Al Bu Sa'id Sultanate

The man who got the Persians out

Drafted from Risso, Oman and Muscat: An Early Modern History (1986)formation

Ahmad bin Sa'id was the Ya'ariba governor of Sohar when the imamate collapsed into the Hinawi–Ghafiri war and one of the factions invited a Persian army in. Nadir Shah's troops landed on the Batinah coast in the late 1730s and took the ports; Ahmad held Sohar through a siege that lasted months, and then removed them from Oman by a combination of negotiation, payment and — in the account most often repeated, and hardest to verify — a massacre of the garrison commanders at a banquet.

In 1744 the scholars elected him imam. The procedure was the one the record has now recorded three times in Oman: the community's learned men choosing the best-qualified candidate, who could be deposed if he failed.

He was a competent ruler for nearly forty years. He put down the tribal factions without ending them, rebuilt the fleet, held Muscat and Sohar and the interior, and re-established the East African stations that had been let go during the civil war. He also fought off a Persian attempt on the Gulf and, when the Ottoman governor of Basra was besieged by the Persians in 1775, sent ships to relieve him — for which the Ottomans paid, and which is a fair summary of how the sultanate made money.

The dynasty he founded still reigns in Oman, which makes it one of the longest continuously ruling houses anywhere — and it does so under a title Ahmad never held, because the office he was elected to did not survive his grandsons.

An elective office becoming a family's

Drafted from Risso, Oman and Muscat: An Early Modern History (1986)aside?What aside means

Ahmad bin Sa'id was elected imam. His son Sa'id bin Ahmad was elected imam after him. His grandson was not: by the 1790s the rulers of Oman had stopped seeking election, dropped the title of imam, and called themselves sayyid and then sultan — a word with no Ibadi content at all — and the office passed from father to son.

That is the same thing that happened to the Zaydi imamate of Yemen after 1636, on a page two entries away in this region, and the parallel is close enough to be worth stating as a finding rather than a coincidence.

Both offices were doctrinally elective and explicitly not hereditary. Both were held by one family for long enough that the family became the obvious candidate. Both families then found the doctrine inconvenient, because an office open to any qualified claimant gives every qualified claimant a standing right to rise against the incumbent. The Zaydi answer, on the Yemeni page, was to revise the jurisprudence. The Omani answer was simpler: stop calling it an imamate.

The consequence was the same in both places, and in Oman it is still visible on a map. The interior did not accept it. The Ibadi scholars of the interior went on holding that the imamate existed and that Muscat's sultans were not imams, and they reconstituted the office when they could — in 1868 briefly, in 1913 seriously, with a treaty in 1920 recognising an imam at Nizwa alongside a sultan at Muscat, and a war in the 1950s that ended it.

So there is no rule of succession to state for this dynasty, and the absence is the fact rather than a gap. The two Omani polities before it were elective and said so. This one spent its first fifty years being elective and the rest of its life quietly not being, without ever replacing the doctrine with another one.

There is a second thing worth admitting. The span ends in 1861. The dynasty did not end in 1861 and has not ended; the Al Bu Sa'id are the ruling house of Oman today. What the span measures is the empire — from the election of 1744 to the partition that separated Zanzibar from Muscat — because the empire is the thing with a beginning and an end. There is no honest way to record a polity that is still running, and every entry in it stops.

The coast recovered

Drafted from Razik, History of the Imâms and Seyyids of 'Omân, from A.D. 661-1856 (1871)expansion

The East African coast was not conquered by the Al Bu Sa'id. It was inherited, lost, and taken back over about seventy years, and the sequence is worth following because it explains why the empire ended up centred on an island rather than on Muscat.

Mombasa had thrown off its allegiance to Oman during the reign of the founder, Ahmad bin Sa'id. That is the position at the start: a dynasty holding the Ya'ariba's overseas possessions on paper and losing the most important of them almost immediately.

In 1784 an expedition sent by Ahmad's brother, then imam, brought the island of Zanzibar to submission. The regent who followed was bent on recovering Mombasa and did not manage it. It was not finally annexed until the long reign of Sa'id bin Sultan, who took it along with the other ports and islands of that coast — and those are precisely the territories that afterwards became the independent principality of Zanzibar.

