Ibadi Imamate of Oman

Elected, and removable

Drafted from Wilkinson, Cambridge Middle East Library (1987)formation

There was a second Ibadi imamate at the other end of the Islamic world. The Rustamids held Tahert in the central Maghreb from about 776, on the doctrine that the leader of the community should be the most qualified Muslim regardless of descent and could be deposed if he failed. Oman is where that doctrine came from and where it lasted.

Ibadism is the surviving moderate branch of the Kharijite movement — the party that broke from Ali at Siffin over the arbitration. What the Kharijites held, and what Ibadism kept after the militant wings had been destroyed, is that leadership is a qualification and not an inheritance: no Qurashi requirement, no Alid requirement, no designation. The community's scholars elect the man best fitted to the office, and if he stops being fitted they can remove him.

In 750, with the Umayyads gone and the Abbasids not yet established in the Gulf, Omani Ibadi scholars elected al-Julanda ibn Mas'ud imam at Nizwa. It lasted about two years. An Abbasid expedition came down and killed him, and Oman was governed from Baghdad for the next four decades. In 793 the governors were expelled and an imam was elected again, and that imamate ran for a century.

The geography did most of the work. The Omani interior sits behind the Hajar mountains, reachable from the coast through a small number of passes and defensible at all of them, and it supported itself on the aflaj — the underground channels that bring mountain water to the date gardens, which are communal property maintained by the villages that use them. A society organised around shared water rights and tribal arbitration, in country an imperial army has to want badly, is fertile ground for an elective imamate and poor ground for a governor.

The coast is a different country and always was. Sohar and later Muscat traded with India and East Africa and belonged to whoever could hold a port, which was frequently not the imam. That division — an elected imamate in the interior and a commercial power on the coast — is the shape of Omani history for the next twelve hundred years.

Water, and who owns it

Drafted from Wilkinson, Cambridge Middle East Library (1987)aside?What aside means

The Omani interior is not a country that supports a state by accident. Rainfall is low and unreliable, the summer is brutal, and cultivation depends almost entirely on the aflaj — underground channels, some of them kilometres long, cut on a gradient from an aquifer at the foot of the mountains to the date gardens of a settlement, with vertical access shafts along the length for maintenance. The technology is old, related to the Iranian qanat, and building one is a capital project measured in generations.

What matters politically is that a falaj is owned in shares. The water arrives continuously and is divided by time — a household's right is a measured interval of flow, on a rotation, and those intervals are bought, sold, inherited, endowed and litigated. Maintaining the channel is a collective obligation. What that produces, on the evidence of the surviving documents, is this: a settlement on a falaj is a corporation with a written constitution, a body of case law, and a permanent requirement to arbitrate between its members.

That is the society the Ibadi imamate governed, and it explains a good deal about the shape of the office.

It explains why the imam's function was so heavily judicial. He was invited in 897 in Yemen and in 750 here to settle disputes, and the disputes were largely about water and land. It explains why the scholars mattered — an entire legal literature exists on falaj shares, and the men who knew it were the men who elected and could depose the imam. And it explains why an imamate could be constituted, destroyed and constituted again in the same mountains for a thousand years without needing a dynasty: the thing being governed was already organised, already litigious, and already used to arbitration from outside.

What the imamate lived on, then, was a tithe on dates grown with water somebody's great-grandfather had dug for.

The century it worked

Drafted from Wilkinson, Cambridge Middle East Library (1987)expansion

The imamate reconstituted in 793 lasted a hundred years, and the middle of it is the period Omani tradition treats as the model against which every later imamate was measured.

Under al-Warith ibn Ka'b and then Ghassan ibn Abdullah and Abd al-Malik ibn Humayd and al-Muhanna ibn Jayfar, the imamate governed the interior from Nizwa with a judiciary, a treasury and a body of scholars producing the law it governed by. It took the coast: Sohar was in its hands for long stretches, and Sohar in the ninth century was one of the busiest ports in the Indian Ocean — Omani ships were trading directly with China, and the merchant of the Sindbad stories is a Sohari.

Ghassan ibn Abdullah is recorded as having built a fleet against the Indian pirates who were preying on that traffic, which is a striking thing for an elective imamate in a mountain valley to have done and is a reminder that the interior and the coast were not separate economies even when they were separate polities. The imamate's income was dates and the tithe; its access to money was Sohar.

The literature is the other output and it is the more durable one. Ibadi jurisprudence — the madhhab that survives today in Oman, in the Mzab of Algeria, on Djerba and in Zanzibar — was substantially written in this century and the one after it, by men who were participants in the events they were legislating about. The Rustamids of Tahert held the western half of the same tradition; the two communities were in contact, and it is the Omani scholars whose work continued after Tahert fell.

The imamate's own account of the period is that it was the time when the community got it right: an imam who was learned and could be argued with, a council of scholars who could depose him, and an interior that governed itself by law. That account was written afterwards, by people arguing about what had gone wrong.

The port for all the Arabian merchants

Drafted from al-Sirafi, Ancient Accounts of India and China, by Two Mohammedan Travellers, Who Went to Those Parts in the Ninth Century (1733)aside?What aside means

The century in which Oman had an elected imam was also the century in which Omani ships sailed to China, and the two facts are connected by money.

