The waṭan is where the soul (nafs) resides and where the heart (qalb) lives. And, it is the opposite of travel (safar).
———Nur al-Din al-Salimi, Jawābāt
In 2003, on one of his first trips to Zanzibar since the 1964 revolution during which thousands of “Arabs” from Southern Arabia (now the Sultanate of Oman) were killed or fled, Sheikh Ahmad bin Hamad al-Khalili, Oman’s national mufti, was interviewed on Zanzibari television. In addition to inadvertently correcting the interpreter’s translation of his Arabic into Swahili on live television (touching off intense, vocal resentment about why he refused to speak Swahili despite his fluency), Sheikh al-Khalili informed those of Muscati and Omani descent that they should no longer perform the travel prayer (ṣalat al-safar). The travel prayer, a truncated form of the daily ritual obligation aimed at easing the burdens of pious requirements during travel, has long been central to jurisprudential debates about proper worship.Footnote 1 Sheikh al-Khalili was insisting in 2003 that this particular population in Zanzibar—Omanis who had migrated and settled on the island in the first half of the twentieth century and remained after the 1964 revolution—should accept that Zanzibar was their homeland, not Oman.
For Omani Arabs living in Zanzibar and those looking on from Oman, Sheikh Ahmad al-Khalili’s public statement raised thorny questions about appropriate piety and political belonging.Footnote 2 For some, al-Khalili’s declaration in the early 2000s was embarrassing in that it drew attention to the possibility that there were those who had been circumventing pious obligations for decades. Indeed, most people I asked laughed derisively, saying that those who continued to perform the travel prayer for so long were simply being lazy. For other Omani Arabs in Zanzibar, al-Khalili’s declaration was something of a betrayal since it seemed to close permanently the hope of “return,” even though actual (re)patriation to Oman was highly unlikely because of restrictive immigration policies. His comments also exposed the fact that some Omanis had preferred to remain in Zanzibar after the revolution. Though most Omani families left Zanzibar after the violence of 1964, others either could not do so (some were unable to acquire travel documents and others were assigned by their families as representatives to keep an eye on property) or found the idea less appealing than remaining (because of weak familial ties or financial prospects). Some in Oman came to doubt the loyalty of those who had not returned. To others, it was a surprise that Omani Arabs living thousands of miles away from the Arabian Peninsula for decades, and who barely spoke Arabic, still considered themselves to be “traveling” at all.
In this moment, Sheikh al-Khalili’s comments not only exposed personal tensions among people with ties across the Indian Ocean. It also highlighted fundamental questions about what constitutes a political home, not to mention travel, in the first place. By the end of the twentieth century, the term for homeland (waṭan) had come to denote territorial sovereignty, citizenship, and nation-state in Oman and throughout the Arab world, but this moment revealed that the legacy of another form of waṭan continues to resonate across the Indian Ocean.
By examining early twentieth-century Omani religious discourses about travel and prayer as well as an emerging British immigration policy, this article makes three related arguments. First, inspired by Achille Mbembe’s call to grapple with the “imaginaries and autochthonous practices of space,” especially in the context of assertions about sovereignty and boundaries, I explore contending notions of political space.Footnote 3 In particular, I demonstrate how anti-colonial notions of “homeland”—waṭan—were not restricted to a nationalistic or nation-state model of a bordered territory or of patriotic sentiment based on a shared ethnic, religious, or linguistic identity, as is often argued of Middle Eastern anti-colonial movements. In writing about anti-colonial uprisings in Ottoman provinces in the interwar period, for example, Michael Provenance sees nationalism as a source of anti-colonial insurgency, while John Willis illustrates how disagreements over the maintenance of a Caliphate revolved around either pan-Arabism (as Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935) was increasingly arguing) or universalism (through a Hindu-Muslim alliance).Footnote 4 For Zanzibar in particular, Amal Ghazal and Anne Bang have shown how Arab and Muslim intellectuals living in East Africa in the 1930s were conversant in anti-colonial discourses and turned to pan-Arab and pan-Islamic nationalism to support their particular Zanzibari patriotism and expressions of cultural pride.Footnote 5
At the turn of the twentieth century, however, some anti-colonial and anti-imperialist scholars were hardly working with presumptions about bounded territorial sovereignty, patriotism, or even shared linguistic, religious, and ethnic identarian bonds that became central to these ideologies, whether pan-Arab, pan-Islamic, or territory specific. Nor, however, were these early twentieth-century religious scholars proponents of the kinds of political forms based on “legal pluralism, disaggregated sovereignty, and territorial disjuncture [that] would be constitutionally grounded” that Gary Wilder has described as critical to the thought and writings of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor as they grappled with a post-colonial future in Martinique and Senegal.Footnote 6
Instead, some Omani scholars of the Indian Ocean World understood and deployed the language of waṭan in the service of a personally spatialized Islamic polity, structured around pious obligations and responsibilities. It was neither bounded by territorial borders nor controlled by administrative powers. Such an Islamic polity did not need to be centralized. A waṭan or “homeland” described the spaces and places to which people directed their religious obligations and, in particular, prayers. It was understood to have a spatial quality through questions of distance and the built environment,Footnote 7 but was hardly conceived along a territorial and bordered model with a codified system of identification determined by birth.Footnote 8 In addition, the heart and soul, intention, and differing determinants for men and women, husbands and wives, slaves, herders, seafarers, martyrs, and nomads mattered. There was, nevertheless, a formality to the homeland since it was incumbent on individuals to “take” (akhadh) one and to perform religious obligations in accordance with their selection.Footnote 9 At stake in identifying a homeland, in other words, was the expectation for the personal enactment of pious behavior, (ideally) supported and performed within the context of a righteous community and laws.Footnote 10
At the same time, British officials were working with what became a more familiar model of political homeland in which individuals were subjects of a ruler of a defined territory, determined through birth and made manifest through documentation.Footnote 11 And, it was a territory whose borders became increasingly regulated, especially after World War I. In the second half of this article, I describe how, despite this familiar model, British officials struggled with its implementation through the 1940s. Aiming to standardize political rule, they grappled with how to systematize it across a region comprised of diverse polities and modes of membership. The messiness of the alignment of bordered territory and identity is more than evident.
In examining these notions of homeland, I also challenge the assumption that British imperial rule imposed territorial order on a realm of unfettered mobility.Footnote 12 Concern about movement and belonging was not confined to European officials, nor were European laws the only legal discourses affecting mobility. The “sedentarist bias” is not isolated, in other words, to European empires and the nation-state.Footnote 13 Similarly, the romanticizing of a “nomad metaphysics” that celebrates an unbounded mobility (presumably among non-Europeans) elides notions of political home as well as discourses and practices that express obligations of spatial belonging beyond those associated with European empires.Footnote 14 Scholarship on the Indian Ocean that has emphasized European jurisdictional rivalries and trade has in part appropriated the presumptions of colonial rule regarding the unfettered mobility of the region’s “natives.”