The northern half

While that was going on the same state was operating at the other end of the Gulf, and the chronicle is clearer about this than about Africa.

Sa'id held Gombroon — Bandar Abbas — on the Persian shore and exercised sovereign rights there, which is plain from the terms of the treaty the East India Company made with him. An Arabian sultanate collecting the customs of a Persian port, under an arrangement a European trading company thought worth formalising.

That is the shape of the state at its widest: the Omani coast, a Persian port, the Gulf, and an African littoral from Mombasa southward. Almost none of it was territory in the sense of ground held by garrisons. It was harbours, customs houses and the sea between them.

What was given away

One transaction from the end of the expansion says more about the position than any of the conquests, and the chronicle's editor prints the document in full.

In July 1854 Sa'id bin Sultan signed over the Kuria Muria islands, off the coast of Mahra, to the British crown. The deed is short and unmistakably a personal act:

Captain Fremantle having come to me from the great Queen, asking from me the Islands of Khalfan ... I hereby give to her imperial Majesty the Sovereign of England, her Majesty Queen Victoria, the said islands, and to her children after her. I give them absolutely, on my own behalf, and on behalf of my children after me, of my own free will, and without any drawback on my part.

The editor adds the detail that makes it interesting. The islands were at that time tributary to shaikhs at Mirbat, and Mahra had not recognised Omani suzerainty for centuries. Sa'id was giving away, by a stretch of authority he was glad to have British countenance for, something he did not securely hold.

That is the whole logic of the last phase of the expansion. The empire was built on being useful to the British in the western Indian Ocean, and being useful was worth more than the islands were. Seven years after that deed, when his sons quarrelled over the inheritance, it was a British viceroy who divided it between them.

An Arabian sultan in Africa

Drafted from Sheriff, Eastern African Studies (1987)peak

Sa'id bin Sultan ruled for fifty years from 1806 and moved his capital to Zanzibar. The move was gradual — he was on the island for long stretches from the 1820s and permanently from about 1840 — and it is the decisive act of this reign: the centre of an Arabian polity relocated to an African island two thousand miles from the country it was named after.

What made the island worth it was an economic transformation Sheriff's book is the standard account of, and it had two parts.

The first was cloves. The plant was introduced to Zanzibar and Pemba from the Indian Ocean spice islands in the 1810s and 1820s, and the sultan and the Omani landowning families who followed him planted it on a scale that made the archipelago the world's principal producer within a generation. The labour was enslaved East Africans, and the significant change is in the direction of the trade: slaves who had previously been exported became instead the workforce producing an export. The plantations were owned by the sultan and his relatives among others.

The second was ivory. European and American demand — for piano keys, billiard balls, combs, cutlery handles — pushed a trading frontier inland from the coast, along caravan routes financed from Zanzibar, first to Lake Tanganyika and eventually to the eastern Congo. The caravans carried cloth and guns in and ivory and captives out, and the political disruption they caused in the interior is a substantial part of the history of nineteenth-century East Africa.

The money was moved by Indian merchant houses. The customs of Zanzibar were farmed to a Kutchi Bhatia or Ismaili firm which paid the sultan a fixed annual sum and advanced him credit against it, and the same houses financed the caravans and bought the crop. The customs came before the land, in other words, and the sultanate's treasury was in practice an arrangement with a merchant community that was neither Omani nor African.

And the buyers were Western. Sa'id signed commercial treaties with the United States in 1833, Britain in 1839 and France in 1844; American cloth from Salem was so dominant in the East African market that the Swahili word for unbleached cotton is merikani. An Arab sultanate on an African island was, by the middle of the century, a fully integrated node of a world economy centred somewhere else — which is Sheriff's argument and his title.

As well appointed as Her Majesty's

Drafted from Wellsted, Travels in Arabia, Volume I (1838)peak

In the 1830s a lieutenant of the Indian Navy surveyed the Omani coast, travelled inland, and wrote an assessment of Sayyid Said's power for readers in London. It is the most useful description of the Busaid state at its height precisely because Wellsted was not admiring it. He was working out what it could do to the British if it chose to.

