Ya'ariba Imamate

The office, again

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

The first Ibadi imamate of Oman ended in 893, when an Abbasid army invited in by one faction of the scholars took Nizwa and killed the imam. Omani historiography counts imamates in the plural — distinct constitutions of the same office, separated by periods of dynastic or foreign rule — and what came in between was the Nabhani kings, the Buyids, the Portuguese on the coast, and then the Ya'ariba.

This is the Ya'ariba.

By the early seventeenth century Oman had been without a functioning imamate for a long time. The Nabhani, a dynastic house that had held the interior for centuries, were spent; the coast was Portuguese, and had been since Albuquerque took Muscat in 1507 and burned Qalhat; and the interior was divided among tribal leaders with no arbitrator above them.

In 1624 the scholars at Rustaq elected Nasir bin Murshid of the Ya'ariba imam. The procedure was the old one — the community's learned men choosing the best-qualified candidate, who could be deposed if he failed — and it produced, as it had in 750 and 793, a man with authority over tribes that had recognised nobody.

What he did with it was conventional and effective: he took the interior fort by fort, reduced the tribal leaders, and turned the imamate into the government of Oman for the first time in seven centuries. He also began the thing that makes this imamate unlike the earlier one. He attacked the coast.

Everything else about the constitution was the same as it had been nine centuries before: election to the office, election as the ground of the office, tribes for the army. That identity is the point. What persisted in Oman for eleven hundred years was not a state but a procedure, and the states constituted under it were separate things sharing one constitution.

Taking the coast

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

The Portuguese had held the Omani ports since 1507, as part of the system of fortified harbours by which they attempted to control the Indian Ocean trade from Sofala to Malacca. Muscat was the northern anchor of it: a deep, sheltered harbour between cliffs, with two forts above it, commanding the approach to the Gulf.

Nasir bin Murshid took Julfar and Sohar in the 1640s. His successor Sultan bin Saif took Muscat in 1650.

That date is the hinge of the whole imamate. An imamate in the mountains with date gardens and a tithe had acquired the best harbour in Arabia, its fortifications, its shipyards, its customs, and — most consequentially — the hulls in it. Omani shipbuilding and Omani sailors existed long before 1650; what the port supplied was the capacity to operate ocean-going armed vessels at scale, and the Portuguese ships taken in the harbour were the beginning of a fleet.

Within a decade the imamate was raiding Portuguese Asia rather than defending against it. Omani squadrons hit Diu and Bombay in the 1660s, Bassein, Daman and the Konkan coast afterwards; they took ships, ransomed towns, and made the northern Indian Ocean unsafe for a power that had regarded it as a monopoly. The English East India Company, newly arrived at Bombay, negotiated with Muscat and occasionally fought it.

The proceeds of that raiding were substantial, and nothing consulted treats them as a structural part of the state's income the way the tithe and the customs were — so the raiding sits in this paragraph rather than being counted as a revenue base. It probably understates the polity. Saying so is better than inventing a figure for it.

The church plate

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

Taking Muscat was not the end of the Portuguese war. It was the point at which the Omanis stopped defending a coast and started raiding an empire, and the Omani chronicle describes the transition in a few sentences without appearing to notice how large a change it is.

The last of the fighting in the harbour is recorded in the chronicle's ordinary register, which is to say partly as farce. Two Portuguese men-of-war went on hovering off Muscat after the forts had gone, so a body of mercenaries was hired — men, in the chronicler's phrase, to whom death was sweeter than wine to the lips of a wine-bibber — who went out at them in small boats, destroyed both ships and killed the crews. In the fighting for the town itself a Portuguese officer the chronicle calls Cabreta made a last effort with a small band and got inside; he was surrounded, pelted with rotten eggs, and finished with spears. God, writes the annalist, thereby rid the Muslims of him and his polytheist companions.

Then the offensive. Fired by the successes at home, the imam declared a jihad and carried the war into the enemy's country: he attacked Diu and Daman on the coast of Gujarat, to the great consternation of the Portuguese, and came away with an immense booty — including, the chronicle specifies, all the gold and silver vessels and images belonging to the churches.

That is a small Arabian state, thirty years out of foreign occupation, sending fleets to sack the Portuguese establishments in India and bringing the altar plate home. Everything the Ya'ariba are remembered for in the Indian Ocean — Mombasa, the East African coast, a navy that outfought Europeans for two generations — begins with that decision, and the chronicle gives it four lines.

Relieved of any fear of invasion, the imam turned to domestic business, and the chronicler is oddly specific about what that consisted of: he fostered trade, and sent agents into different countries to buy arms and horses, for which a strong demand had arisen among his subjects. A population that suddenly wants to import weapons and cavalry mounts in quantity is a population expecting to use them, and they did, on each other, within a generation.

One absence in the chronicle is worth recording because of what it says about the whole record. The date of the capture of Muscat from the Portuguese — the founding achievement of the dynasty, the event the whole book exists to lead up to — is not in it. Badger had to reconstruct it from the chronology of other events in the same reign and settle on 1651 or 1652, and says so. A court chronicle can carry the rotten eggs thrown at a Portuguese captain and lose the year its state was made.