Therefore, rather than seeing Omani movement across the ocean as having been managed only once European colonial administrators began to exert control over the seas, I demonstrate how discourses and practices of prayer mark a form of spatial and social demarcation articulated through Islamic obligations. Discussions about movement and belonging were already taking place when colonial administrators began regulating the seas more forcefully. Prayer and papers might, therefore, be understood as two techniques in the regulation or disciplining of place and movement. Both are embedded in legal discourse and both relate to the idea of a political home. And yet, both structured belonging and homeland differently and managed them through distinct and highly uneven means: the authority of religious pronouncements and the power of the (colonial) state. In both cases, mobility and homeland are inseparable. My goal in presenting these divergent discourses of mobility and homeland is to highlight how these forms of management, as uneven as they are, emerge in relation to each other, sometimes as oppositional and sometimes encompassing, and they are never static or isolated.
Third, this article emphasizes that movement and settlement across the Indian Ocean was not only an economic decision, but also an ethical and political one, linked in part to the tensions of British rule and the potential establishment of a theocratic Imamate. Many fine studies have examined the history of trade and economic relations across the Indian Ocean as well as that of the scholarly networks linking intellectuals in the Arabian Peninsula to East Africa and North Africa.Footnote 15 This article focuses on ethical and religious discourses of movement and obligation, of belonging and space, in order to consider how peoples’ pious links to such spaces were understood and practiced.Footnote 16 Rather than presuming that all those who did not have physical or material constraints on travel would travel, I examine concerns about the ethics and political implications of travel. Indeed, what even constituted “travel” and “home?” Migration from Oman to Zanzibar raised questions well beyond that of duration and risk. For some Omanis, moving was itself an existential, ethical, and jurisprudential question that entailed consideration of intention, of the heart and soul, and of secure piety in the context of non-Muslim rule. Migration and settlement elsewhere would also shape and be enacted in the bodily requirements of prayer. Articulating political home through the daily act of prayer is precisely what Sheikh al-Khalili recognized.
The article is divided into two parts. After a brief background section, the first part examines everyday concerns about appropriate pious travel, and thus homeland, in the questions to and answers from the most important Omani theologian of the twentieth century, Nur al-Din al-Salimi. In the second part, I explore shifting British attempts at controlling the same circuits of travel by means of documents and permissions along with divergent notions of political home. The documentation of identity and its link to national territory, as Radhika Mongia has shown, marked a turning point in the international management of movement after the standardization of the passport system (with the 1920 League of Nations Paris passport conference). This article explores both Omani religious discourses about travel and British immigration policies in the making of political home as a way of highlighting the tensions, divergent possibilities, and uncertainties about it in this moment of flux, when the collapsing of geography with identity and belonging was being worked out.Footnote 17 While notions of the nation-state came to be naturalized later in the twentieth century, the first decades of the twentieth century were a period when the as-yet world of post-colonial nation-states was in the process of formation and when a non-nationalist, but anti-colonial, polity also remained salient. Apparently foreclosed, its legacy continues to resonate.
The Three Faces of Oman
Questions among pious Omanis about homeland and prayer in the early twentieth century were being posed at a moment of heightened political tension. It was a time when Omani Sultans nominally ruled in Zanzibar and Muscat, and when a theocracy—the Ibadi Imamate—in the interior of Oman was about to be reconstituted. It is critical to note that after 1890, when Zanzibar became a British protectorate (of an Arab Sultanate), there became, in effect, three major “Omani” polities—Zanzibar, Muscat, and an Omani Imamate—each with a different relationship to the other and each with shifting entanglements and tensions with British rule and power.
The Omani polities of Zanzibar and Muscat had themselves split in the middle of the nineteenth century. After Sultan Said bin Sultan al-Bu Saidi’s rule over both Muscat and Zanzibar (1806–1856), a succession dispute between two of his sons led to the division in 1861 of the al-Bu Saidi domain (through an agreement organized by British officials, known as the “Canning Award”) into two separate polities: Muscat, ruled by Thuwayni bin Said al-Bu Saidi, and Zanzibar, by Majid bin Said al-Bu Saidi. In 1890, however, Zanzibar was also declared a British protectorate, while Muscat remained nominally independent. At the same time, “Oman,” the inland towns and villages, remained mostly beyond the control of al-Bu Saidi sultans in Muscat. The populations of these towns and villages were also predominantly Ibadi, a third branch of Islam after Shi’ism and Sunnism, which meant that an Imamate could be established. By the early twentieth century, scholarly and political discussions about the formation of another Imamate were ongoing and in fact an Imamate was established in 1913.Footnote 18
The ethical debates among Omanis about movement were thus a result of specific political and economic conditions. They took place at a moment when the British Empire was at its height, but also only decades away from formally ending. It was, in addition, a period when Omani rule in East Africa took the form of a protectorate, both supported by and dependent on British power. An impending Imamate in Oman and an Omani colony in Zanzibar under British rule are the contexts critical to understanding the tensions surrounding ideas of homeland and travel. As much of the discussion about the Ibadi “revival” (nahḍa) of the nineteenth century has noted, questions about proper piety at this time were posed with the aim of describing the religious perspectives of Ibadism to non-Ibadis and in the hopes of engaging a pan-Islamic movement. But they also came in the context of political tensions about the social and individual obligations of Ibadi piety and how that pious life could endure under British rule.
Part I
Those Who Mimic Them
It is impossible to know how many Omani-Zanzibaris whose families migrated to East Africa in the nineteenth century or earlier performed the travel prayer or for how long. We also cannot know whether Omani-Zanzibaris who moved to Zanzibar in another wave in the twentieth century performed it, and even the number of Omanis in Zanzibar is not entirely certain. Frederick Cooper has argued that census data from the early part of the twentieth century showing a dramatic increase of “Arabs” by 77 percent in Zanzibar and Pemba, from 18,884 in 1924 to 33,401 in 1931, indicates more about the ways people self-identified than an actual increase in the “Arabs” population.Footnote 19 A more accurate measure of demographic changes might be the number of ships arriving in and departing from Zanzibar. Yet these numbers are hardly accurate either since, as Johan Mathew has shown in his work on trafficking, sailing dhows regularly came and went without the knowledge of British officials, bringing both contraband goods and people across the ocean.Footnote 20 Nevertheless, British archival sources provide some data about how many people officials believed were entering from Arabia, and there was a steady increase through the 1930s, peaking at about 3,500 in 1939, on the eve of World War II. While this number may seem small, it so alarmed British officials that they worked relentlessly to stop the migration. They discussed ways to intimidate passengers, to disseminate pamphlets warning off potential travelers, and to garner the support of leading Arabs to mitigate the flow. One official wrote, for example, “I think that it will be sufficient if they are harried a little both before and after the arrival of their dhows.”Footnote 21
What is clear is that at the beginning of the twentieth century, for some Omanis, migration and settlement were accompanied by doubts that were as ethical and jurisprudential as they were economic and physical. These uncertainties are revealed in a series of texts, including question-and-answer fatawa (in Oman, fatawa are sometimes simply called jawābāt or “answers”). Below, I examine a variety of texts written by Nur al-Din al-Salimi (1869–1914), the most important Omani theologian of the twentieth century, the intellectual force behind the revival of the Imamate in Oman in 1913, and the primary religious scholar for Omanis in Zanzibar. Nur al-Din’s significance in Omani and Ibadi political philosophy and theology cannot be overstated. Even today, his writings continue to serve as the foundational reference for correct Ibadi behavior.
