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Drought and New Mobilities in the Omani Interior

“He who eats her halwa must [also]

patiently endure her misfortune”

“If fortune does not obey you, follow it so

that you may become its companion.”

—Nineteenth-Century Omani Proverbs

IN THE 1840S, Nizwa, one of the largest and most important towns in the Omani interior, and its environs were struck by a severe drought. This drought lasted for more than five years, disrupted the normal patterns of life, and resulted in mass emigration. The festival (’eid al-adha) marking the culmination of the Hajj in 1845 reflected the impact of this environmental crisis. Because of the drought, Nizwans were unable to celebrate in their normal manner. The eighty-foot-tall fort at the center of Nizwa commanded a view of what had been, in more prosperous times, extensive date groves. As a meeting place of four streams, Nizwa was generally well watered, and, consequently, its citizens were well off. Writing forty years after the drought, S. B. Miles noted that Nizwa surpassed “all the towns of Oman in its supply of water, natural wealth, and the industry of its inhabitants.”¹ Before the drought in the 1840s, the area’s agriculture supported a population whose size was second only to Muscat, and its industry included “famous and extensive” textile and embroidery works. Nizwa grew cotton and indigo, and women spun and men worked looms to produce blue cotton goods.² Nizwa was also a religious capital, known as bayḍat al-Islam, the core—literally, “egg”—of Islam, for its historical role in maintaining the Ibadi Imamate.³ The people of Nizwa prayed and studied in three hundred mosques.

During the December 1845 festival (’eid), however, something was amiss. A procession of drummers and horn players led cheering men to the central square for mock fighting with swords, spears, and matchlocks. Women watched the festivities from the rooftops. But the normal celebrations lacked something important. The ’eid al-Adha celebrations of the Hejira year 1261 went on for a typical three days, but the circumstances—namely, the five years of drought—meant that anxiety plagued people from every social class. With the central market closed and commerce suspended, adults worried about rain. Would this be the year? More immediately, those who anticipated the delectable sweetmeats for which Nizwa was famous felt the sting of the drought. There was no halwa. None of the sweet delicacies were procurable. And it was not simply a question of obtaining the ingredients. Many families had left Nizwa because of the drought and mysteriously, the departed included all of the confectioners.⁴ The out-migration of confectioners, who were people of humble status, offers new clues on the mobility and circulation of people within Arabia and beyond.

FIGURE 1.1. Nizwa fort, silent witness to the 1840s drought. Percy Cox took this photograph in 1901. “Some Excursions in Oman,” Geographical Journal 66, no. 3 (September 1925).

The long drought and the loss of viable agricultural lands around Nizwa caused people to flee. While some moved to places in the interior or to the coastal towns of Oman, others went farther afield. One Nizwan became an important property broker in Zanzibar. Juma bin Salim al-Bakri, whose story was introduced earlier, amassed huge ivory holdings at his headquarters in the eastern Congo. And, fifteen years after the halwa-free Hajj festivities, a confectioner who had traveled through Muscat to East Africa became a trade agent and “big man” in the most important trading depot in central Africa. Thus, in that drought-stricken festival in 1845, while the men of Nizwa sipped coffee in the evening and listened to a poet sing his verses, they were likely worrying about the ruin of the whole province. They probably could not have imagined how far the drought would compel their neighbors and countrymen to travel.

* * *

This chapter examines eastern Arabia in the early nineteenth century to explain the environmental, social, and political conditions that prompted Arab migration to East Africa. The Omani ruler Seyyid Said bin Sultan al-Busaidi’s reasons for shifting his capital to Zanzibar in 1832 were financial and geostrategic, but what motivated others?⁵ Despite the important connections, many histories focused on East Africa have taken Arab migration for granted and overlooked push factors.⁶ Surprisingly, many of the Arab migrants who traveled to Africa in the nineteenth century were people of modest means from interior towns, not wealthy traders from port cities. Rather than neglect the Omani interior, this chapter focuses on the patterns of circulation that connected Arabian oasis towns like Nizwa to far-off Zanzibar and new settlements in eastern and central Africa.

