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This article examines conflicting notions of political home or homeland (waṭan) in the early twentieth-century Western Indian Ocean. In a period of colonial consolidation and shifts in trans-oceanic mobility, determining political belonging took on urgency for both British officials and Omani intellectuals and migrants. This article examines how, in contrast to both anti-colonial nationalists and British colonial officials, homeland in Omani religious scholarship was neither bounded territorially nor articulated through origins or subjecthood. Yet, it was spatial, affective, and hierarchically determined. And, it was manifest, embodied, and performed in the daily requirements of prayer. Spatial but not territorial, necessary but personally, hierarchically, and affectively decided, this pious notion of homeland has for the most part been replaced by the nation-state form. Yet, legacies of attachment to waṭan outside the bounded territorial model occasionally surface, operating as a simultaneous, but not synonymous, expression of political and personal belonging.
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In January 1964, on the heels of its formal independence from Britain, the East African island of Zanzibar exploded in a violent uprising ousting the Al-Bu Saidi sultan—an Omani by descent—and his primarily “Arab” government. Though early reports of the revolution did not indicate targeted attacks against Arabs, it soon became clear that thousands of Arab-identified residents—settlers—were killed, mostly in rural areas. 1 Others, including some families I came to know during my years in interior Oman, described being separated from their families or being captured and taken to detention camps, where they stayed a week or two before being reunited. Some found their way to these camps in search of relatives, shelter, and food. 2 Decades later, the chaos and violence of that time was recounted to me with unnerving directness. Eventually, thousands of Arabs were deported or fled—to Kenya, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Muscat and Oman. Muscat, on the coast of Oman, was the seat of the other Al-Bu Saidi sultan—a cousin of the Zanzibar sultan—who had only recently taken control of “Oman proper,” the territory of the Imamate whose ruler was now in exile in Saudi Arabia having been defeated in a war with the Sultan of Muscat. In the meantime, those leaving Zanzibar required ships and documents.
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This paper examines official and personal Omani accounts of the 1964 Zanzibari revolution and its aftermath. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Oman and Zanzibar, official and local histories in Oman as well as archival documents in London and Zanzibar, it explores understandings and descriptions of the revolution's causes, its perpetrators, and its victims. Though Zanzibar gained independence from Britain in 1963, many African-identified Zanzibaris feared that the subsequent parliamentary elections would simply reinstate the island's “Arab” elite. And, indeed, in January 1964, in the aftermath of the elections, armed revolt broke out, leading to the massacre and expulsion of thousands of people who were popularly identified as “Arab”. This event, and especially later news that officials of the new post-independence Zanzibari state were forcing some remaining Arab women to marry them and encouraging other men to do the same, have left indelible marks on personal and national accounts of Oman's past in East Africa. Undoubtedly, such accounts of violence have helped shape national identity through a sense of shared trauma and victimhood. However, many questions remain: What are the differences between accounts of those who were either witness to or contemporaries of these events and accounts of those, much younger Omanis, who were notṣ How are social, political, and economic hierarchies and resentments presentedṣ How are they occludedṣ And, to what affectsṣ This paper illustrates how different Omani accounts of the Zanzibari revolution also often reveal personal and national nostalgia for life in East Africa, reflect people's subtle attempts to grapple with the political, social, and economic conditions of the revolution's eruption, and indicate tensions and hierarchies between various groups of Omanis who had lived in East Africa. Ultimately, this paper also argues that in addition to helping to shape a shared yet fragile national identity, accounts of the violence of the Zanzibar revolution have sometimes reinforced and sometimes raised doubts about notions of a shared Omani “Arabness”.
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This dissertation is about a town in Southern Arabia and the ways that gendered sociality and infrastructural transformation meet and become mediated through peoples' understandings of local history and religious values. Focusing on the mundane social world of neighborhood women in the town of Bahla in the oil-rich state of the Sultanate of Oman, I analyze how memories and interpretations of urban life play out in relation to people and practices understood to be at the margins of shifts that have come to define a town's contemporary history. The subjects of this dissertation are housewives, divorcees and widows who inhabit the town through their daily visiting, exchanges and stories. Their activities and conversations demonstrate unintended effects and re-workings of development projects, discourses and policies, as well as multiple, subtle and contradictory ways that the past is entangled in daily lives. Each chapter of this dissertation is structured along two intersecting axes. On the one hand, I focus on the material structures and technologies that Bahlawis associate with development and modernity, and, on the other, I examine related aspects of the mundane social world of women. Tacking back and forth between the two allows me both to investigate the materiality of abstract notions such as development and modernity, and to provide an account of the mundane and quotidian. Examining the material incarnations of development, such as settlement patterns and roads, plastic thermoses, abundant coffee, schools and piped water entangled in women's daily encounters, as well as discourses (including religious) surrounding these icons of development illustrates the complex ways they are helping to shape and being shaped by gendered sociality. Bringing these two axes together highlights how gendered sociality is not only, as numerous studies on women's networks have illustrated, a site in which one can observe social organization or mechanisms of solidarity and hierarchy. This dissertation argues that the configurations of sociality are also historically contingent as well as objects of shifting discourses, notions and practices of development, domesticity, heritage, history and religion.
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This paper explores how different natural resources figure in temporal imaginings. I ask: how do oil and water come to frame the relationships and chronologies of transformation and, more particularly, of causality? In order to understand visions of environmental futures, not only might we need to attend to the forms of planning, expectation, and prognosis that shape knowledge or senses of the future, but we may also consider how and why causality and significant events are associated with particular natural resources. Drawing on my previous work that explores the future orientation of oil-depletion talk in Oman as well as textual sources and ethnography, I argue that while water has been associated with pious rule and divine presence, oil has been considered to be much more transitory and the product of human interventions and policies, interventions and policies that emerge from a fraught political history. While water seems to motivate events and cause change, serving as an indication and vehicle of God's power, oil appears less a cause of national transformation, at least in its origins.
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