Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
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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 massif that separates the coast from the 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