This story necessarily begins with the underlying geographical and environmental factors that shaped human settlements in interior Oman and ends with threats that periodically upset these settlements. The management of water shaped Omani settlement patterns, and this chapter takes up the technological adaptations and religious traditions that addressed environmental limitations. Scholarly approaches that have presupposed a false dichotomy between static interior societies and enterprising coastal peoples have misread Omani history and misunderstood the processes that linked the interior regions of Arabia and Africa. Seyyid Said bin Sultan’s activity in the Indian Ocean, and his outposts in Africa in particular, renewed circuits of travel and created new opportunities. Thus, when Arabs in Oman were faced with progressively more difficult choices about how to handle constricting droughts or devastating floods, a new temporizing strategy—decamping to Africa—was open to them.

MAP 1.1. Oman and its surrounding regions

GEOGRAPHY

Oman’s peculiar geography has made it both relatively isolated from the Arabian Peninsula and well connected to maritime networks. The region’s geography has created unusual patterns of rainfall and runoff, and humans have built irrigated settlements that are well adapted to these arid, rugged conditions. Oman’s seemingly contradictory forces of isolation and integration have also sustained Ibadism, a sect of Islam that is neither Sunni nor Shi’a, though regional dynamics have also undermined Ibadism’s ideal form of governance, the imamate.⁷ These forces have also tempted scholars to mistake the country for a static interior cutoff from the littoral, a view derived from the country’s twentieth-century history, when it was known as the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, than from the preceding century, which is our focus.

Geography is inherently visual and most easily understood through maps or metaphors. It is useful to imagine the Arabian Peninsula as a boot. Viewed from the side, the boot has a heel, Yemen, which nearly rests on the Horn of Africa. The boot’s spiked toe pokes into the Straits of Hormuz, the passage into the Persian Gulf. The countries of the eastern Mediterranean (Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan) serve as the boot’s pull straps at the top, and Saudi Arabia is the boot’s thick shaft. Oman is the boot’s toe box. The top of the toe box curves out into the Persian Gulf’s entrance, and the toe box meets the outer sole at Ras al-Hadd, the eastern-most point of the peninsula, which juts out into the Arabian Sea of the Indian Ocean.

As it turns out, this particular boot is steel-toed: mountains line the inside of the toe box and seem to cut off (or protect) the interior from the outside world.⁸ These mountains, called the Hajar range, run for more than three hundred miles (500 km), are seventy-five miles (110 km) at their widest, and reach to nearly ten thousand feet (3,000 m) at their highest point, Jebel Akhdar (green mountain). The range only breaks at a few points, where drainage has created passes through the mountains. On the sea side of the mountains, a coastal plain known as the Batinah (al-Bāṭinah) fills the gentle arc at a width of twenty miles. The mountains draw close to the shore again, and the Batinah ends at an important pass—the Sumayl Gap—through the mountains, right before the twin ports of Muttrah and Muscat. The steep mountains plunging to the sea create the natural harbors of Muttrah and Muscat, and the Sumayl Gap is the broadest break in the mountains. Historically, Sumayl was a vital link between the coast and the interior for the movement of people and goods; control of the pass had military implications for the ruler and those who wished to challenge him.

The Omani interior lies between the landward side of the Hajar range and the desert forelands of central Arabia. This region was historically known as Oman, so the modern nation-state derives its name from its interior rather than its more famous coasts. Thus, referring to the “Omani interior” is something of neologism. In the interior, the mountains give way to a bajada zone of alluvial fans that reach out to a vast waterless plain before running into the desert sands.⁹ Primary settlements exist in the mountains, on the piedmont, and out in the plain. Movement along the outwash fans is much easier than crossing the mountains or the desert, facilitating exchange between interior settlements. In this sense, if we imagine the desert as the sea, the Omani interior shares characteristics with littoral societies: greater similarities in location, occupation, and culture to those on the littoral than to those in the hinterland.¹⁰ The interior settlements fall into two general regions, al-Dakhiliya and al-Sharqiya. Al-Dakhiliya (literally, “the interior”) is the central region, snugged south and west of the Jebel Akdhar massif. To the east, al-Sharqiya (literally, “the east”) is hemmed in by the Hajar Mountains to the north and east. The region gives way in the south to the Wahiba Sands. The Sumayl Gap connects Dakhilya and Sharqiya to the ports of Muscat and Muttrah, and Sharqiya also has a connection to the port of Sur to the southeast.

