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servir la pensée ibadite en valorisant l’héritage de la civilisation de la vallée du M’zab, à travers la préservation et la transmission du patrimoine...

This paper presents the main results of the 2023 excavations at Site 73 / 66 in the Liwa hinterlands (northern Oman) undertaken by the WAJAP team. Excavations focused on domestic buildings dating to the Umm an-Nar and Wadi Suq period. Here, the buildings and the deposits found within them will be discussed.

Not Sunnis and not Shi’is, the Ibāḍī Muslims of Oman and some areas of North Africa form a “third branch” of Islam, with their own version of the Sharīʿa law. The development of this law displays many interconnections with the political history of the Ibāḍīs, which spanned from an independent sultanate in Oman, through minority status under Sunni rule in Tunisia and Libya, to isolated desert communities in Algerian Sahara. This article gives an overview over such interconnections between the political (state authority) and the legal, through history and in contemporary North Africa, with some examples of legal discussions from the “Ibāḍī renaissance” (nahḍa) in the twentieth-century Saharan oasis of Mzab.

In the Sahara, the oasis of Mzab is the home of a small minority of Berber-speaking Muslims, the Ibadis. Long time isolated, they were for the first time integrated into what became “Algeria” with French colonialism. This raised the challenge for the religious and worldly authorities of the community: Should they resist integration into the new larger entity, or should they join in a wider, national struggle for Islamic renewal? How should they relate to the foreign, French authorities? This seminar will place the Mzab in Ibadi history, and trace how the community responded to these challenges during the twentieth century.

During the early nineteenth century, the Omani outpost of Zanzibar emerged as a leading marketplace in the Western Indian Ocean. The island's economic expansion depended heavily on a community of well-connected Indian merchants. The port's rising fortunes also attracted traders from farther afield. By 1826, American merchants had reached the island. Although Americans had decades of experience in the region, they struggled to turn a profit on Zanzibar. Over time, American traders realized that commercial success depended on a strong relationship with the island's Indian community. By the 1840s, the American consul, Richard Waters, and Zanzibar's custom master, Jairam Shivji, had formed a lucrative arrangement exchanging commodities. Waters, Shivji, and their peers developed a commercial framework that melded key precepts of Indian Ocean trade with their Atlantic equivalents. Aided by bilingual commodity contracts, trade between the United States and Zanzibar flourished. In time, the island served as a crucial springboard for American ventures to India. With the help of Parsi firms, Waters and his successors incorporated Bombay into their trade routes. In turn, the city's economic expansion reshaped trade in East Africa. By the American Civil War, commercial intelligence and British credit from Bombay contributed to Americans' success on Zanzibar.

Originally published in English in 1928, this volume deals mainly with Anglo-German relations at the end of the 19th Century. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s voice can be heard clearly in the documents which give an extensive picture of the alternating phases of relations between Great Britain and Germany, as influenced by their respective obligations and interests in the international issues which united or divided the Powers over a period of twenty years. The strongest impression which these documents leave is the revelation of how greatly the mentality of the western world changed since they were drafted, and especially during the decade which came after World War I. The shaping of policy, as exhibited in these despatches and memoranda, is governed almost exclusively by the ultimate idea of war as the deciding factor. The menace of war and the prospects of success or failure in aggression or defence appear to be the essential motives of policy.

Most sociological and ethnographical studies of Israeli Mizrahim are disconnected from those of Sephardic and MENA Jewish communities worldwide. Rooted in academic cultures that predate the country's establishment, Mizrahi history in Israel is often deemed either a success story or a shameful story of marginalization in these communities' global histories, and as a sui generis case of Jewish migration. We trace the early origins of this seemingly arbitrary disconnect to nineteenth-century European scholarship on "Sephardic" turned "Oriental" Jews and follow its subsequent entrenchment not only in Mandate Palestine and Israel but also in the United States. By focusing on key scholars working across transregional networks, we show how a Sephardic bias evolved into disciplinary divisions that have constrained the development of MENA Jewish studies. Finally, we call for renewed attention to the historical and contemporary patterns of separation, diffusion, and diasporic mobility that have long characterized MENA Jewish communities.