Below, I analyze a ninety-page letter directed at Omanis in Zanzibar, a book of rhymed prose about religious practice (an extremely popular reference in contemporary Oman), and questions and answers (fatawa) in two different compilations.Footnote 22 The first, Ḥall al-Mushkilāt (Solving the Problems) records questions raised from 1899 to 1903 by a governor of the town of Bahla (1914–1944). The second text is a five-volume set of questions to and responses from Nur al-Din al-Salimi. Of this set, one chapter contains forty-eight fatawa that concern travel prayer specifically. While only three directly reference Zanzibar, twenty-seven refer to waṭan, and are relevant for those migrating or considering migrating. The recurring themes in these texts include the opposition between travel and homeland, the significance of intention as well as that of the “heart” (qalb) and the “soul” (nafs) in declaring a homeland, the relative importance of political rule, and finally, concerns about the relationship between men’s and women’s prayer obligations as well as those of slaves, Bedouin, and sailors.
Nur al-Din al-Salimi never traveled to East Africa himself. As I was told by a direct descendant, both Nur al-Din and his son, Mohammad bin Humayd al-Salimi, thought it preferable not to travel there or anywhere not under Muslim rule, even though they also did not deem it forbidden (ḥaram). Still, as the most important Ibadi theologian of the early twentieth century, Nur al-Din’s pronouncements about religious, political, and economic life did travel across the ocean.
Nur al-Din’s opposition to colonial rule in the Indian Ocean extended beyond his criticisms of the British in Muscat or Zanzibar. He was highly critical as well of the Omani elite in Zanzibar. Disdain for some of those who had moved to East Africa is palpable in his text Badhl al-Majhūd fi Mukhālafat (Striving in defiance) written in 1910. In this extended response to an interlocutor from East Africa he refers to as “the objector” (al-mu‘tarid), Nur al-Din speaks directly to Omanis (primarily Ibadis) living in Zanzibar, condemning them for behaving like Christians and blaming them for the British occupation of Zanzibar (because their leaders abandoned the religion). He writes: “They began dressing like them, they bent their tongues to speak in their languages, they mixed in their schools, and they helped them in their courts of injustice and where the land is fallow (bawār).”Footnote 23
As Amal Ghazal points out, Nur al-Din was engaging other anti-colonial work, responding directly, for example, to the chief judge of Beirut, Yusuf al-Nabhani, who had recently condemned missionary schools in the Levant.Footnote 24 Though agreeing with al-Nabhani in regard to the dangers of these schools, al-Salimi diverged from him on the question of migration, or hijra, a practice of emigration that had been a tenet of classical Islam and was being discussed among newly colonized people.Footnote 25 While al-Nabhani encouraged Muslims who were living under non-Muslim rule to migrate elsewhere, Nur al-Din argued that this practice of emigration had been a requirement prior to the conquest of Mecca in 630 CE, but no longer was necessary. After that time, and as long as a person felt “safe” (āmanan) in his religion, he could stay. Nur al-Din added, however, that such a person must be careful to only pray the travel prayer, demonstrating the ways that prayer could serve as an explicit and public marker of the declaration of a homeland elsewhere.Footnote 26 Indeed, for Nur al-Din, the travel prayer could signal the refusal to acquiesce fully to non-Muslim rule. For those who felt uneasy with post-revolution Zanzibari politics and those committed to Nur al-Din’s position (if not his texts explicitly), Sheikh al-Khalili’s position in 2003 was a departure.
Disdain for those who traveled to Zanzibar and who appropriated the customs of the British is evident too in the fatawa. In a two-page response to one questioner’s letter, Nur al-Din emphasizes the absurdity and hypocrisy (though he does not use the highly charged word “nafāq”) of those who claimed to maintain Oman as their homeland, but who clearly much preferred to live in Zanzibar. Here, the tension between living under British rule and feeling at home becomes evident since he notes that some of those who perform the travel prayer in Zanzibar actually prefer it there and therefore—despite political conditions—should pray the full prayer:
A: And look at the condition of our friends from the people of Zanzibar, may God give them qualities of an adult to see clearly (rushd). For example, one of them builds homes (dūr) and he collects farms (shawanib) and he takes wives (zawajāt) and concubines (sarārī) and servants (khudum). And, despite that, he shortens the prayer. In fact, he groups the two prayers, using the excuse that his waṭan is Oman. And, even if he returns to his waṭan [i.e., Oman], in some years, he would not reside there, except a short period of time, and his heart is attached to Zanzibar; that is, his supposed travel destination. And, if the Sultan forbade him from entering Zanzibar, he would consider that one of the greatest punishments.Footnote 27
While in both Defiance and in his fatawa Nur al-Din is clearly unhappy with those who he says mimic the polytheists (mushrikīn), the Christians, and who pretend to call Oman their home, there are also differences in these texts. While in Defiance he declares that those who live under the rule of the British should pray the travel prayer, in the fatawa he reprimands those who do so while clearly making Zanzibar their homes and distinguishes between those who had been living there prior to British rule and those who moved there after it had been seized (istīlla’):
Q: He whose homeland (waṭan) is in Oman (bi Oman), is it permissible for him to move it to Zanzibar? Or, [is it permissible] to take it as a second homeland, knowing that the polytheists (ahl al-shirk) have seized it (istīlla’)?
A: Abu Ishaq, may God have mercy on his soul, mentioned that it is not permissible to take a homeland in a land that has been occupied by the mushrikīn, unless it was considered a waṭan to him in the past, before the seizure (al-istīlla’).Footnote 28
Evading in this exchange the question about whether it was possible to take two homelands, Nur al-Din focuses instead on the question of living under foreign rule, drawing a distinction between those who had settled prior to “seizure” and those who contemplate moving after the fact, revealing his negative view of occupied lands for the pious. We will see that he does address the possibility of multiple homelands in Jawhar al-Niẓām, especially for free men, drawing a sharp distinction between them and slaves and wives.
Of Hearts, Souls, and Intentions
In his extended fatwa about whether it is permissible to live under Christian rule, Nur al-Din not only suggests that it was permissible (even though not ideal), but he also emphasizes the importance of the heart and soul in determining a waṭan, noting that it meant where someone felt secure in his religion.
Q: And, is it permissible to take it [waṭan] in a land owned/ruled (yamlikhā) by mushrikīn? And, is it similar if it is a land of Islam (Ardh al-Islam) where a mushrik ruler entered? Or, is it Ardh al-Shirk? And, is there a difference if the mushrik rulers interfere with the Muslims in their prayers, or do not interfere? And, is there a difference between whether those who are ruled are Muslims or mushrik? Or, one group exceeds the other or they were equal?
A: In fact, his waṭan is where he hits the ground with the fullness of his slippers (kalākilihi) and where his soul resides (sakanat nafsihi) and his chest opens with his happiness (inshara al-sadrahu). […] That is his waṭan, whether it is the dār al-Islam or unbelief (kufr), as long as he is safe (āmanan) in his religion, there is no problem for him to reside where he is residing.Footnote 29
This emphasis on the heart and soul pervades the fatawa. In fact, for a free man the waṭan can only be determined by the feelings of the person himself, and not by some external authority or power.