IBADISM

Another defining aspect of the Omani interior has been its religious character. Oman has been the home of Ibadi Islam for 1,200 years. Ibadism (Ibaḍiyya) is a sect that separated from mainstream Islam in 37 AH/657 CE, before the better-known divisions of Sunni and Shia took place. Ibadis refer to themselves as “the people of straightness” (ahl al-istiqāma), and they believe they are the practitioners of “the oldest and most authentic form of Islam.”¹¹ Ibadi theology centers on a longing for a righteous imam who scholars and pious leaders select to facilitate the believers’ ability to live in an ideal society defined by piety and justice.¹² Striving to achieve this righteous imamate has been a touchstone of Omani history, and Wilkinson has proposed an “Imamate Cycle” as a means to explain the Omani past. In this view, new imamates have strong ideological power, but when the ideological basis of the Ibadi imamate weakens, the struggle for power and wealth increases, and this struggle leads to 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 one that left Nizwa without any halwa in the 1840s ended the water supply to some aflaj when the water table fell. These were the kinds of ecological disruptions that temporarily reset Omani society. One can see a halting pattern throughout Omani history: villages were abandoned and reopened at different times when, either through good fortune or hard work, the falaj flowed again. Large-scale expansions of the falaj system tended to occur only when strong imams ruled with links to maritime trade. These were the conditions best suited to major extensive development and falaj building.²⁷

Along these lines, it is worth noting that the nineteenth century emerges as anomalous because new mobility resulted in both the abandonment of settlements (albeit sometimes temporarily) for the coast and for Africa, and in new sources of wealth linked to Indian Ocean commodity trades, which made it possible in a limited number of cases to renovate or extend aflaj. The advent of Omani rule in Africa broadened mobility and could relieve temporary pressure on precarious settlements.²⁸ Even in times of typical rainfall, however, falaj communities faced pressure to divide the irrigation supply fairly among many shareholders, to use the water efficiently, and to ensure the maintenance of the system. The way that each community made these compromises around the falaj system, Wilkinson has argued, reveals “some of the fundamental aspects of social organization in an Omani village.”²⁹

Extreme drought threatened the social organization of villages and the livelihoods of families. Individuals and families had to choose from among a range of limited options open to Omanis in the interior. As water courses slowed to a trickle—or dried up completely—families could no longer water fields, fruits, or fodder. Famine followed drought. Paradoxically, water was not always a blessing. Cyclones or hurricanes sometimes delivered massive deluges, and the compromised hydrology of the country made it vulnerable to flash floods that uprooted palm trees, damaged aflaj, and devastated settlements. Indeed, periodic environmental setbacks undercut livelihoods in interior Oman, and they also provided reasons to abandon settlements. In the nineteenth century, however, a new option presented itself: emigration from Oman to the burgeoning Arab settlement on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa, a route made possible by the Indian Ocean activities of their ruler, Said bin Sultan.

SAID BIN SULTAN AND THE INDIAN OCEAN CONTEXT

For interior Omanis, a new connection to the Indian Ocean world emerged in the nineteenth century because of changes in trade and alliances. Said bin Sultan bin Ahmed al-Busaidi was at the center of these changes. Known by the honorific seyyid (lord), Said had been the ruler of Muscat and its dependencies since 1804, and he had played an important role in an Omani commercial expansion.³⁰ While Europeans insisted on calling him the Imam of Muscat, he was never elected to that Ibadi rank. Instead he focused on external relations, continuing a tradition of Busaidi rulers. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Said’s grandfather, Ahmad, led the resistance to a Persian invasion and cast off the Omani Ya’arubi dynasty that had allowed the Persians in. These heroics—and Ahmad’s exemplary character—led to his election as Imam in the 1740s. Seyyid Said, his grandson, came to the throne through adroit personal maneuvering in the early years of the nineteenth century, and became Oman’s greatest sultan. Domestic politics in Arabia demanded smart tactics, and Said bin Sultan used the same political flair (and willingness to use force) to expand al-Busaidi control beyond Arabia. He deftly balanced the competing interests and animosities of four regions—Oman, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and East Africa—to rule an empire that connected three sides of the western Indian Ocean.³¹ His family and close allies controlled Oman’s principal towns and both sides of the Straits of Hormuz. Across the Arabian Sea, Oman’s Busaidi rulers claimed the Makran coast, in what is now part of Pakistan, and in the 1820s and 1830s, Said subdued the towns of the Swahili coast.

