Until recently, most of the scholarship on coastal East Africa has been done by people (like myself) trained in the African Studies tradition and (again, like myself) woefully ignorant of the Arabic language. The result has been many fine-grained but somewhat insular and Swahili-centric studies of coastal peoples and their history. In the early 2000s, people from the world of Middle Eastern Studies who were equipped with good Arabic started to turn up in the Zanzibar Archives and at Swahili coast conferences. Their training gave them access to Arabic documentary materials that had gone unused and made them aware of cultural and religious networks that linked coastal elites to other regions of the Indian Ocean. They were able to shed light on aspects of the Zanzibari past those of us who were trained primarily as Africanists had missed.

Amal Ghazal's book, which is largely concerned with Zanzibar, represents a continuation of this trend. Using a wide range of Arabic sources, she is able to delve into the intertwined religious and political discourse of the coast's Omani elite. Zanzibar, she argues, has not received the attention it deserves from Arabists because it was a dependency of Oman, which itself has been treated as peripheral to the main thrust of Middle East history. Further complicating the situation is that Omanis and the Omani-descended elite in Zanzibar adhere to the Ibadi school of Islam, which split from the Sunni tradition in the eighth century. Ibadi thought has generally been considered outside of the mainstream of Islamic intellectual life, so Ibadi thinkers in obscure places like Oman or Zanzibar have received little scholarly scrutiny.

Ghazal describes a network of Ibadi reformers that stretched from the Magrib to Egypt to Oman and Zanzibar. She makes the case that Ibadi scholars participated in the Islamic reformist and anticolonial movements of the late ninetieth and early twentieth centuries and that Zanzibar was central to this discussion. She is able to demonstrate that Ibadi scholars, most notably the jurist Nasir al-Bahlani who was born in 1860 in Oman and died in 1920 in Zanzibar, were participants in scholarly and journalistic debates about Arab nationalism and Islamic reform that engaged not just other Ibadis and Omanis but also Sunni scholars and Arab nationalists in Egypt. In doing so, she is making the case that Omani-ruled Zanzibar was perceived by its Arab inhabitants as part of the larger Arab world and that that perception was reciprocal.

The book offers a perspective one would not get from someone trained as an Africanist. In some respects it is an important corrective to the more insular Africanist perspective and offers a perspective on the Omani ruling class's worldview that would be inaccessible to anyone unable to read Arabic.

Tellingly, however, she begins and ends the book with reflections on the comments of Najib al-Rayyis, a journalist who visited Zanzibar in 1997. Al-Rayyis lamented the fall of the Omani Sultanate in Zanzibar and saw parallels between the ‘loss’ of Zanzibar and Andalusia. Like Andalusia, ‘Zanzibar came under Arab-Muslim rule, flourished, and earned a reputation as tolerant center of economic and intellectual prosperity. Both ‘paradises’ of Arab rule were lost violently, too’ (p. 1). To be fair, this is her paraphrase of al-Rayyis, but her book reflects this highly Arab-centric view of the island and its past. Exactly what the source of Zanzibar's prosperity was is never mentioned. Slavery comes up in the context of the imposition of treaties limiting the slave trade, but the role of slavery in the nineteenth-century economy of the islands and its legacy in the twentieth century is unexplored. Ghazal's source material includes all sorts of patronizing and condescending comments about Zanzibar's non-Arab inhabitants, which she leaves unanalyzed. If the word ‘revolution’ appears in the book, I cannot find it. And the 1964 revolution is the 800-pound gorilla lurking in the background of this story. Ghazal sees the Omani intellectuals of Zanzibar as anticolonial thinkers and sees the confluence of Islamic reform and Arab nationalism there as a critical piece in the development of nationalist and anticolonial thought. That argument may have merits, but what she leaves unsaid is that the events of 1964 rendered that strand of nationalist thought largely irrelevant. In fact, in al-Rayyis's lamentations about Zanzibar as a lost ‘paradise’, the Kenya Highlands and Rhodesia might be more relevant parallels than al-Andalus.