In Ḥall al-Mushkilāt, Nur al-Din writes explicitly in response to the governor from Bahla: “People who have decision-making power do not have the authority to take away the waṭan from someone.”Footnote 30 That is, state powers, colonial administrations, Sultans, and Imams have no authority to determine someone’s waṭan. This is a far cry from the system of passports and immigration controls later used to define belonging. In response to a question about a soldier who receives a ruling from another scholar who declares the soldier’s prayer incorrect (bāṭil), Nur al-Din writes in frustration:
A: As for the soldier who prays waṭan, he knows best his [own] situation and no one should pass a religious ruling that his prayer is incorrect and does not count because the condition of a waṭan is specific to its owner (ṣāḥib)—“’amr al-waṭan makhsūs bi-ṣāḥibihi.”Footnote 31
Both questioners and Nur al-Din use the term waṭan to refer to a place that serves as a person’s primary home. It is a place where one belongs, one’s responsibilities are centered, and one’s heart feels most at rest. A waṭan may be manifest in the length of residency, but not necessarily. Instead, for a man, the attributes of property ownership and family (wives and children, concubines and servants) may draw him close and prove the waṭan. Nur al-Din responds to another question as follows: “…the waṭan is agreed upon in jurisprudence (fiqh) for he who takes family and children and abode (dār) and money. If this is not the act of taking a waṭan, then we do not know what a waṭan is?”Footnote 32
Despite this, Nur al-Din insists on an intentional (niya) declaration of homeland, though not necessarily in writing or even verbally.Footnote 33 If a man’s intention was to return to his “homeland” or to the place where he was living before, then he should perform the travel prayer. If, on the other hand, he intended to make a new home elsewhere, then he should begin praying the full prayer at his new homeland.
Underlying all of these formulations is a repeated emphasis on the opposition between homeland and travel. Throughout the twenty-two pages devoted to the travel prayer in the Jawābāt, both questioners and Nur al-Din contrast travel, safar, with waṭan. Throughout the fatwa collection, the state of traveling is opposed to the state of waṭan, or home/homeland. Nur al-Din is clear about this opposition: “The waṭan is where the soul (nafs) resides and the heart lives. And, it is the opposite of travel.”Footnote 34
Distance and Time
In addition to exploring a person’s ties to a homeland, questioners were also keen to understand when “travel” in fact could be understood to begin and whether there was a limit to the duration of travel. Nur al-Din responded in numerous ways, but as a general rule, he explained that traveling began when a man journeyed two “farsakhs” (women were, we will see, mostly instructed to follow the practice of their husbands). Each farsakh is usually a half-day’s travel, or about three miles from the end of the built environment (umrān) of his waṭan, though Nur al-Din also sometimes insisted that if someone intended to travel, then he should begin shortening his prayers after one farsakh. Footnote 35 It should be noted that in Sunni law travel has generally been determined to begin at four barīds (or sixteen farsakh), which may take one, two, or three days walking.
Interestingly, in Jawhar al-Niẓām, Nur al-Din also writes that as soon as someone steps on a boat, he is traveling:
And, he who rides the sea, intending to travel
must shorten the prayer from the moment he is on the sea.
And, even if the boat (markab) anchors,
it is due to the different nature of the sea.
It is different from the land because
there is no indication of building/settlement.
The settlement is the palm trees and the walls, and the farming.Footnote 36
This description of the sea as necessarily a space of travel, rather than a “homeland,” suggests, too, that claims about “belonging” to the ocean or sea may have been different for passengers who followed Nur al-Din than for itinerant merchants and sailors from the coastal town of Sur. Fahad Bishara argues that they saw themselves as “belonging” to both land and sea, and this resembles how French officials viewed them.Footnote 37 In Jawhar al-Niẓām, Nur al-Din argues that even for sailors, the ship as the built environment becomes the home, not the sea itself.
Questions and answers in Jawhar al-Niẓām and the Jawābāt about movement highlight the significance of built environments, even in determining whether different villages and towns that had contiguous built environments should be considered one homeland. For example, in response to a questioner who asked whether travel within a “dār” that is larger than two farsakhs constituted travel, Nur al-Din writes: “If the buildings (umrān) are connected, then everything is one waṭan.”Footnote 38 Such emphasis on the built environment raises questions not only for mariners and seafarers but also for nomads. But Nur al-Din is clear that the waṭan of the nomads is where the stakes of the tents of the Bedouin are set, serving as a (movable) building.
Finally, numerous questioners also asked about time and whether there is a limit to how many years someone could be considered to be traveling. Though none of the fatawa in the compilation offers a direct answer, Nur al-Din responds to such questions by describing the acceptable experiences of others. Nur al-Din often refers to Abdallah bin ‘Umar, who stayed in Azerbaijan for seventeen months and, again, Abu Ishaq, who traveled for nine years.
Perhaps most significantly for migrants to Zanzibar, Nur al-Din seems to suggest in his fatawa that it is feasible to take more than one waṭan. In response to a question about whether people who live in Surur, a town (balad), as well as on a farm in the countryside can take both as their waṭan, he writes:
A: They have Surur as a waṭan and their farms as another waṭan. The waṭan is the place where their souls reside and take as a waṭan. And, they do not leave it unless necessary. This is the meaning of waṭan. Therefore, if this takes place, then the rulings of travel do not apply. Travel and waṭan are opposites, if one is removed, the other appears. God knows best.Footnote 39
While Nur al-Din here evades the question of taking both Zanzibar and Oman as one waṭan, he also seems to suggest it is possible to take two homelands, “if necessary.” If one were to take the case of “summer” and “winter” homes as an analogy, one might accept the argument that Oman and Zanzibar, though clearly distinct, were also both “home.” In his collection of rhymed prose, on the other hand, Nur al-Din explicitly acknowledges that free men, at least, can take more than one home, though he does not specify Zanzibar. Nur al-Din, though, was acutely aware of the different political and religious conditions in Oman and in Zanzibar after the establishment of the British protectorate. The feeling of home, embodied through prayer, was entwined with the political conditions of Omani and British colonial rule.
Of Slaves and Wives
Though the majority of the questions posed in the Jawābāt related to free men, some questions also concerned women and wives. The subject of slaves appears more in the work of rhymed prose. Of the forty-eight fatawa, nine concern women or wives. It is also impossible to tell whether the authors of the questions in this compilation are male or female, though sometimes a questioner makes his or her gender clear by referring to a relative or spouse. Still, a significant number of the questions pertain to relations between men and women, highlighting that women were accompanying their husbands and that men were marrying women on their “travels.” In general, Nur al-Din argued, women were to follow their husband’s declarations of taking a homeland, and to pray a full or shortened prayer.