Seyyid Said was a ruler of international standing. He corresponded with Muhammad Ali, the pasha of Egypt, and Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States. He finalized commercial treaties with the United States, Britain, and France. In 1846, he sent his most trusted ambassador to New York City with a cargo of merchandise. In the Indian Ocean region, he sought strategic marriages with regional powers, taking a Persian royal for a bride, and he sent proposals to the widowed Sakalava Queen of western Madagascar.³² In Oman, he leveraged his power to check challenges on religious grounds, both from Omani Ibadis and from reformist Wahhabis outside his realm. In the Persian Gulf he battled other regional maritime powers and allied with Great Britain to suppress piracy.³³ After 1819, when Great Britain effectively limited the Omani role in the Persian Gulf trade and threatened the robust exchange between Muscat and the ports of western India, Said looked to Africa.³⁴

The relationship between eastern Arabia and East Africa was an enduring one. People from Arabia had settled on the east coast for more than a millennium, and slaves from the Swahili coast revolted in southern Iraq in the tenth century.³⁵ Monsoon winds propelled seasonal traders to Africa and back, and other Arab migrants established themselves on the Swahili coast in medieval city-states like Kilwa.³⁶ Direct Omani involvement in East Africa began after the Omani Arabs wrested the coast from the Portuguese in 1698. This involvement in East African affairs waxed and waned over the next two hundred years, dictated as much by politics in Arabia as by matters on the coast. Under the eighteenth-century Omani Ya’arubi dynasty, more Arabs had settled along the East African coast—especially from Lamu to Mombasa, and further south at Kilwa—as they were attracted by profits from trade. These settlers retained their loyalty to the Ya’arubi rulers even after the 1740s, when Imam Ahmad displaced them in Oman. During that period, Imam Ahmad tried to capture Mombasa, and he sent assassins from Oman to eliminate certain rulers, but he was unsuccessful.³⁷ It was tenacious Arab clans like these, foremost among them the Mazrui of Mombasa, that Said bin Sultan faced in the early nineteenth century when he attempted to assert al-Busaidi control over the coast.

Said had begun his conquest of East Africa in 1817, and he tried to balance Arab and European rivalries in the Persian Gulf and on the African coast, along with a tenuous domestic situation in the Omani interior. Once he secured Zanzibar, an island situated twenty miles from shore in the middle of the long Swahili coast, Seyyid Said used it as a base of operations. Some East African outposts, especially Mombasa, did not readily submit to al-Busaidi rule. Elsewhere on the Swahili coast by the late 1820s, Said had established effective control over important coastal towns, appointing a governor, a customs master, and in some cases, a garrison chief. Zanzibar was the most important for Said bin Sultan, and he moved his court from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1832. With this direct attention (and substantial intrigue), he was able to subdue the Swahili coast and exile the Mazrui governor of Mombasa and his followers to the Persian Gulf in 1837.³⁸

