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During the 3rd millennium BC, a series of oases located along the western foothills of the al-Hajar Mountains saw the establishment of intensive human occupation, associated with the construction of large buildings (the so-called “towers”) and residential structures. These settlements were supported by the onset of agriculture and their development was often associated with and made possible by the introduction of substantial water management systems, including simple wells and complex, large ditches. The oasis of Salūt, near Bisya in the central Sultanate of Oman, is one such Early Bronze Age (EBA) centre. There, extensive investigation of ancient hydraulic structures provided an opportunity to study contexts preserving significant information on ancient climate change and water availability, from the late 3rd to the second half of the 1st millennium BC. A geoarchaeological investigation targeted the huge ditch surrounding the EBA stone tower of Salūt-ST1. Its complete layout was revealed and large portions were fully excavated, allowing the documentation of its infillings and the geological substratum. At the same time, wells excavated at the bottom of the ditch witness the attempt to cope with the lowering water table at the turn of the 3rd millennium BC. Exploration of Iron Age (IA) wells, paired with the geoarchaeological study of sediments from the plain, further extended the chronological scope of the research, while a survey of the area identified ancient and more recent underground and open-air channels, including the exceptional radiometric dating for the introduction of the aflaj (the local term – plural – for the underground water tunnels) network serving the oasis in the late Holocene. This contribution presents the first synthesis including fresh data on how water was harvested and managed in the area of Salūt over almost two millennia, with a diachronic approach that finds little parallels in the region.

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.

Background This work emerged from a need to better understand the “lived experience” of early marriage for girls and how it should impact on contemporary attitudes in the Muslim community and encourage it to support the international movement with the aim of a minimum common age of 18 years for marriage of young people. Objective To identify from contemporary published literature, including autobiographies and religious texts dealing specifically with early marriage, the effects of early marriage on individuals and to set this as a background to the extensive literature on its medical, psychological and social impact. Participants and setting: The setting is the published words of two women and a man who were involved in early marriages and a commentary on the topic by an Ibadi theologian. Methods The documents were identified through searching a range of databases using various search engines. Texts were then analysed for key terms describing the impact of early marriage and these were then grouped into themes. Findings The extracts raise questions linked to the issue of consent and the role of adult coercion, including physical force and threat of harm. In practice girls are given in marriage by their guardians against their wishes and international conventions on the rights and care of children, as well as that outlined in Qur’an 4 v6. Conclusion Modern Muslim states face a real challenge in implementing 18 as the minimum age for marriage, especially in how to manage opposition to appropriate new legislation from some traditionalist groups.

The following paper covers a topic seldom studied in detail, namely the ruins locally known as al-Asnam (“the Idols”) of the funerary monuments from the Roman settlement of Cydamus, as well as the few related architectural elements reused as spolia in the actual town oasis of Ghadames (Libya). The dispersal of most of them and the strong deterioration of the rude mortared rubble core preserved in situ, now stripped of their ashlar masonry, make it difficult to reconstruct the lost architecture of these funeral monuments. But detailed studies of the preserved data and, going forward, the formal and metrical coincidences with best preserved tombs with arcaded portico elevating on a cubic basement conserved in the Ghirza necropolis and in other sites of predesertic Tripolitania, allows us to make reliable assumptions about the original images of these monuments. The paper will analyse the most significant spolia recorded during the surveys, such as peculiar capitals with heavy square-ended abacuses, plain and spirally fluted shafts, friezes and head-arches with carved geometric and phytomorphic patterns and iconographic subjects, mainly to re-create the virtual image of these funeral monuments and to define their chronological framework, that fits with the historical transformations and the wider cultural, social and economic dynamics of late Roman Tripolitania. The simple reiteration of flat and simplified decorative ensemble, the archaising representation of the wealth status of the client élite and the conscious references to classical models all emphasize the prestige of their monuments, which have been passed down from the late IV and V centuries. They can all be seen to be linked to the process of transmission of new models through the main caravan route still actively connecting the Libyan coast to the south of the region.

This research presents a preliminary study on qiyas (analogy) in the Ibadi School, focusing on the second century A. H. in which Abū ʿUbaydah Muslim bin Abī Karīmah and his students were present. It has shown that the school paid early attention to analogy. Abū ʿUbaydah, al-Rabīʿ, and Ibn ʿAbd al- ʿAzīz used it to varying degrees, and the latter one comes in the forefront of those who used it abundantly. Abū ʿUbaydah initially expressed reservations, due to the absence of standardized values, and the fear of adopting whims as a hidden premise for analogy, especially if the matter was related to dimāʾ (killing life) and furūj (private parts). However, the applied practices of what later became known to the uṣūlī scholars as the qiyas al-ʿillah wa al-dalālah (analogy of cause and indication) were evident in Abū ʿUbaydah’s masāʾil (issues) and inspired in his later students. Ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz considered Abū ʿUbaydah as skilled and precise in his applications of analogy. This research traces these applications through the Mudawwanah (writings) of Abū Ghānim Al-Khurāsānī (d. 200 A. H.).

, ABSTRACT:, The fields of Ottoman and Maghribi history have largely developed independently of one another. Thanks to the outlooks of both colonialist and nationalist historiographies of the Maghrib, historians of North Africa for a long time mostly ignored the Ottoman presence or depicted the Ottomans as distant, foreign conquerors. Ottoman historians tended to see the Maghrib as peripheral to the history of the empire and to portray North African provinces as largely irrelevant to the core of Ottoman history. Since the 1970s, a smattering of scholars has attempted to connect the histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Maghrib. Building on this growing body of work, this article argues for the usefulness of taking the Ottoman Empire seriously in the study of Maghribi history, and of taking the Maghrib seriously in the study of the Ottoman Empire. After an exploration of the historiography, we turn to a discussion of sovereignty as an example of what the Maghribi turn in Ottoman history might look like. Rather than consign North Africa to an imagined periphery, we ask how Ottoman historiography can be reimagined when we view the empire from the Maghrib.