However, in response to some interesting situations, Nur al-Din diverges from this rule and suggests that a woman should pray either according to her own heart’s waṭan or in distinction to her husband if he was refusing to take a waṭan even in a place where it was clear he had made his home.Footnote 40 In a case in which a woman had made a condition of her marriage that her own region remain their home (implying that his home was elsewhere), Nur al-Din states that the man should adjust to her full prayer at her natal home, even if he considered it “travel.”Footnote 41 Clearly, in this instance, the grounds of an agreement or contract outweighed the man’s own feelings. It is in the questions related to marriage and women that the most vivid dilemmas arose, as people grappled with their senses of “home” and their social relations across different lands.
While the relationship of free women to their male or female slaves is not mentioned by Nur al-Din, he does discuss the relationship of free men to their slaves. As “dependents,” the analogic relations of slaves and wives to free men has a long history in Islamic jurisprudence.Footnote 42 In the Jawābāt compilation, the only reference to slaves and travel prayer, however, is to point out the hypocrisy of those Omanis who claim that their “home” in still in Arabia when they have settled in Zanzibar, taking concubines and slaves. But there is a reference to prisoners or those who commit great crimes and “do not know when they will be freed.” In these cases, Nur al-Din argues, the prisoner prays the waṭan prayer.Footnote 43 Whether there is an analogy between a prisoner and a slave is not indicated explicitly, though the issue of an unknown duration of remaining unfree could be comparable. In Ḥall al-Mushkilāt, a questioner does make a direct analogy between a woman’s divorce and a slave’s emancipation from bondage (al-riqq), to which Nur al-Din responds, if returning to her original waṭan after divorce, she would pray the full prayer there.Footnote 44 While he does not directly comment on the question of the slave and his or her “home” after being freed, the questioner makes an explicit analogy. Given that Nur al-Din does not suggest an alternative, one could presume that the same principle would apply to a freed slave returning “home.”
There is a more extended discussion of the status of slaves and prayer in Jawhar al- Niẓām, a text that articulates behavioral requirements absent of direct questions. Here, Nur al-Din argues that slaves, like wives, should follow their owners’ prayers. If the owner is traveling, then the slave prays the travel prayer. If the owner is home, they both pray the full prayer.Footnote 45 However, he does draw a distinction between slaves and wives, noting that if a man who is traveling purchases a slave, then the slave begins praying the travel prayer (even if he or she had previously been “home”), while a woman who marries a traveling man will continue to perform the full prayer.Footnote 46
Nur al-Din also notes that slaves who flee must pray the full prayer and those who the master declares will be manumitted upon the master’s death (gaining the status of mudabbir) must continue to pray as he does while the master is alive.Footnote 47 These expectations highlight that slaves who were Muslim had specific sets of pious obligations and, like wives, did not have the power to choose when they felt “home.” In fact, Nur al-Din contends with this very tension for those who cannot choose for themselves whether to pray the “homeland” prayer or not, for those whose hearts may not be “home” but may be required to pray as such anyway. They are, he notes, those who suffer. Clearly, a homeland of the soul was structured by deep inequalities.
And, [for he] who is obliged to take a waṭan
his heart suffers and is not in his homeland.
Part II
Undesirables, Subjects, and the Introduction of Immigration Policies
While these questions about homeland, belonging, and movement were posed in the context of the tensions surrounding the growing British presence in the Western Indian Ocean, British officials also grappled with migration in the administration of their empire. As this section of the article demonstrates, British officials struggled to impose controls even when intent on regulating movement. The story of the control of movement is, as scholars have long recognized, integral to the emergence of modern polities. But its imposition was often tactical, with officials responding to immediate crises and questions. In other words, it also reflects confusions in governance.Footnote 48 As British officials increasingly required safe passage documents and passports for travelers from the Sultan of Muscat’s office and other sheikhdoms on the Arabian Peninsula, residents often ignored the requirements, found documents too difficult to obtain, or used them for their own ends. Even when documents were issued, they frequently failed to conform to British expectations and attempts at standardization. Not surprisingly, British officials regularly adjusted their administrative approaches and, nearly as regularly, disagreed with each other about how to determine who was required to have what documents. This article cannot do justice to all the twists and turns of these policies. Rather, I focus on the particular attempts at controlling and regulating movement in the twentieth century’s first decades, particularly the uncertainties and confusions around political membership and its documentation. I emphasize the difficulties of determining jurisdiction, the growing significance of designating travelers as subjects of a ruler (based on birth or origins) and finally, the legitimizing function of paper documents (the travel pass and passports). As Nur al-Din was addressing the questions of how pious Ibadis should enact their daily religious obligations, which required of them to decide their “homeland,” British officials were developing procedures for how to regulate membership within and across political borders.
Debates among officials in Zanzibar about how to control immigration from Arabia to the island may have peaked in 1939 around the issue of “Manga Arabs,” a term used by British officials, the origins of which have long been debated, to refer to lower-status Arabs from Oman. But the first discussion of immigration controls in Zanzibar occurred thirty-five years earlier, around the time that Nur al-Din was writing his fatawa. Footnote 49 In 1903–1904, two sets of linked debates about mobility and belonging were taking place in the Western Indian Ocean among British officials: one concerned jurisdiction, slavery, and flagging, and the second involved laborers. The first debate coalesced around what became the “Muscat-Dhows case,” the fourth suit to be heard at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. This 1904 case exposed a convoluted system of imperial protections, jurisdictions, and rivalries (never mind documentation) that continued well into the 1940s. As Fahad Bishara has shown, the determination of who could be protected by which imperial power (France or Britain) as opposed to a seemingly independent sovereign (the Sultan of Muscat) was bitterly contested.Footnote 50 The sea was itself the focus of much legal wrangling, too, since the French claimed it was possible for people to belong to the sea, whereas the British insisted that birth (on land), and perhaps marriage and residence, determined subjecthood.
The second set of debates, also from 1903–1904, pertained to the control of laborers who had been working on the Ugandan railroad and had traveled to Zanzibar to find other work.Footnote 51 The recommendation in Zanzibar at that time was to look to the laws of Cape Colony and Natal, which had just passed restrictive immigration laws (The Immigration Act of 1902) that prohibited “the landing of any person who could not write out an application or sign in the characters of any European language and who could not provide evidence of some financial means to support himself/herself.”Footnote 52 These debates, however, were aimed less at determining who belonged where or who was a subject of which ruler than at marking who was undesirable and thus unwelcome to land.Footnote 53 As John Torpey has argued, until World War I immigration controls were focused initially on “undesirable” outsiders, but were subsequently directed at “national” groups.Footnote 54
In Zanzibar, little came of the recommendation to look to the Cape Colony laws. Edward Clarke, the British Consul General in Zanzibar, raised the issue of immigration again in 1909, and yet again in 1912. In 1912, he became alarmed by what he saw as “the entry of undesirables from German East Africa” in light of the fact that “Zanzibar was unprotected by any form of immigration restriction and was likely to become a dumping ground.”Footnote 55 Zanzibar, he complained, was “the only place on the East African coast where immigration was not controlled.”Footnote 56 The Foreign Office replied to Clarke’s requests for increased controls by pointing out their impracticality; British officials would not be permitted to board foreign ships or to make ship captains responsible for their passengers in the event of possible repatriation. The only way to circumvent German and French objections would be to proceed not with immigration decrees, but with “Public Order” decrees, and in fact it took the declaration of martial law in Zanzibar in 1915 for an Office of Immigration and Embarkation to be established. In 1916, Zanzibar implemented further emergency regulations, prohibiting the landing of any subject of an “Enemy State” and any person who was not in possession of a passport.Footnote 57
At this time the “passport” referenced above was not a standardized booklet, but rather a travel pass or safe passage document, linking “subject” to ruler to territory, rather flexibly. Nevertheless, a documentary trail that denoted official subjecthood was clearly being articulated, all premised on an idea of a single ruler controlling a territory in which his subjects were born. Such a document proved to be extremely difficult to regulate.