Despite his nominal control of both Arabia and East Africa, Said bin Sultan faced challenges to his rule from his subjects and from European political interests in the western Indian Ocean. In Arabia, he favored the coastal towns like Muscat, Muttrah, and Suhar, over the interior centers of Ibadi power, such as Nizwa and al-Rustaq. During his reign, Said bin Sultan failed to earn the confidence of Ibadi leaders, and he sought to balance their needs with the demands and attractions of Indian Ocean (and global) trade.³⁹ The Busaidis had aggressively pursued international trade since 1783, focusing more on Muscat and port cities than the interior. By moving their capital from al-Rustaq to Muscat in the eighteenth century, al-Busaidi rulers distanced themselves from the tribal politics of the interior.⁴⁰ Consequently, Muscat and its sister city Muttrah became vibrant, multicultural ports, attracting merchants, traders, and slaves from the Persian Gulf and the western Indian Ocean. A visitor in 1824 noted Muscat had become “a sort of emporium for the Coasts of Africa, Madagascar, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and India in general; and in being so, it has rather added to than diminished the trade of Cutch, Surat, Bombay, &c.”⁴¹ The strong connection to India was clear: this observer noted that the lingua franca of Muscat was Hindustani, and the only Arabic speakers were native Arabs, whom he called “by far the smallest portion of the inhabitants.” ⁴²

Within Arabia, Said had to contend with the threat of Wahhabi pressure. The violent, reformist ideology that Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab expounded in the eighteenth century became the theological basis for the expansion of Muhammad bin Sa’ud’s state from highland central Arabia. The Wahhabi antagonized the Ottomans to their north and the Omanis to their east.

Said bin Sultan’s challenges in Arabia from the Wahhabi forces demonstrated the complex calculus of local and regional rivals. Between 1800 and 1820, the area around Wadi Ma‘awil was home to a series of violent destructive conflicts. The Wahhabi attacks on the well-watered date-farming region at the southern end of the Batinah coast and the areas northwest of Muscat and near Wadi Sumayl were retribution for Said bin Sultan’s activity in the gulf. Said bin Sultan had allied with the East India Company in 1809 to thwart his rivals the Qawasim of Ras al-Khayma and their Wahhabi allies.⁴³ When the East India Company’s ships withdrew, however, the Wahhabi staged multiple punitive expeditions against Oman, and the Wadi Ma‘awil was hit hard. In response to the Wahhabi alliance with Said’s local rivals, the Omani ruler requested military support from the Persian shah and received 1,500 cavalrymen.⁴⁴ Some of the pitched battles lasted nearly two weeks. Foreign troops occupied local settlements, and fighting spilled into the marketplace.⁴⁵ Both sides destroyed their enemies’ date plantations, cutting down trees in contravention of Ibadi laws of war, and crushing the local agricultural economy.⁴⁶ Seyyid Said failed to bring peace when he captured the fort at Nakhl, because the governor he appointed abused the local populace. They insisted that the governor be removed or they would emigrate, but the replacement was also cruel.⁴⁷ Even as Said bin Sultan launched attacks on Bahrain in the gulf, the war in Wadi al-Ma‘awīl continued until the late 1810s when, after sending a large contingent from Sharqiya, Said bin Sultan negotiated a temporary settlement in the region.⁴⁸ The fight with the Wahhabi and their allies threatened Said bin Sultan’s rule and destabilized the local population. These rivalries also pushed Said bin Sultan to ally frequently with British forces, and he spent much of his career negotiating with Europeans in the Indian Ocean.

As with domestic forces, Said engaged in a subtle balancing act with European nations, and his move to Africa brought him into closer contact with them. He sought trading advantages through commercial treaties, but he tried to limit the role of European traders, especially in his African dependencies. For much of his reign, Europeans were forbidden from trading on the African mainland. He funneled all business through Zanzibar. There, Indian merchants and financiers, some of whom had followed him from Muscat (where their families had lived for generations), oversaw trade on behalf of Said, and they imposed customs duties on all goods. In Oman, foreign merchants were limited to the port cities. In the 1840s, British traders desired direct access to the products of the African mainland, and their government wanted to curtail the slave trade. Said bin Sultan signed treaties in 1822 and 1845 to limit the trade of slaves within his dominion. Although these treaties only applied to European subjects and did not prohibit Said’s subjects from keeping, selling, or transporting slaves within East Africa, the measures were not popular in Said’s African territories. European observers noted the limited strength of the Zanzibari state and its inability to control Africa beyond its primary trading ports.