Fort Jesus

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

The Swahili coast had been Portuguese since the first decade of the sixteenth century, and their position on it rested on Fort Jesus at Mombasa — a bastioned Italian-designed fortress built in 1593, the most substantial European work in East Africa.

The Omanis were invited. Swahili towns that resented Portuguese customs and Portuguese garrisons had been appealing to Muscat since the 1650s, and Omani squadrons had taken and lost Mombasa more than once. In March 1696 the imamate laid siege to Fort Jesus properly, and the siege lasted thirty-three months — through plague inside the walls, through two relief fleets from Goa, through the death of almost the entire garrison. It fell in December 1698.

With it went the Portuguese position north of Mozambique. Pemba, Kilwa, Zanzibar and the Mrima coast came under Omani suzerainty; Omani governors were installed, Omani customs collected, and the Ibadi imamate of the Omani interior became a power on the African littoral.

It is worth pausing on the improbability. The first Omani imamate was a polity constituted by scholars in a mosque at Nizwa, governing a society organised around shared rights in irrigation channels, whose imam was elected on merit and could be deposed by argument. Nine hundred years later the same office, constituted the same way, was besieging an Italian-designed fortress two thousand miles away and taking it.

Nothing about the constitution changed to permit that. The imam was still elected, still deposable, still primarily a judge. What changed was that the office had acquired a port, and a port on that coast at that date was an entry point into a world system.

The domestic monuments belong here too, because they were built with the same money. Nizwa's great round fort, Sultan bin Saif's, is the largest in Arabia and was designed for cannon. Jabrin castle, put up in the 1670s by an imam whose election was itself disputed, is a palace with painted ceilings and a school in it. And the aflaj — the underground channels the earlier Omani page describes as the foundation of the whole society — were extended and repaired under the Ya'ariba on a scale that has left their names on them.

The imamate that went to sea

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

Describe the Ya'ariba from the inside and you get a mountain imamate: an elected imam, qualified in law before he is anything else, tribal horsemen raised through kinship, and a revenue built on tithes and dates.

Describe what they actually did and you get a naval power.

They took a fortified harbour from a European empire. They built and operated an ocean-going armed fleet. They projected force across two thousand miles of open water, down the East African coast and into the approaches to India. And they sustained a thirty-three-month siege by sea against relief squadrons sent from Goa.

Two descriptions of one polity

The gap between those two accounts is the most interesting thing about this state, and it is easy to miss because the second half was built so fast.

Nothing in the imamate's constitution anticipates a navy. The office was designed for the interior — for a scholar-judge chosen by those competent to judge, ruling a country of mountains and wadis where an outside army could arrive and could not stay. Its army was the tribes, and the tribes were not sailors. Ships cost money that tithes on dates do not obviously produce, and a fleet needs permanent crews, yards, timber and captains who answer to somebody continuously — none of which a tribal levy supplies.

They acquired all of it inside a generation, and they acquired it by taking Portuguese infrastructure rather than by growing their own. Muscat came with a harbour, fortifications and the accumulated apparatus of a maritime empire's forward base. The imamate captured a going concern and ran it.

Which description is right

Both, and the tension between them is not resolved by picking one.

The chapter that follows this one is about 1719, when the scholars elected a child and other scholars held that the election was therefore invalid — an argument about qualification, conducted in the vocabulary of the interior, by an institution that at that moment also owned Mombasa. The imamate never stopped being the thing it was designed to be. It simply acquired, in about fifty years, an ocean's worth of assets that its constitution had nothing to say about.

The horse in the valley

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

The Ya'ariba destroyed themselves over the question their office existed to answer, and the sequence took about fifty years.

It began among brothers. Sultan bin Saif, who had taken Muscat from the Portuguese and built the fortress at Nizwa, was succeeded by his son Bal'arab, who founded and endowed a college at Yabrin and began well. Then his brother Saif raised a following among the more devout jurists and shaikhs of Oman, and the two fought each other across the country for years. The chronicle records what people ended up calling them. Bal'arab was the Butcher. Saif was the Scourge of the Arabs.

Nobody could say which of them was the elder, or on what ground the country was divided about which had the better claim. That is the whole difficulty of an elective imamate in one sentence: when two qualified men of the same house both rise, the qualifications do not decide between them, and there is no other rule.

Two imams

By the 1720s the same thing was happening again and worse, because this time both men were actually elected.

Sayf bin Sultan the second held the office when Bal'arab bin Himyar — a cousin — was elected imam by part of the population of the Dhahira. Two imams, each lawfully chosen by an assembly, each with an argument.

Sayf could not beat him. After two or three failed attempts he sent to Makran and hired a body of Baluchis, all armed with muskets, and put them under his brother's command. They were cut off almost to a man in a single engagement.

So he applied to Nadir Shah of Persia.