These demands for immigration controls emerged in conjunction with discussions about nationality as well as about labor. In Zanzibar, a “Nationality and Naturalization Decree of 1911” established nationality policy there, while a 1914 edict in Muscat clarified some requirements for changing allegiance. The 1911 decree established three paths to nationality: birth, naturalization, and marriage. For birth, the child either had to be born within the dominions of the Sultan of Zanzibar (to either a Zanzibari or non-Zanzibari father) or outside the dominions to a Zanzibari father.Footnote 58 As James Brennan has illustrated, the patchwork of German East African colonial arrangements, Zanzibari Sultanate jurisdictional claims, and British protectorate governance produced on-going debates about sovereignty and, in particular, attempts to define the extent of the Sultan’s “dominions.”Footnote 59
In Oman, British officials recognized Omanis only as subjects of the Sultan of Muscat, and not the Imam, despite the establishment of the Imamate in 1913 and the agreement of Sīb in 1920, through which the Imamate and the Sultanate recognized each other as more or less independent polities. Although he died in 1914, Nur al-Din al-Salimi was instrumental in the establishment of the Imamate. Perhaps not surprisingly in that year, questions about identifications and naturalization came to a head over tensions with Germany. In June 1914, the Omani Sultan, Taimur bin Faysal al-Bu Saidi, learned that supporters of the Imam from Sharqiyya (eastern coastal Oman) were journeying to East Africa and acquiring German identity documents there, thereby allowing them to travel without fear of arrest, even while bearing arms back to Oman.Footnote 60 With the outbreak of World War I, British officials became alarmed by any link to Germany and worried that the Sultan might establish his own private commercial treaties with Germany.
British advisors to the Omani Sultan therefore drafted an edict prohibiting any “Omani-born subject” (ra‘iyya) (or son or grandson of any Omani-born subject), “Arab by race and nationality,” from acquiring “naturalization” documents from a foreign state, unless such a “transfer of allegiance” had been approved by the Sultan himself or by means of a treaty arrangement.Footnote 61 A document was later created to provide consent from the Sultan to allow an “Omani Arab born subject” to change allegiance.Footnote 62 This emphasis on birth contrasts markedly with the notion of homeland articulated by Nur al-Din.
It should be noted, too, that the term “ra‘iyya” (subject) increasingly appears on official travel documents as British officials dictated what kind of information should be noted there, demanding confirmation that each person was a “subject” of one ruler, who would in turn be recognized as such by the British. The term’s Anglo-Indian legal genealogy, however, suggests a more varied set of referents. According to the British Indian imperial dictionary, Hobson-Jobson, the Anglo-Indian word “raiyat” or “ryot” derived from the Arabic and/or Persian ra‘iyya: “its specific Anglo-Indian application is to a ‘tenant of the soil,’ an individual occupying land as a farmer or cultivator.”Footnote 63 According to Suraiya Faroqhi, the term “ra‘iyya” referred to the status of peasant and tax-payer (as opposed to soldier) in Ottoman territories and not “subject” per se.Footnote 64 Furthermore, in Ibadi jurisprudence individuals living under Imamate rule were referred to as allies (ḥulafā’) or followers (atbā‘) rather than as “ra‘iyya”.Footnote 65 These new documents demanded instead the use of the term “subject.”
Further complicating these procedures and categories were questions of “protection,” which were first raised in the context of the 1904 Muscat Dhows case and cropped up again in the 1910s as a result of petitions by men from Arabia requesting British-protected status due to their relatively permanent settlement in East Africa.Footnote 66 As concern about the exclusion of undesirables gave way to the designation of subjecthood, questions about identification and belonging flummoxed British colonial officials. Despite this, the determination of homeland through the identification and documentation of subjecthood became essential to the regulation of movement.
Is He a “Subject?”
Although immigration controls became far more stringent after World War I, confusion about their enforcement reigned throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and even into the 1940s. In 1922, the Zanzibar Attorney General recommended that a new immigration decree should be instituted and by the following year the 1923 Immigration Decree was promulgated.Footnote 67 This decree, established thirteen years after Nur al-Din’s condemnation of Omani Ibadis for their hypocrisy, highlights the shared concerns of an Ibadi theologian and the Zanzibar government in clarifying questions of homeland at a particular historical moment.
In response to the decree, the Arab Association, an organization established in 1911 to represent Arab interests, remained officially silent, but the Indian Association formally objected to some of its measures, including the demand for passports.Footnote 68 The Indian Association pointed out that the passport system had been introduced as a “temporary” measure during the war and that it should no longer apply, especially since “there should be no restrictions of any such sort on traveling within the Empire.”Footnote 69 The British Resident, John Houston Sinclair, responded by stating that the affirmation of the passport system was an “imperial measure, and in fact a world-wide measure,” and left unanswered the question of why British subjects needed a “passport” to travel within the empire at all. Indeed, it was confusing to many Omanis why “subjects” of the Sultan of Muscat—who was a cousin of the Sultan of Zanzibar—needed them, since they saw Zanzibar as an extension of Oman and since Zanzibar was officially a protectorate and not a colony.
The status of “Omanis” and “Muscatis” was confusing not only in the region, but also for colonial administrators in London. In fact, by the mid-1930s, it was still not entirely clear to officials in the metropole whether subjects of Muscat (not to mention subjects of the Omani Imam) were also British Protected. The ambiguous status of Muscat as an “unofficial” protectorate while Zanzibar was an official one and Oman was “independent” made such questions difficult for officials to answer. In February 1936, an application by a “Muscati subject” in England for an “emergency certificate” as a British Protected Person or a seaman’s certificate of nationality was making the rounds. The request was forwarded by the Home Office to the Colonial Office and then to the India Office and finally to the office of the High Commissioner for India, who also asked whether it should go to the Foreign Office.Footnote 70 Some officials saw no problem in issuing passports or emergency certificates to “Muscati subjects” because Muscat maintained “special treaty relations” with His Majesty’s Government, even if it was not an official protectorate. Others noted that there was no point in issuing a certificate if the person was not in fact either a British subject or a protected person, and Muscat subjects were neither. One official at the India Office wrote, however, that though Muscat was not in theory a “protected state,” in practice it was treated as such, just like Bahrain and Kuwait. Bahrain was not in fact a “protected state,” but clearly this was not known to the official in the India Office. Interestingly, the man who applied for documents in the first place, Yusuf Nassar, apparently told the Chief Constable who interviewed him that “he had been informed by the Police that he was not a British Subject,” suggesting that Nassar had believed himself to be one. In response to this confusion, the India Office official recommended the creation of an altogether new legal category, “Subject of Muscat and Oman—British Protected Person,” but deferred to the Foreign Office for affirmation.
