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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