The inventory first. Said's navy consisted of four heavy frigates, two of them of fifty guns; three corvettes of eighteen to twenty-two; and several smaller warships. To those could be added his own merchant ships, the Arab-flagged vessels constantly trading into Muscat, and — beyond everything else, on account of their numbers — the country baghlas, some of over two hundred tons. Wellsted reckoned the sultan could assemble transport for twenty thousand men.

Then the judgement that costs him something to make. The ships of the Imam of Muscat, he writes, are as well constructed and as well appointed as Her Majesty's.

Then the harbour. Muscat commands the entrance to the Persian Gulf; its anchorages would shelter any number of ships; in the hands of a skilful engineer it could be made almost impregnable in a short time. Against which the British usually had one or two vessels of twelve or eighteen guns in the whole Gulf, and a squadron from India needed a month to arrive in certain seasons.

Wellsted's anxiety is Russian and reads oddly now — he spends pages on the possibility that Said's squadron might make a rendezvous with a Russian force at Basra, which, manned with Russian seamen, would hold naval superiority in the Indian seas for some period. The scenario never had much in it. What the scenario proves is the point: a British naval officer in 1838 could construct a plausible nightmare in which the decisive fleet in the western Indian Ocean was Omani, because in 1838 the Omani fleet was the largest thing in that ocean not flying a European flag.

And then, at the end of the chapter, the other half of the relationship. A reciprocal treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, had been concluded with Said, stipulating in what Wellsted calls Eastern phraseology that his enemies should be Britain's enemies and his friends Britain's friends; and up to that feeling, he says, the British had acted until very lately. But when the probability of the sultan actually asking for assistance came before the Supreme Government of India, the passage of the treaty began to be construed.

That sentence dates the peak more exactly than any tonnage figure. Said's fleet was at its largest, his commercial empire ran from the Gulf to Zanzibar, and the ally who had promised that his enemies were theirs had started reading the promise closely before being asked to keep it.

What it ran on

Drafted from Sheriff, Eastern African Studies (1987)contraction

The Zanzibar empire was built on slavery, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than in the passive constructions the older literature used.

The clove and grain plantations of Zanzibar and Pemba were worked by enslaved people brought from the mainland, in numbers Sheriff estimates in the hundreds of thousands across the period, with a mortality on the crossing and in the first year of labour that the sources record without much comment. The caravans that went inland for ivory bought and captured people to carry it, and sold them at the coast when they arrived. The market at Zanzibar was the largest in the western Indian Ocean. The sultan taxed every transaction and his family owned plantations.

None of this was unusual for the period and none of it is mitigated by that. A customs duty and a land tax sound like ordinary fiscal categories, the same kind levied everywhere from Egypt to China, and on their own they say nothing about what was actually being taxed: a duty on the sale of human beings, and the produce of estates worked by people who had themselves been sold. A comparative vocabulary built to hold sixty different states side by side cannot carry that distinction on its own, which is exactly why the plantations and the caravans have to be named here rather than left to a neutral label to convey.

The dismantling came from the power that was also the guarantor, which is the other half of the century. Britain wanted the trade ended and wanted a friendly Zanzibar; it obtained the Moresby Treaty in 1822 restricting sales to Christian powers, the Hamerton Treaty in 1845 confining the traffic to the sultan's own African dominions, and in 1873 — after the empire had already been partitioned — a treaty closing the Zanzibar market entirely, obtained under the threat of a naval blockade.

Each of those agreements removed a part of the sultanate's revenue, and each was signed because the alternative was worse. It is the same relationship Qajar Iran had with Britain and Russia, and the Ottomans had with the same European powers in the Mediterranean: a state whose independence was underwritten by a European power that was simultaneously legislating its economy out of existence, and which signed each instrument because refusing was not available.

Zanzibar became a British protectorate in 1890, twenty-nine years after the partition and four decades after the first serious pressure.

The arbitration, and the office coming back

Drafted from Sheriff, Eastern African Studies (1987)end

Sa'id bin Sultan died at sea in 1856 on the passage between his two capitals, which is a tidy fact and a true one. He left the African dominions to one son, Majid, and Oman to another, Thuwaini, and the brothers disputed it.

The dispute was referred to the Governor-General of India, and in 1861 Lord Canning's award divided the empire: Zanzibar and the East African coast to Majid, Muscat and Oman to Thuwaini, and an annual subsidy of forty thousand crowns payable from the richer half to the poorer to compensate for the inequality. Both accepted.