Said had been forced to balance these interests and strategize among their connections to maintain his precarious command of these far-flung realms. To maintain his interests, he often needed to be present in Arabia or Africa, and even after he had moved his court to Zanzibar in 1832, events in Oman or the Persian Gulf frequently beckoned him north. Such absences, dependent on the twice-yearly monsoon winds to facilitate his voyage, could easily stretch over a year. Seyyid Said’s rule thus relied upon loyal governors, mercenaries, and tax collectors. When Said traveled, he did so warily, sometimes insisting that rivals from tribal factions, prominent families, or learned Ibadi ulama travel with him.⁴⁹ In this increasingly connected Indian Ocean world of Seyyid Said’s dominions, the ruler compelled some elites to move with him. Others, facing desperate circumstances, chose to move in his wake.

Temporizing in the Face of Drought

The drought that struck across the Nizwa region in the 1840s created dwindling resources and mounting desperation. People had to make choices about their very survival, and their reactions to the drought demonstrate how and why mobility became a solution. In Manaḥ, seven miles from Nizwa, the prolonged drought dried up seven of the eight springs that watered the town. Formerly cultivated land lay in ruin, and the lack of water destroyed date groves. Dead trees marked the approach to the walled town, where two-storied stone and mud houses lined the narrow streets. In wetter, more prosperous times, the settlement had produced sugar cane in abundance. In the small date groves that persisted, the people had no spare fodder for the animals. Only one plantation northeast of town continued to flourish, presumably because it had access to the only remaining water source. Want of water reduced the population in Manaḥ. In the decade of drought (1835–45), the town lost half of its population: only 500 residents remained.⁵⁰

As the drought’s realities set in, people had to make difficult choices about how to use the water that came from the falaj and how to guarantee their own survival. We have no intimate portrait of drought in the interior during the first half of the nineteenth century. Given the continuities of agriculture and life ways, however, a more recent example provides a basis for comparison. The experience of the village of Ghayzayn, in Wadi Hawasina on the eastern side of the Hajar Mountains, where “drought began to erode the wealth of the community” in the 1970s, is illustrative.⁵¹

The people of Ghayzayn, having faced three years without rainfall, initially tried to use water more efficiently. They opened only one of the two irrigation streams from the falaj, halving the normal irrigation cycle. Next, they filled a cistern above the falaj to increase the flow when they did let the water run. As the months wore on, however, decreased irrigation took its toll. Young palms, which were future assets, died, as did the lime trees growing with them. Villagers took more drastic steps, allowing crops to wither. They first cut water to their field crops (wheat, tomatoes, and onion) and then to their fodder crop (alfalfa). All the remaining water was used for date palms, but the year’s yield was nevertheless diminished. The drought’s effects were both immediate and ongoing. Dates and alfalfa served as feed for domestic animals; the poor date harvest and lack of fodder led to the sale of livestock.⁵²

In addition to the short- and medium-term hits to household economies, the drought created difficult living conditions and exacerbated infrastructural problems. As the volume of water fell in the falaj, the water contained more dirt, and women had to walk further upstream to get drinking water that was only marginally cleaner. The only other source of drinking water, a shallow well in the wadi, had dried up in the early days of the drought.⁵³

The falaj also suffered. Unsealed channels lost more water to infiltration when underground water in the wadi disappeared. Less flow and more dirt resulted in faster silting. The channel needed to be relined and cleaned, and falaj repair was expensive. The village had already delayed maintenance before the rains stopped. Raising money for repair was even more difficult in the depths of the drought. The longer the people waited, the more difficult the falaj was to repair.⁵⁴

While some members of the community were optimistic that the rain would eventually return, clouds of pessimism hung over the village. The drought “had broken the spirit of the community, and many had begun to accept an inevitable end to the settlement.” Three families left the community as the drought set in, and many others prepared to do so. In a village of five hundred people, this was a tremendous demographic shift. The people who departed were “some of the most dynamic and astute economically,” so the loss to the community was in disproportion to the number who left.⁵⁵