The sailing directions survive. A ninth-century Arabic account of the route, written by men who had used it, explains that the China ships load at Siraf rather than Basra — goods coming down from Basra and across from Oman are transhipped there — because the Gulf has frequent storms and shoal water. From Basra to Siraf is a hundred and twenty leagues. From Siraf the ships run about two hundred leagues to Muscat, at the far end of the province of Oman, passing a place called Nabd Bani al-Safaq and an island, and rocks called Oman, and a narrow strait between two rocks called Dordur which small vessels will attempt and the China ships will not, and two more rocks that barely break the surface. At Muscat they water from wells and take on Omani cattle. From there it is a month's sail with the wind aft to the Malabar coast, and then on east.

That is the longest regular commercial sea route in the world at the time, and the Omani imamate sat on the stretch of it where every ship had to stop for water.

The other end of the route is described in the same text and it is a city called Khanfu, which is Guangzhou: the port for all the Arabian merchants, standing on a great river some days above the sea, so that the water there is fresh. Foreign merchants of four religions lived in it under their own arrangements, and the Chinese authorities kept exact registers of them.

In 878 a rebel army came down on it. The citizens shut the gates, the siege lasted a long time, and when the city fell the inhabitants were put to the sword. People who knew China well told the compiler that besides the Chinese killed, a hundred and twenty thousand Muslims, Jews, Christians and Parsees died there, on account of trade — and that the number is exactly known, because the Chinese are extremely precise in the accounts they keep of such people.

Then the detail that matters more than the number. The rebel cut down the mulberry trees along with almost every other kind, and the mulberry is what the silkworms are fed on. That destruction, says the text, is why silk failed and why the trade in it in the countries under the Arabs came to a standstill.

And the consequence for Oman, in one clause: the merchants returned in crowds to Siraf and Oman.

The direct voyage did not resume. Goods went on moving, but in stages, handed between intermediaries at Kalah in the Malay peninsula and elsewhere, with the long-haul profit divided among more people. Within fifteen years of the sack of Khanfu the Abbasids landed in Oman and ended the imamate.

The two events are not cause and effect, and it would be neat and wrong to say so. What can be said is narrower and harder to dismiss: a polity that had financed an unusually independent constitution out of the traffic on one sea route lost the far end of that route and its own government in the same fifteen years, and did not get either of them back on the same terms.

The camels round the pillar

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

The Omani chronicle records one administrative arrangement from the imamate's best century that is worth more than a page of description, because it shows exactly what kind of authority the office actually exercised.

Under the imam al-Muhanna, who held the office for four decades from about 810, the province of Mahra to the south-west was tributary to Oman. The way the tribute worked was this. Once a year the people of Mahra brought their camels to Nizwa and walked them round a pillar that the imam had had erected there for the purpose.

The chronicle's editor sets out both reasons the ordinance existed, and they are not the same reason. First, so that the owners publicly acknowledged their dependence. Second, so that the cattle-tithe due from them could be correctly estimated.

An imamate whose whole claim was that it collected a religious obligation under rules the scholars enforced needed to know how many camels there were, and it found a way of counting them that was simultaneously a ceremony of submission. The herd walks past; the assessors watch; everybody has seen it happen.

What else the century held

The rest of the record for that period is of a functioning state doing unremarkable things well.

An imam named Ghassan is remembered for putting an end to a formidable band of pirates who infested those seas in vessels called bawarij, operating out of the mouths of the Indus. That is a navy, or at least a naval campaign, run by an elected imam of the Omani interior against raiders from Sind.

When one imam became too infirm to carry on the administration a mutiny broke out among the soldiery and was resolved by appointing a regent — which is to say the office had an administration substantial enough to have soldiers who could mutiny, and a procedure for a ruler who could no longer function.

And Harun al-Rashid tried to reconquer Oman, and failed. That is the second Abbasid attempt in half a century; the first had killed the first imam in 751. The caliphate at the height of its power could not hold the country behind the Hajar mountains, and after Harun it stopped trying for eighty years.

How the office was actually filled

The chronicle also gives, for this period, the first account of how an election was conducted, and it is not flattering.

The learned elders assembled at Nizwa under a president. The nobles had a candidate. The president, by his own personal machinations, set their choice aside and conferred the imamate on somebody else.

That is the mechanism working in the sense that it produced an imam, and not working in the sense that everyone could see who had really decided. An elective office in which one man's influence over the assembly is decisive has a succession problem waiting for it — and the chronicle records that problem arriving, at length, in the crisis that broke the imamate half a century later.

The question an elective office has to answer

Drafted from Wilkinson, Cambridge Middle East Library (1987)contraction

An office that can be taken away has to have rules about when. Ibadism held that an imam who failed in his duties could be deposed by the community that elected him, and for a century nobody had to work out exactly what that meant. In 886 they did.