In response, the Foreign Office issued a telegram in January 1939 to the Home Office that was then circulated to the India Office, reminding both of the definition, established in 1914, of a “British Subject” as opposed to a “British Protected Person.” Those born in a colony after January 1915 would be subjects, while those born in a protectorate would be protected persons. If, however, a child in a protectorate was born to a British father, the child would be a British subject.Footnote 71 Similarly, Britain would exercise jurisdiction over British subjects in foreign countries according to capitulatory arrangements. As Muscat and Oman were not protectorates and this “Muscati” did not appear to have been born to a British father in a protectorate or in Muscat, the Home Office would not consider him a British subject or protected person.Footnote 72
Working through this tangle of policies and seeking to reconcile their legal categories with local practice, British officials often returned to place of birth and paternity as their starting points, and on this ground attempted to construct a system of identification, jurisdiction, and governance. None of this was straightforward. The archives testify to ongoing confusion, as well as to the distinctions “theory” and “practice.” Homeland was, clearly, not a matter of the resting place of a free man’s soul, nor was it the responsibility of the individual to decide.
The Demands of Paper
The demands of paper, rather than the inclination of the heart, was becoming ascendant in defining a person’s relationship to place (and, eventually, rule). As noted above, the use of the passport in the Indian Ocean dates initially to 1916 but became more widespread after 1920 when a standard international passport format was agreed upon at the League of Nations conference in Paris. The “Nansen” passport intended for stateless people was adopted in 1922, while in 1926 the Geneva passport convention reiterated the need for a standardized international system. Though the first attempts at requiring travel documents in Zanzibar in 1916 foundered on the inability of British officials to convince (or coerce) people from Muscat and Oman to carry such papers, by the late 1920s travel documents of some sort were more regularly used. Still, this practice did not proceed without objections and confusions, as the reaction of members of the Indian Association makes clear.
Prior to 1929, when passport books finally arrived in Muscat, some travelers from Oman and Muscat had in fact acquired safe passage papers. Issued throughout the Persian Gulf by the agencies, residencies, and local governments, such documents sufficed for travel, though British political agents sometimes complained that local government identity papers lacked detail and made it impossible for port officers to know whether the person traveling was in fact the person bearing the document.Footnote 73
As Lindsey Stephenson has illustrated, at the beginning of the twentieth century the Qajar Government in Iran also began issuing internal travel passes, called “ilm-o-khabar,” aimed at regulating travel within the Persian Empire, and external travel passes, called “tazkireh,” required for travel between empires.Footnote 74 Not surprisingly, this travel pass system and the questions about what lands and ports were under whose sovereignty, raised serious tensions, as Britain was carving out the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf under its “protection” at a time of growing Iranian nationalism.
These policies, Stephenson shows, were modeled partly on Ottoman bureaucratic practices for internal travel with the mürur tezkeresi, based on an authorization (ilmühaber) for civil servants and an identity card (nüfus tezkeresi).Footnote 75 As Fahad Bishara notes too, mariners carried another form of safe passage document, known as “qawl” (declaration), to ensure freedom of navigation.Footnote 76 While the Ottoman, Qajar, and British empires were producing conflicting travel passes, Omanis traveling to Zanzibar and into the Gulf generally carried documents labeled “Tadhkirat al-Mūrūr” or no documents at all.Footnote 77
Below is an example of a travel pass issued in 1928 by the head of the council (raīs al-wazara) of the Sultan of Muscat for a merchant and his sons, to travel to Bahrain.Footnote 78
A travel pass issued in 1928 by the head of the council (raīs al-wazara) of the Sultan of Muscat for a merchant and his sons to travel to Bahrain.
Unlike the passports and travel passes issued by the Muscat government (as well as the Imamate administration and other potential “secessionist” regions) after 1929, this document is a safe passage request, hand-written rather than typed, and without the standardization of a reproducible bureaucratic form. Instead, it is a “ticket for passage” (tadhkirat al-mūrūr and then, in the body, tadhkirat al-ḥaj), written as a rather formal letter, kindly requesting safe passage from the “men of powerful governments” (rajāl al-dawal al-‘aẓām) for a well-known man and his sons. The author of the document, writing on behalf (mahal) of the Sultan, uses a combination of Qur’anic and local language rather than modern standard Arabic. He uses, for example, the Qur’anic, rather than modern standard, spelling of “Ismail” as well as phrases particular to the Persian Gulf. The author explains the reason for travel (presumably for pleasure) as a change of “air” (taghayar al-hawā), rather than climate (taghayar al-jaww). Though hawā is also an Arabic word, it is more widely used in the Persian Gulf than the modern standard “jaww.” Similarly, the Sultan’s representative lists the appearance/position of the man (haīy’a al-rajal) rather than using the more general term, description (al-awṣāf), that became common later. The identifying features also differ from those of later, more standardized documents. In this case, the author writes that the traveler’s homeland (al-waṭan) is Muscat, his color (al-lawn) is white, that his height is average (ta‘adul), and that his eyes are healthy (ṣaḥīḥa). That he indicates “color” is interesting, though what other color options were possible is not clear from this letter. There is also an interesting reference not to the man’s eyes. Rather than noting their color, as British officials likely wished, the document references their health. At a time when trachoma was a serious concern and a potential cause for refusing entry to Zanzibar, for example, the issue of “healthy” eyes would have mattered more. While the letter indicates awareness of British identificatory expectations, it is also a hybrid, non-standard document, revealing the slow march of bureaucratic regulation.
Throughout the Persian Gulf, book passports and paper passports were introduced either in 1929, as in the case of Muscat, or 1930, as in the case of Bahrain (on the model of Muscat).Footnote 79 Though neither Muscat nor Bahrain was a protectorate, it was the British political agent who issued them, charging ten rupees for the book passports in Muscat and seven rupees in Bahrain. Book passports were distinguished from the paper passports as the former were used for travel outside the Persian Gulf, while the paper passports were used for travel between the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms and Muscat, but not Zanzibar.
This new passport regime brought with it unintended consequences. British officials soon discovered that one sheikh was using the requirement for travel documents to further his own claims of sovereignty from Muscat and the Imam. In 1929, the sheikh of Ja’alan Beni Bu Ali, Ali bin Abdullah al-Hamoudah, who had been vying for independence since at least 1925, began issuing his own “passports.”Footnote 80 When the British Resident in Bushire learned of it, he instructed all consulates to impound any such documents.Footnote 81 This minor incident reflected the establishment of Beni Bu Ali’s own custom house in Sur, a coastal town and the focus of the famed Muscat-Dhows case. It also prefigured greater tensions with the Ja’alan sheikh who became something of a thorn in the side of the British. There is no question that these documents were a symbolic form of declaring and establishing sovereignty. In 1930, RAF planes bombed al-Hamoudah’s village, enabling the Sultan to reestablish control there.Footnote 82
But this was hardly the only new problem to emerge. One India Office file about passports from 1929 to 1934 in Bahrain, Muscat, Kuwait, and other sheikhdoms is dominated by difficulties with the available and acceptable documents as well as the issuing authorities.Footnote 83 Rather than becoming regularized, by 1931, the system of issuing passport books and papers (to say nothing of visas) by the agents or sheikhs of the Persian Gulf became so cumbersome that the Political Resident in Bushire asked whether dhow travelers, and especially pearl divers, truly needed such documents and whether the demand then was actually causing more problems.Footnote 84 Thus, it was decided that to prove their occupation, divers would be asked to produce their “diving books,” while all other travelers could get a paper “pass” indicating their name and signed with the “seal” of the ruler of the sheikhdom. Of course, this required each ruler to have a seal. In Zanzibar, by contrast, significant resources were devoted to preventing poorer Manga Omani Arabs from entering the protectorate at all.