Although this example comes from the early 1970s, the fact that the village relied so heavily on the falaj and on irrigation provides important insights into the process a century before. Where the people of Ghayzayn used cash remittances to pay for the water, dates, and alfalfa brought in by land rover, individuals in Nizwa and Manaḥ in the nineteenth century did not have these options. The author of the modern study suggests that people in the past, with fewer options, would have most certainly have taken earlier action to repair the falaj and to protect their crops.⁵⁶ Judging by the extreme drought in Nizwa in the 1840s, however, the people’s ability to palliate was limited; every aspect of their lives was affected; and departure—if only until the end of the drought—was a ready solution. For example, a half century earlier, during an intense drought in the late eighteenth century, date palms died, and some Arabs, like Nasir bin Ahmad al-Riyami, abandoned small villages for larger interior settlements.⁵⁷ Others, including “the greater portion of the inhabitants,” fled from the interior to coastal towns in the Batinah and near Muscat. In the port city trading town of Muttrah the recent arrivals drove up the price of well water. When the drought broke, they returned home.⁵⁸ Likewise for the Nizwans, some took temporary refuge at the coast and, given the new circumstances in Africa, others may have made their way there.

Be Careful What You Wish For

The solution to the eighteenth-century drought that had displaced interior Omanis and driven up well water prices in Muttrah was intercession from the sultan. Hamed bin Said al-Busaidi (r. 1784–1792) took decisive action to end the drought: he gathered people and led them in prayer for rain in three different wadis around Muscat on three subsequent days. As a result, “clouds covered the sky, and the rain descended, as if poured from buckets.” Hamed bin Said mounted his horse and rode quickly back to his house in Muscat before waters coursed down the wadis and washed into the sea. The outcome in this case was favorable—great fertility followed, crops were abundant, and prices were low.⁵⁹ Some storms, however, brought too much rain, and the consequences of downpours were also dire.

Evidence from the nineteenth century shows that, in the face of devastating flash floods in Oman, out-migration to East Africa increased. One exception to this was the Sumayl valley, where a newly robust market for their particular dates created economic resiliency. In most other regions of the interior, however, environmental damage prompted some to move across the Indian Ocean. In general, most Omanis welcomed rain. In 1835, a cold drenching rain from a December downpour delighted the Jenebeh of eastern Oman by ensuring pasturage for the coming months.⁶⁰ People knew that violent rains sometimes fell, and the community expected them with some regularity, as often as every three years. These rains turned the valleys into dangerous streams, so swollen and swift that camels could not pass through them.⁶¹

Voluminous, unseasonable rains could also turn sinister and flash floods in wadis could carry date palms and houses as far as the sea. Writing in the early twentieth century, Ibadi scholar and historian Abdullah bin Humayd al-Salimi recounted Oman’s worst flood, a heavy June downpour in 251 (Hegira) / 865 that swept down the wadis, washed away whole villages, pulled date palms from their roots, and carried bodies out to the sea. The same floods inundated the aflaj.⁶² In addition to the immediate loss of life and livelihood, floods compromised the irrigation system by damaging watercourses, filling them with detritus, and hastening the silting of the falaj.⁶³ Damage to aflaj increased the cost of maintaining the water source. Beyond their economic consequences, floods and storms contributed to out migration from Oman across the Indian Ocean in an era of new mobility.

Data from the 1870s suggest a variable pattern of heavy rains and storms that destroyed large numbers of date palms, dismantled houses, and led to transoceanic emigration. In 1874 and 1875, unseasonably heavy rains destroyed the date crop in central Oman. The next year, however, rains fell plentifully at the appropriate time (at the beginning of the year), and this precipitation pattern promised an abundant date harvest.⁶⁴ The following year, severe storms in December flattened five thousand date palms in the Ma‘awīl and Sumayl valleys.⁶⁵ At that time the Sumayl valley was rapidly expanding its production of fard dates for the United States market. In 1875, an American visitor to Muscat estimated that six million pounds of dates traveled from Muscat to New York that year.⁶⁶ Farmers in Sumayl discovered that they could sell all the dates that they could harvest, and the value of this export peaked in the 1880s.⁶⁷ Thus, while we have insufficient data to quantify the effects of a storm that toppled five thousand palms, it is likely that the loss of thousands of trees producing the region’s most valuable export devastated some residents.

