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The introduction of colonial schooling in Zanzibar was aimed at improving economic productivity, drawing on an exchange of educational theory with the American South to ensure a labor supply for the post-emancipation plantation economy. Yet colonial officials faced a key problem: students did not attend, preferring instead to continue studying in Qur’anic schools, institutions roundly derided by colonial officials. To secure attendance, colonial officials engaged local Muslim leaders to create an Islamic studies syllabus. While reflecting transnational Islamic reformist trends, this syllabus ultimately backfired as local parents protested its lack of moral content. Based on research in the Zanzibar National Archives, this article recounts the tensions and overlap between colonial officials, Islamic leaders connected to transnational discourses of reform, and local Muslim parents over what constitutes truly “useful” knowledge. It argues that colonial education was not particularly successful in forming students into the hard-working agricultural subjects it envisioned. It was successful, however, in orienting public institutions towards economic progress, and shifting public discourses on morality and religion to suit that goal.

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.

تشخّص هذه الدراسة الوصفية المفردية واقع المعاش للحقل الميداني محلّ دراستنا، حيث قام الباحثان بجـمع البيانات من خلال الأدوات البحثية المعتمدة، كجلسات المقابلة والملاحظة بالمشاركة، وتحليل المحتوى اللوائح والأنظمة الداخلية، وكانت إشكالية الدراسة كالأتي: ما هي القيم التنظيمية في المؤسسة الوقفية؟، وما مصدرها ؟ كيف تتجسّد عملياً في الواقع ؟ ولقد كشف التشخيص الميداني مدى تأثير العقيدة الإسلامية في أسس انطلاق المؤسسة، وقد كانت جلّية في الأنظمة ولوائح من أجل المحافظة والاستمرار على أدوارها التي انطلقت منها، وللكفاءات القائمة على إدارة المؤسسة التأثير البارز على فعالية القيم في أرض الواقع، من أجل سلامة ونجاعة قيمها التنظيمية، فهي متأثرة بطبيعة المؤسسة ونوعية نشاطها، وحجمها، ولخلفيتها ومنطلقاتها الأيديولوجية والثقافية والعلمية والمجتمعية والجغرافية. وقد صغنا الفرض الآتي: يمكن للمنظّمة الواعية بالشريعة ومقاصدها الكونية، أن تجسّد القواعد الفقهية في فلسفتها الإدارية وتصوغها قيم تنظيمية This descriptive study diagnoses the reality of the study, I collected the data through the approved research tools. The problem was: What is the organizational value in the endowment foundation? its source? How it is applied in reality? The real diagnosis reveals the extent of the influence of the Islamic faith on the basics of the foundation’s start, and it was evident in the regulations to preserve its starting roles. The skilled managers have a great impact on the efficacy of values in reality for its organizational safety; affected by the nature of the foundation, the quality of its activity, its size, its background and its ideological, cultural, scientific, societal and geographic backgrounds. We formulated this hypothesis: the aware organization of the faith and its cosmic purposes can apply the jurisprudential rules in its administrative philosophy and formulate organizational values.

Starting from a consideration of Tomé Pires’ 1515 Suma Oriental, this article considers the feasibility, nature, and relevance of a summa orientalis in the form of a Portuguese Early Maritime Corpus. When this corpus is compared with Arabic nautical literature, primarily Ibn Mājid and Sulaymān al-Mahrī, and especially with attention to the technical aspects of their writings, then the desirability of an Indian Ocean Maritime Corpus is envisaged. The centrality and the mediating role of Arab pilots and Arabic nautical literature indicate that the first step is the delimitation of an Arabic Early Maritime Corpus.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the dynamics related to the pottery production in Sumhuram, the easternmost port of call between the Red Sea and the Indian continent along the southern coast of Arabia (second century BC–fifth century AD). Being a rich hub of international trade, receiving and redistributing local products and goods from many different areas, Sumhuram was able to provide for its needs through its own agriculture and a number of local activities, as attested by the presence of kilns and furnaces. Previous studies on the topic have suggested a possible connection between local pottery manufacturing in Sumhuram, and the Hadrami tradition, although kilns have not been found until recently. In 2015 archaeological investigations unveiled the first evidence of such a connection with the discovery of a pottery kiln and some production waste inside the city wall, along with the identification of pottery sherds in the area of the kiln. In order to identify their mineralogical and petrographic composition, thin-section analyses were made on a number of selected sherds. The preliminary results demonstrate that the raw materials used are compatible with a local production. This allows us to describe the different phases of the pottery cycle in Sumhuram as well as the structure of the pottery kiln, which represents an uncommon find in the pre-Islamic archaeology of southern Arabia.