The audition

The shah promised to help, and then — so the story runs — decided to test the mettle of the Omani sovereign before committing to it. He sent him a viciously restive horse, with the message that the agreement would hold only if Sayf could ride the animal.

The trial took place in the valley behind Muscat, in front of the shah's messenger and whoever else had come to watch. The young imam got on and coursed the horse round the valley several times, until it finally leapt the town wall and broke its legs, and the rider landed on his feet unhurt.

He passed. The Persians came.

What the story is doing

It is worth pausing on what has been described, because the chronicler tells it as a feat of horsemanship and it is something else as well.

The elected head of a religious commonwealth — an office whose holder was chosen by scholars for learning and piety and could be deposed by them for failing in either — is performing for a foreign king's envoy, on a horse sent to see whether he is worth backing, in order to obtain an army to use against another lawfully elected imam.

A few years later the Persians were in the interior on their own account, the imamate had lost every friend Sayf could rely on for counsel, and his own officers were recommending a governor of Sohar named Ahmad bin Sa'id as the man who might get the country back.

He did. And then the assembly elected him instead.

A question about procedure

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

In 1719 the Ya'ariba scholars elected Saif bin Sultan II imam. He was a child. Other scholars held that the election was therefore invalid, since the qualifications for the office include the capacity to exercise it, and that a regency was not something the doctrine provided for.

That is the whole of the dispute, and it destroyed the state.

The argument was legal and the factions it produced were tribal. Oman divided into two blocs — the Hinawi and the Ghafiri, named for the leaders who assembled them — and the division outlived the question that caused it by three hundred years; it is still a category in Omani social life. Rival imams were elected. The forts changed hands. The country was at war with itself for two decades.

Then both sides did what the losing faction had done in 886: they looked outside. One party appealed to Nadir Shah of Persia, and Persian troops landed at Julfar and Muscat in the late 1730s. They came as auxiliaries and stayed as an occupation, which is the entirely predictable outcome and was predicted at the time.

Ahmad bin Sa'id, the Ya'ariba governor of Sohar, held his town through a long siege, negotiated the Persians out, and — the accounts differ on how much negotiation and how much massacre was involved — cleared them from Oman. In 1744 the scholars elected him imam.

So the office survived again, and the family holding it did not. It is the second time an Omani imamate ended not by conquest but by a disagreement among the people qualified to constitute it: in 886 over whether a deposition was lawful, in 1719 over whether an election was. Both times the losing side invited a foreign army. Both times the office was reconstituted afterwards by somebody else.

The next record is what the man elected in 1744 made of it, and the short answer is that he made it hereditary.

Twelve years and lacs of gold

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

Sultan bin Saif spent twelve years and, in the chronicler's phrase, lacs of gold and silver building the fortress at Nizwa.

He could afford it. The same reign had taken Muscat off the Portuguese, wiped out the two men-of-war they left hovering off the coast, carried the war to Diu and Daman on the Gujarat coast and come back with an immense booty including the gold and silver vessels and images out of the churches, and then — the detail the chronicle bothers to record specially — fostered trade and sent agents abroad to buy arms and horses, for which a strong demand had sprung up among his subjects.

Then he built a fort in the interior and was buried in it.

What the money went into

That is the shape of the Ya'ariba legacy and it is unusual for a maritime empire: the profits of the sea were spent inland.

The great forts of the Omani interior are theirs. So is the college at Yabrin, founded and endowed by Sultan's son. So, in a real sense, is the standing of Nizwa and Rustaq as the places where the imamate is properly constituted — a convention that outlived the dynasty by centuries and was still doing political work in the twentieth.

A British traveller who reached Nizwa in the 1830s, a hundred and seventy years after Sultan bin Saif died, reported that its fort was reckoned in the estimation of all the surrounding country to be impregnable.

What the successors got

The other thing the Ya'ariba left was an empire, and it passed on intact to men who had just displaced them.

The East African coast from Mombasa southward, taken off the Portuguese in the 1690s, did not revert or fragment when the imamate collapsed into civil war and Persian occupation. It was still there in the 1780s to be re-secured by an expedition, and still there in the nineteenth century to be turned into something the Ya'ariba would not have recognised: a sultanate with its capital on an island off Africa, financed by cloves and slaves.

So a dynasty that ended by hiring Baluchi mercenaries, auditioning for a Persian shah and losing its own office to a governor of Sohar nonetheless handed its successors a working overseas empire, the forts to hold the interior, and an endowed college.

And the office

The last thing is the thing that keeps happening in these mountains.

The Ya'ariba imamate was itself a reconstitution — the third time the same elective office had been established in the same country, the first having been destroyed by an Abbasid army in 893. It ended in 1744 in a disputed election resolved by a foreign army, which is precisely how the earlier ones had ended.

And it was constituted again afterwards. The man who replaced them was elected imam by the same procedure, in the same towns, by the same kind of assembly. The form survived every dynasty that held it, including this one, which is why the chronicle is a history of imams rather than of houses.