In the following season—from 1877 to 1878—heavy floods overran “the whole of Oman,” and the country’s date crop was almost entirely lost. The environmentally marginal Sharqiya region was hardest hit, with an estimated crop loss of 90 percent. Surrounding districts suffered almost as much. By harvest time, the specter of famine was clear, and the British resident in Muscat expected distress and possible political disturbances.⁶⁸ While political grievances simmered, some people whose lives depended on date farming in the 1870s made the same decision as those who faced the catastrophic drought in Nizwa the 1840s: they left their homes. In Muscat, observers reported a steady emigration to Zanzibar. Between 1877 and 1878, an estimated one thousand Arabs decamped in response to the poor date harvest.⁶⁹

In March 1885, a cyclone hit central Oman, inundating villages and settlements. A flash flood ripped down the Sumayl valley, destroyed thousands of date trees, and rendered homeless the poorest inhabitants who lived in makeshift shelters of matted palm leaves. The recovery from such destruction was slow. Nine months later, a visitor still found wrecked houses, ruined date gardens, and many headless palm trees broken or bent to the ground.⁷⁰ The strong international market in fard dates from Sumayl may have been a saving grace. In response to demand in the 1870s, farmers in Sumayl had greatly increased the number of date trees they planted. The loss of thousands of trees was proportionately smaller than the preceding decade’s loss. Still, Sumayl producers exhibited some resilience, probably because of the thriving production and high prices of dates. Throughout the 1880s, the date trade to the United States was at its peak, averaging more than $100,000 per year. The producers earned about 80 percent of the export value.⁷¹ Unfortunately for most Omanis, the lucrative, particularistic market for fard dates from Sumayl had no cognates in other sectors of the economy. As the nineteenth century closed, Sumayl fell more in line with the rest of the country, as both local political disturbances and a North American recession significantly diminished export earnings.⁷² This set the groundwork for waves of emigration to East Africa that would continue until the 1960s.

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What conclusions should we draw from the people of Oman’s relationship to their environment in the nineteenth century? The sometimes tenuous balance that Omanis sought in maintaining their date groves and their livelihoods faced the same challenges in the nineteenth century as they had in previous periods. Droughts and floods were endemic. What was strikingly different about this era, however, was that Indian Ocean emigration was an option for many more people than it had ever been before. A close connection between the interior of Oman and Zanzibar and other East African locales became firmly established during this period. For example, Nasir bin Ahmad al-Riyami escaped drought in the eighteenth century by moving his family from the village of Al Jede’iya to the larger settlement of upper Ibra (Ibrā‘ ‘Alaya). After Said bin Sultan had paved the way to East Africa in the early nineteenth century, however, Nasir bin Ahmad led his family there in the 1820s, and his family prospered.⁷³ Africa became a refuge and a source of wealth. The degree to which environmental difficulties prompted people to move is hard to isolate, yet the extreme droughts of the 1840s and the destructive, variable rain patterns of the 1870s both preceded periods of Arab migration. Desiccated water sources and ruined date groves put individuals and families in precarious conditions. When their homes and farms were unsustainable, and an absent sultan was unable to lead prayers for rain, Omani Arabs could temporize. Moves to the Arabian coast and to East Africa bought time for droughts to end, rain to come, and land to revive.

Following historian Claude Markowitz’s terminology, this movement should be seen as a pattern of circulation.⁷⁴ Some Arabs did settle in East Africa, but emigration began as a response to particular factors in Oman, and nothing suggests that individuals left Arabia with no intent of returning. As we shall see, some of these migrants used wealth gained abroad to invest in their homelands. Some renovated aflaj or built new ones, while others underwrote the construction of impressive houses. Far from being isolated, the interior of Arabia continued to be connected to the Indian Ocean world, not just through the circulation of goods, but also through the circulation of people, their wealth, and the religious and political ideologies that motivated them. By understanding the temporizing strategies that individuals pursued in the face of difficult conditions, we can appreciate the contingent nature of mobility in the western Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century. The evidence of this mobility can be found among the former halwa-makers of the caravan routes of central Africa, and in the business contracts that these men and women from drought-stricken Nizwa and other places wrote in Zanzibar. The sweetness of halwa must wait, and it is to these deeds and the world they describe that we now turn.