This article aims to study whether the increase of agricultural settlements in the Sultanate of Oman during the Late Islamic period (c. 1500-1950) was related to pre-oil globalization, as attested in the wider Gulf region. This is done by analysing the archaeological dataset of the agricultural village of Sahlat, with a focus on the ceramic material, located in the Suhar region. The assemblages collected by the Wadi al-Jizzi Archaeological Project, point to its occupation from c. 1750 to 1930. During this time period, the coastal towns of southeastern Arabia were heavily influenced by globalization processes, but the effects and reach of trade on rural communities remains poorly known. In this paper, Sahlat is compared to two contemporary sites connected to the same falaj system, and two other sites in the Gulf region. The results indicate that pre-oil globalization did not only impact coastal towns, but that rural settlements such as Sahlat experienced similar transformations. It is suggested that pre-oil globalization was not only linked to the pearling trade, but that the export of dates should also be taken into consideration when studying this topic.

The Dhofar region in the southwest of Oman is a peculiar, and special, corner of Arabia. It represents the eastern-most extent of the highland spine of Arabia which extends down the west coast and then swings eastwards through Yemen. Traditionally Dhofar had more to do with areas to its west than to the rest of Oman, with social and linguistic connections to areas in modern-day Yemen. Likewise, Dhofar is a primarily Sunni Muslim area in contrast to the Ibadism dominant in the north of Oman. T...

Studies on post-slavery in East Africa often concentrate on the aftermath of slavery for the formerly enslaved. By contrast, former owners’ experiences after abolition and during emancipation are rarely explored. This article examines the trajectories of Omani Arabs in western Tanzania during and after the end of slavery, ca. 1910 to the late twentieth century. Having settled and built slavelabour plantations along the central caravan route in the nineteenth century, they relocated to rural areas between the 1920s and 1930s following the legal abolition of slavery and great economic depression. To tell their story in postslavery Tanzania, we drew examples from primary sources deposited in the archives of Tanzania and the United Kingdom, and oral interviews collected from the many villages in rural western Tanzania where the Omanis’ descendants now live. We show that the history of the Omani Arabs and their identity in twentieth-century western Tanzania was shaped by economic dispossession and uncertainty about citizenship, but also by evolving cultural identities and sustained social networking.

On October 15, 1912, a little over twenty years after Zanzibar was declared a British protectorate, Theodore Burtt, a Christian missionary in Pemba, a sister island to Zanzibar, sent a letter to the British consul general in Stone Town, Zanzibar’s capital. The letter addressed two concerns: how to manage marriage among “native” Christian converts and whether the marriages conducted by the mission were valid under “Mohammedan law” (ZNA AB 30/7). But the main concern of the mission, according to the letter writer, was that the “present lawless promiscuous cohabitation between the sexes, and separation again, often for trifling causes and...

In Oman, Bangladeshis are now the most important community of migrants among South Asians. Among them are fishermen who represent a paradigmatic example of the difficult situation most low skilled workers have to face in the Gulf countries. Based on fieldworks in Hatiya, a small island of the Bay of Bengal from where these fishermen are originating, and in several harbours of Oman, I intend to highlight the different mechanisms which make migration a very risky gamble for these men. From the recruitment process through local networks, the conditions of work and salaries, the unavoidable path to an irregular status and eventually the arrest and deportation of most of these workers, I propose to show how, structurally, their migratory experience almost always leads to failure and increased poverty.

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While most West European nations were formed around pre-existing entities that could be called “countries” before the modern age, this was not the case in the Middle East. Some entities, like Egypt, did have a clear political and cultural identity before colonialism, others, like Algeria, did not. This chapter discusses the four states of the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, through the perspective of “country creation” going into and coming out of colonial rule. We can see here two “models” of fairly similar types of historical development, one showing a gradual process through a protectorate period to relatively stable modern nations, another through violent conquest and direct colonization ending in violent liberation and military and wealthy but fragile states. The article asks whether these models for the history of country creation and the presence or absence of pre-colonial identities can help explain the modern history and nature of these states in the Arab Spring and the years thereafter. Then, a more tentative attempt is made to apply these models to two countries of the Arab east, Syria and Iraq. While local variations ensure that no model can be transferred directly, it can show the importance of studying the historical factors that go into the transition from geographical region to a country with people that can form the basis of a nation.