Ibadi revolt as “retrograde,” an “outburst of religious fanaticism,” or “xenophobia” that expose their own implication in the material predicament of the besieged Ibadi tribes. When British officers described late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Oman as “divisive,” “uncivilized,” “piratical,” and “backward,” they were describing the effects of sociopolitical and economic conditions that were largely due to their own exploitative governance of the region. Although Oman was not a formal colony, it fell within a sphere of influence that encompassed the Arab-Persian Gulf region.

Absorbing Oman into a narrative of universal history, British travelogues, correspondence, and official reports describe the Arabs of the Oman region through the matrix of antitheses: civilization and barbarity, Christianity and Islam, modernity and a “traditional” ahistorical cycle with “constant fighting and trouble especially when one imam or sultan died and another was elected.”⁴ The fundamental assumption of tribal chaos and infighting became a habitual way of thinking about the region, spurring the 1895 British declaration of unequivocal support to the sultan (whoever he might be) through the use of naval force against any tribal sheikh who threatened the stability of the coastal zones (Bailey 1988, 3:326). According to Haworth, the “principle of self-determination” for the tribes of Oman could be allowed only “based on some signs of movement towards progress … and the interest of civilization must be the deciding factor”⁵ Oman’s past, which was also its present, did not align itself with the expectations underlying this understanding of progress filtered through Indian spectacles.

Oman was just 1,600 kilometers from the port of Surat, where the East India Company first established itself (only a little farther than the distance between Muscat and Kuwait). Having eradicated the French threat in the nineteenth century, Britain’s interests in the early twentieth-century Gulf region were primarily strategic—safeguarding the telegraph lines along the Arab Gulf coastlines, speeding communication between London and India (Muscat had a cable station on the route between Karachi and Aden, Yemen), and ensuring the safety of British shipping lanes to Persia, Iraq, Muscat, and India.⁶ These were the primary routes for the British India Steam Navigation Company from the late nineteenth century onward, incorporating major Gulf ports such as Basra, Qatif, Manamah, Muscat, and Dubai on the way to and from Bombay.

Once a necessary commercial port of call / central entrepôt in the Gulf trade networks, Muscat’s importance had waned with the introduction of steam power. This faster means of transport was fundamental to the imposition of an imperial trading and communication regime that was favorable to British strategic interests, as competition from the steamships reduced the profitability of Oman’s local shipping fleet. Most of the transport trade that Muscat had once catered to the smaller Persian and Arab ports had disappeared, owing to the direct visits of steamers from India and Europe to these ports (Persian Gulf Political Residency 1873–1957, vol. 7, 103).

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which cut shipping time from months to weeks, played a significant role in overall British policy for ensuring the safety of the British Raj, as the stability of shipping lines in and around the Arabian Peninsula assumed paramount importance (Landen 1967; Onley 2007; Wingate 1959). Progress in Oman was thus tied to the region, becoming part of the buffer zone for the defense of India. In the aftermath of World War I, control of Muscat, through a stranglehold on the Gulf, assumed even greater importance in view of British commitments in Iraq.⁷

Thus, on the one hand, the British government’s attitude in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to abstain from involvement with dynastic disputes or intertribal feuds and wars (Saldanha 1906, 13). This informal mode of colonial governance was considered an “improvement” over direct rule, inasmuch as “a country is improved by the advice and development of its own internal powers rather than by its absorption and by its direct management”⁸ On the other hand, “civilizing” the Arab-Persian Gulf necessitated a cleansing and reorganization to ensure the pursuit and enforcement of measures that would define the relationship between Oman and British informal governance. Measures against slave trafficking and piracy and regulation of the traffic of arms and armaments thereby towed the region into the broader space of exchange that defined the civilizational flow that enabled the Indian Ocean’s imperial trading and political networks. This entailed preventing the “disturbance of maritime peace” and protecting “the interests and property of British subjects” (Saldanha 1906, 13). Accordingly, it was considered preferable for the British political resident to recognize, protect, and entrench local coastal rulers and “customary” rule, holding these rulers responsible for their subjects’ transgressions rather than enforcing the treaties. This was one of the primary tools in the British bag of imperial political strategies: the recognition and protection of local chiefs and rulers (Mamdani 1996; Newbury 2003). As they saw it, implementation of their policies was easier with a few malleable rulers than navigating the tribal groupings, with their sheikhs and their variable relationships. Their “independent” status notwithstanding, these regions were as integrated into British imperial rule as formal colonies. Internal “self-development” involved heavy-handed imperial intervention on the coastlines that led to forcible transformations of everyday social, political, and economic lives, and not only on the coast.

In other words, the British government was unwilling to extend its power beyond the reach of its naval gunships (Persian Gulf Political Residency 1873–1957, vol. 7, 64). These gunships, which could turn an attack into a surrender through their very presence, forged the constitutive unit of what w...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. Reform and Revolt through the Pen and the Sword
• 2. Nizwa Fort and the Dalla during the Imamate
• 3. Museum Effects
• 4. Ethics of History Making
• 5. Nizwa, City of Memories
• 6. Nizwa’s Lasting Legacy of Slavery
• 7. The al-Lawati as a Historical Category
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index