Aḥmad b. Mājid is the most renowned author of Arabic navigational literature. Although he is reported to have come from the southern Gulf port of Julfar, the vast majority of his work focuses on navigating the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, and his compositions contain few details relating to Gulf navigation. The one exception is a short, undated poem describing sailing routes in the Gulf. This paper analyses this unique poem and compares the navigational practices it describes with those in his other navigational works in order better to understand the specific characteristics of Gulf and Indian Ocean navigation in the fifteenth century.

Extensive trade networks in the Indian Ocean generated contact among cultures and spheres of maritime technology across a huge geographical area. Inevitably, these networks resulted not only in exchange of foodstuffs, raw materials, luxury goods, spices, and manufactured goods, but also in cultural and religious concepts and technological knowledge and practices. With the intensity of maritime trade these exchanges engendered the borrowing of shipbuilding designs, materials, and methodologies and generated a certain hybridization of technology, design, and the ways in which ships were conceived. This hybridization is particularly evident in the Belitung and Phanom-Surin ships discovered in Indonesia and Thailand respectively (Flecker 2001; 2008; Jumpron 2019; Wongnai, Jumpron & Premjai 2016). While echoing shipbuilding practices from outside South-East Asia, they also incorporated materials and concepts from South-East Asia, and yet remain distinct from the dominant lashed-lug construction of the region. Using archaeological material from Oman and South-East Asia as well as ethnographic data from the western Indian Ocean, East Africa, India, Oman, Iran, and South-East Asia, this paper explores current archaeological and ethnographic shipbuilding information and raises some questions about the place of Belitung and Phanom-Surin in first-millennium shipbuilding practice.

This paper seeks to examine the legacy of the Omani presence in the states of Malaysia, which arguably has made itself apparent in the royal dress of the Kedah Sultanate. This discovery indeed calls for further investigation, especially on how the Omani dress later became a model for Kedah royal dress which is famously known as Baju Muskat. Further analysis is essential to determine to what extent did the Kedah Sultanate adopted the Omani dress of the Muscati style and what aspects of the Kedah royal dress resemble the Omani dress substantially. Preliminary research indicates that there are few similarities that one can find between the Omani dress with that of the Kedah royal dress, which is said to be worn by the latter since the 17th century. Reading through the existing literature in the field also reveals one interesting picture that points to the underrepresentation of Omani individuals, merchants, and scholars in the Malay texts as the former tends to describe them, often as Arab traders, or Persian traders. In short, this paper has attempted to explore and examine the above-mentioned circumstances for a better understanding of the subject matter under study through a method of content analysis. Keywords: Well-being, Happiness, Subsistence, Ethical Principles, Arab-Muslim Thought

Abstract This article treats cliticization of a pronoun to a syntactic host and doubling of the clitic pronoun with a non-pronominal counterpart in Syrian and Omani Arabic. Although the two varieties are closely related and the morphological paradigms they display are very similar, the pronominalization and clitic pronoun doubling patterns they display are quite different. We trace this difference to a basic difference in whether the relevant syntactic processes are sensitive to intervention effects in the two dialects, with the result being that the restrictiveness of pronominalization and clitic pronoun doubling patterns parallel the restrictiveness of basic word order patterns – whether double-object constructions are ‘symmetric’ or ‘asymmetric’ – with Syrian being the more restrictive of the two varieties.

Abstract This study introduces and analyzes proximal and distal singular demonstratives in fourteen varieties of Musandam Arabic, a little-documented dialect group located on Musandam Peninsula in northern Oman and neighbouring areas of the United Arab Emirates. Following an overview of the dialect group in its regional context, the study provides a description of singular demonstratives from the point of view of phono-logy, morphology, and geographical distribution. The study then focuses on two salient features found in several of the varieties under investigation: gender distinction based on consonantal alternation ( d -based masculine forms vs t -based feminine forms); and gemination of the feminine t -element. While the former is attested, albeit rarely, in other Arabic dialects, the latter is unheard of. In the last section of the article, some hypotheses are put forward as to how these forms could have developed from a historical point of view, in light of data from different Arabic and Semitic varieties. While the gemination of the t -element is best regarded as a Musandam-internal innovation, the d : t consonantal alternation reinforces the putative historical link between south-western Arabia and Oman.

The purpose of the present chapter is to give the reader an overview of the current science education research in Oman. The chapter focuses on three main sections as an overview of the country, an overview of the education development, and the current situation of science education. It addresses the emerging technologies in relation to science education including blended education and e-learning developments. The chapter then discusses the requirements for better implementation of science education along with the future strategies to overcome the challenges and issues that facing science teachers in Oman. It concludes by recommending the importance of making greater efforts to instill the twenty-first-century skills in the future graduates of science to enable them to respond to the requirements of the global economic market.