a mind map of crusades and their contribution to revival of learning europe.
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In July 1970, the Sultan of Muscat and Oman was chased through his palace in Salalah by a contingent from his country’s Desert Regiment. Barricading himself in a room, Said bin Taimur was warned that, should he not surrender, he would be burned to death with a phosphorous grenade. With four bullet wounds and no feasible defence against the British-organised coup, the sultan acquiesced. He signed his abdication document and was taken to the Dorchester Hotel in London, where he died two years later of natural causes.
On the day that he was deposed in this violent coup, the sultan’s son, Qaboos, having agreed to the forced deposition of his father, spoke to the country he now ruled:
Yesterday it was complete darkness and with the help of God, tomorrow will be a new dawn on Muscat, Oman and its people.
July 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of this address. With the death of Qaboos in January, the story of his ascension to the throne reveals not only the longevity of Britain’s imperial interventionism during a supposed era of imperial decline, but also the resolution of a conflict at the heart of Oman’s fractious history.
Two conflicting historical and political traditions came into conflict in Oman during the 20th century and were resolved by the accession of Qaboos. The country’s interior was a stronghold for the Ibadhi Islamic tradition, which opposes sultanic rule. Yet Oman’s coastal areas – in particular its capital, Muscat – embraced sultanic rule, maritime trade and international exchange.
The history of Ibadhism as an Islamic sect begins with the crisis and civil war that followed the death of Muhammad. While Sunni and Shia split over Muawiyah’s claim to be the Fourth Caliph instead of Ali, a breakaway movement of Ali’s followers formed a secessionist group. The Kharijites opposed Ali’s decision to submit his conflict with Muawiyah to arbitration after the Battle of Siffin in AD 657. To the Kharijites, political arbitration by mortals could not subvert what they perceived to be the will of God: Ali’s legitimate leadership. One section within this group disagreed with the violent and exclusionary principles of the wider Kharijite movement that led to Ali’s assassination. This moderate strain called itself Ibadhi, deriving its name from the Basra-based scholar Abd Allah ibn Ibad.
Ibadhism formally established itself around 750 in the south-east of the Arabian peninsula, in what is now Oman. Before this, decades of political dispute with Ummayad authorities had pushed Ibadhi scholars out of Iraq and into Oman, where they created the first Imamate of Oman with its centre in Nizwa. This polity held unique core principles. One was the free election of an imam who would be an amalgamation of a religious and political leader, ruling through a process of shura, or consultation. Ibadhi political thought completely opposed the idea of hereditary succession and despotic rule by a king or sultan.
The imamate had its spiritual foundations and sovereignty in the land of Oman. It fought both the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates and later, colonial powers, in defence of this sovereignty. The election of the first Imam of Oman, al-Julanda bin Mas’ud, took place in the eighth century and the process was repeated intermittently until the 20th century. However, in Oman’s coastal regions, another polity would emerge based on hereditary rule with a different history.
The coastal cities and ports of Oman have long been the sites of international expansion, exchange and diplomacy. Muscat was the site for the expansion of the maritime Omani Empire, which at its 19th-century peak would stretch from the Arabian Gulf to East Africa and include parts of modern Iran. Omani settlers arrived in East Africa and began slave trading in the 16th century. When, in the 17th century, Portuguese colonial powers were expelled from Muscat, they were also expelled from areas in East Africa which Muscat took under its dominion. After the Omani Empire’s dissolution in the 19th century, the British organised the division of the East African dominions from the Gulf in 1861.