What happened is unusual enough to note: the empire was not conquered, did not collapse and was not overthrown. It was divided by an arbitration both parties had asked for, conducted by a third power neither of them ruled, and the losing side was paid.

What followed on each side belongs in one paragraph each. Zanzibar's revenue survived the partition and then did not survive the closing of the slave market in 1873 and the European partition of East Africa that followed; it became a British protectorate in 1890, and the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 lasted around forty minutes. Oman became poorer, more isolated, and increasingly dependent on British subsidy and advice.

And in the Omani interior the office came back. The Ibadi scholars had never accepted that the sultans of Muscat were imams, and in 1913 they elected one and took the interior. The Treaty of Seeb in 1920 recognised the position without naming it: an imam governing the interior in autonomy, a sultan governing Muscat and the coast, and neither interfering with the other. That lasted until oil concessions made the interior worth controlling, and the Jebel Akhdar war of 1954 to 1959 — fought by the sultan with British aircraft and Special Air Service troops — ended the imamate for the last time.

The Omani office kept being reconstituted in the same mountains for a millennium, and the full sequence is this: 750, 793, 1624, 1744, 1868, 1913. The last of them was put down by aircraft.

The manuscript

Drafted from Razik, History of the Imâms and Seyyids of 'Omân, from A.D. 661-1856 (1871)afterlife

Sayyid Sa'id died in 1856 and his sons went to the edge of war over what he had left. Thuwayni had succeeded to Oman; Majid claimed Zanzibar, the neighbouring islands and the Arab settlements on the mainland opposite.

Fighting was prevented by the friendly intervention of the Government of Bombay, and the brothers agreed to submit the dispute to the arbitration of the Viceroy of India and to abide by his decision. A commission of two was appointed to report on the matters at issue — a British brigadier and a British chaplain — and its work involved personal interviews with both sayyids, at Muscat and at Zanzibar.

That is how an Arab maritime empire was divided: by two Englishmen travelling between the two halves of it, writing a report for a third Englishman in Calcutta.

What the sultan gave the commissioner

While the commission was at Muscat in 1860, Sayyid Thuwayni made the chaplain a present.

It was the original manuscript of the history of the imams and sayyids of Oman — the chronicle of his own dynasty and of the four imamates before it, running from the seventh century to his father's death, and, as the chaplain came to understand, unique in the continuity and fullness of its narrative. Nothing comparable existed for Oman from any other source; the native records the earlier parts were compiled from had never been used by any foreign writer, east or west.

The recipient translated it, annotated it heavily in the manner of a Victorian churchman who thought the Ibadis fanatical, and published it in London in 1871.

There is no reason to read the gift as naive. Thuwayni was in the middle of an arbitration whose outcome would determine whether he got the profitable half of his father's empire or the other one, and he handed the arbitrator's colleague the document that established what Oman had been for twelve hundred years before the British arrived. It did not work. The richer half went to his brother, with Zanzibar bound to pay Muscat forty thousand crowns a year — a sum the two sides had already been arguing about, and which the award left deliberately ambiguous as between a tribute implying subjection and a subsidy implying none. It was not a foolish thing to try.

What it means that the book is why we know

The consequence is worth saying plainly.

Almost everything anybody can say about the Ibadi imamate of the ninth century, the Ya'ariba who took Mombasa, and the family that moved its capital to an island — the elections, the depositions, the camels walked round the pillar at Nizwa, the books burnt in 893, the horse in the valley behind Muscat — comes through one manuscript, handed to a foreign commissioner by a sultan hoping to improve his position in a partition of his own inheritance.

The two halves

The division held. Zanzibar and Muscat became separate states with separate sultans of the same family, and their subsequent histories have almost nothing in common: one became a British protectorate on the clove and slave economy of the East African coast, the other went back to being an Arabian port with a mountainous interior behind it that it did not control.

And in that interior the old procedure was still available. The Al Bu Sa'id had begun in 1744 with an assembly electing Ahmad bin Sa'id imam, and had spent a century converting that office into a hereditary sultanate governed from overseas. What was left behind when the overseas half was detached was the country where an imam could still be elected — the same towns, the same assembly, the same qualifications — and a sultan on the coast whose title rested on having stopped being one.