The imam al-Salt ibn Malik was old. A faction of the scholars, led by Musa ibn Musa, deposed him on grounds of incapacity and elected Rashid ibn al-Nazr in his place. Al-Salt went quietly. And then the Ibadi community divided over whether what had just happened was lawful — whether the deposition had followed the required procedure, whether incapacity was sufficient grounds, whether the scholars who did it had standing, and whether the imam they installed was therefore an imam at all.

The two positions became schools: the Rustaq party, which held the deposition invalid and its authors in the wrong, and the Nizwa party, which held it valid. The argument was conducted in law, at length, and it has never entirely closed — Ibadi jurists were still writing about al-Salt's deposition centuries later, and the division is a live category in the tradition.

That is the price of the doctrine, and it should be said plainly by anyone admiring the doctrine. A hereditary office produces succession wars between men; an elective one produces schisms between arguments, and the arguments do not die with the claimants. The Omani imamate spent seven years after 886 with two parties who each considered the other's imam illegitimate.

In 893 the losing side did what losing factions do. Muhammad ibn Nur, the Abbasid governor of Bahrayn, was invited in, came, took Tu'am, then al-Sirr, then Nizwa, killed the imam Azzan ibn Tamim, and sent heads to Baghdad. The first Omani imamate ended in a foreign occupation that one of its own factions had arranged.

An office that comes back

Drafted from Wilkinson, Cambridge Middle East Library (1987)end

893 is where this account ends, and it is worth being explicit about why it ends there rather than in the twentieth century.

The Zaydi imamate of Yemen is conventionally dated 897 to 1962 as a single stretch, because its own historiography treats it as one institution with a continuous line of imams and long interruptions. Omani historiography does the opposite: it counts imamates, in the plural, as distinct constitutions of the same office separated by periods of dynastic or foreign rule — the Nabhani kings, the Buyids, the Portuguese on the coast, the Ya'ariba imams of the seventeenth century who took Mombasa and Zanzibar, the Al Bu Sa'id sultanate, and an imamate revived in the interior as late as the twentieth century against a sultan in Muscat.

So the two Arabian imamates get bounded differently, and the difference is deference rather than inconsistency: each follows the periodisation its own sources use. Yemen's thousand-year figure measures an institution rather than a state. Oman's hundred and forty-three years have the opposite problem — they understate an office that kept being reconstituted in the same mountains for another millennium.

Both figures together are the honest position, and neither of them fits the longevity axis comfortably. That is a fact about the axis.

The books were burnt

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

The Abbasid governor of Bahrayn came into Oman in 893 with twenty-five thousand men, a thousand of them cavalry and half of those in mail. So many families left for Hormuz, Basra and Shiraz ahead of him that the flight is itself part of the record.

He took the northern districts, marched on Nizwa, found it evacuated, pursued the imam to Samad al-Shan and killed him there, and sent his head to the caliph.

Then the Omanis nearly threw him out. Tribes raised by a chief of the Bani Hina drove him back as far as the sea at Sib, and would have finished it if a mounted reinforcement had not come up — two men riding on each camel — and beaten them badly.

What he did on returning to Nizwa is set down by the chronicler in a single sentence, and it is the one to sit with:

He cut off the hands and ears, and scooped out the eyes of the nobles, inflicted unheard-of outrages upon the inhabitants, destroyed the watercourses, burnt the books, and utterly desolated the country.

The two things at the end of that list

Mutilation and outrage are what a punitive occupation does anywhere. The last two items are specific to this country and this polity, and whoever ordered them understood what he was destroying.

He destroyed the watercourses. Omani agriculture is the aflaj — underground channels, cut by hand, running for kilometres from the water table under the mountains out to the date gardens, with shares in the flow owned, sold, inherited and litigated over. That system is the physical basis of everything the imamate taxed and much of what its scholars adjudicated. Breaking it is not looting; it is the deliberate removal of a country's capacity to feed itself and to argue about property.

And he burnt the books. An Ibadi imam was elected by scholars on the strength of learning, deposed by them on the strength of argument, and judged against a body of law those scholars maintained in writing. The books were not ornaments of the state. They were the state's constitution, its case law and its qualification test.

An occupier who wrecks the irrigation and the library has been advised by someone who knew how the place worked.

What came back anyway

His deputy was killed by the population shortly after he left for Bahrayn.

Then, within about thirty years, seven imams were elected and deposed. That is a remarkable figure. It reads at first as chaos, and it is — but it is chaos of an extremely specific kind. A country whose nobles had been blinded and whose books had been burnt went on holding elections, and went on deposing the men it elected, at a rate of one every four years, for a generation.

The chronicle's editor draws the obvious inference about why they could: the Omanis took advantage of the disorders the Qarmatians were causing across the Muslim empire at that period to reassert their independence. When Baghdad was busy, Nizwa elected somebody.

The efforts were too feeble to keep Baghdad out for good, and the interior spent much of the following centuries under one outside authority or another. But the office itself was never abolished, because it could not be: it was not an institution with a building that an army could burn. It was a procedure. As long as there were scholars who knew the qualifications and tribes willing to answer, it could be constituted again from nothing — and over the next thousand years it was, repeatedly, in the same mountains, by men using the same word.