In British discussions on the regulation of movement, a link between ruler, subject, and territory appears increasingly self-evident, even though establishing the identity of subjects created enormous difficulties. The ideal, though, remained: a ruler rules a territory, in which his “people” were born and live, and as a result of which they can be recognized by the ruler’s office, and granted permission to travel from one territory or home to another.
Conclusions
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the meaning of waṭan appears obvious in Oman as it does elsewhere in the Arab world. It is a nation-state with territorial borders (even if some borders remain ambiguous), a sovereign ruler, and a growing, if tenuous, sense of a shared history. Among religious scholars of Ibadism too, waṭan is understood to be akin to the nation-state. In a recent paper, for example, “The Notions of Waṭan and Place in Ibadi Fiqh,” Ahmad Abu l‘Wafa of Cairo University argued that taking a waṭan in Ibadi fiqh is an obligation and that international borders separating sovereign countries are “natural” and inherent to Ibadi thought. He contended, furthermore, that regional or territorial jurisdiction appears in medieval Ibadi texts: “The ruler gets to be fair to his subjects (ra‘iyya) and go to war with those who fight him, within the border of his land where he is ruling.”Footnote 85
Similarly, when Sheikh al-Khalili pronounced in 2003 that Omani-Zanzibaris should accept that Zanzibar rather than Oman was their homeland and that they should therefore no longer perform the travel prayer, he equated homeland with the territorial state. This conception of homeland is not defined by the limits of the built environment, the orientation of peoples’ hearts, or the duration of travel. Rather, it is an officially defined and recognized sovereign state with territorial borders. While Sheikh al-Khalili might not go as far as Ahmad Abu l’Wafa in insisting that medieval Ibadi jurisprudence promoted ideas of territorial boundaries and national sovereignty, al-Khalili nonetheless accepts the notion that homelands are officially recognized territorial states.
In the meantime, paper documentation used for identifying travelers and allowing or denying safe passage has not only become standard but has taken on new meanings. The passport, of course, serves as an emblem of political membership and fortifies state claims to sovereignty. But as a material object, it possesses other valences, too, including evoking feelings of nostalgia for former homelands. When a member of a popular Oman/Zanzibar Facebook group recently posted an image of his black British passport of the Zanzibar Protectorate, for example, others quickly responded with little hearts, thumbs-up images, and crying emojis, signaling their deep emotional attachment to their lost homes, and lives, in Zanzibar.Footnote 86 Such nostalgia would have seemed very odd to Omanis at the turn of the century who saw these documents as inconvenient but logistically necessarily to facilitate movement. Still others would have insisted, along with Nur al-Din al-Salimi, that only individuals and not states had the legitimate authority to locate a homeland in a contiguous built environment.
The naturalization of the nation-state, whether in Europe or its former colonies, is the subject of an enormous body of scholarship. In this article, I have drawn attention to the period before this process became sedimented, recognizing that homelands in the Middle East—and elsewhere—were articulated in a multitude of ways. Conceptions of homeland were not limited, in other words, to national territoriality or even to universalist ideologies based on shared ethnic, linguistic, or religious identities. For early twentieth-century religious scholars of Oman, a homeland was spatial, affective, and hierarchical. It was located on land (rather than at sea) and had limits. Individuals were required to have one and to perform religious obligations accordingly. The self-disciplining and performance of pious behavior, such as praying, would help produce a proper homeland. This notion of homeland existed alongside the confused implementation of policies linking polity to birth and territorial borders. As I have explored, the confusions were so significant that officials sometimes concluded that it was best not to demand travel passes at all. Or, they engaged in convoluted debates, and invoke tenuous rationales, to formulate entirely new categories of belonging.
Such discourses were also riven with inequalities. While Omani religious scholars had to contend with the specter of growing British control as well as new imperial policies regulating movement, British officials barreled along in the conviction that they alone possessed the appropriate methods for the management of mobility. These officials may have been aware of the anti-colonial positions of Islamic scholars in the Middle East, and at times they sought their approval as a means of legitimizing new regulations and policies, but even so, they were not concerned with the possibility that such scholars might theorize homeland in relation to proper pious behavior and mobility.
These disparate approaches necessarily elicit comparison, but as this article demonstrates, they should not be considered in isolation from one another. As Omanis traveled across the ocean, they did so from the perspective of an existing political world and in response to an expanding bureaucratic system and colonial order. The British may have been unaware of these other conceptions of homeland, but they still aimed to manage subjects whose expectations about belonging and mobility were shaped by them. By presenting the two approaches together in this period of flux, my goal has been to elucidate these relations and their tensions.
By the end of the twentieth century, Nur al-Din al-Salimi’s understanding of homeland seems to have been settled, and in Oman as elsewhere in the Middle East waṭan came to be equated with the nation-state. That said, contemporary discourses about homeland (and prayer) carry echoes of the legal and political imaginaries from this period of flux. In 2015, the great-grandson of Nur al-Din al-Salimi spoke out against policies in Kuwait officially instituting zakāt collection as a “national tax.” “I see no justification,” he wrote, “for a state to impose zakāt so long as Muslim individuals are committed to giving it. In fact one gives zakāt just as one also prays because both are person-specific religious obligations.”Footnote 87 His objection was grounded in principles articulated by his ancestor in relation to prayer: like paying zakāt, praying was a person-specific obligation and could not be dictated by an external (state) power. Similarly, shocked reaction to Sheikh al-Khalili’s declaration that Omanis living in Zanzibar decades after the 1964 revolution should no longer perform the travel prayer was not simply due to the potential exposure of lassitude in religious observance. The declaration was also stunning because it diverged from views grounded in a vision of homeland beyond state territoriality and from practices enacted and embodied every day in prayer. Such practices continue to remind us of what a homeland might be: a place personally chosen and based in intention. It could be a place where the free heart lives, the soul resides, and where people hit the ground with the fullness of their slippers.
Acknowledgments
This article could not have been written without the advice and questions of innumerable colleagues, including the anonymous reviewers at Comparative Studies in Society and History, as well as audiences and readers at The University of Oslo, Princeton University, Columbia University, and the CUNY Graduate Center. I especially want to thank Fahad Bishara, Caitlyn Bolton, Mark Drury, Scott Erich, Mohamad Jamil Hodeib, Brinkley Messick, Thomas Ort, Abdulrahman Al-Salimi, Abdallah Al-Sallal, and Karen Strassler for their generosity, encouragement, and support.
