This is an important book. For generations, Oman remained a terra incognita in Near Eastern studies. Only a few British scholars wrote about the area from time to time, and Omani manuscripts on the historical and religious heritage of the country were scarcely accessible, except via the United Kingdom. As a geographer, John Wilkinson has been working in the area for a generation, and what we have before us now is the ultimate sum of his personal research. Nobody, except the Omanis themselves, knows the area and its people better, and nowhere is the reader to realize more intensely the complexity of the subject he will have to cope with. Oman was always a world of its own, inhabited by Arabs who lived in a tribal society unaffected by any deeper urbanization, and dependent on maritime trade for a sufficient basis of nutrition, in addition to the dates it produced. Islam had arrived early, when it was still the religion of the Arabs, expelling the (Sasanid) Persians who had treated the country as an outpost in order to dominate the Gulf. However, the Omanis were too far away from Medina to get involved in the fight about the caliphate, and when they tried, during the Umayyad and the early ʿAbbāsid periods, to pursue their own conceptions via their jamāʿat al-muslimīn in Basra they met strong resistance and quickly fell back upon their original basis. Wilkinson follows the different attempts to create an independent “state” by way of an “imamate” to the last detail, up to the sixth/twelfth century. The sources he uses have never been sufficiently tapped, and most of them are still in manuscript form or have been published only during the last two decades. It is only five years since a first bibliography appeared (M. H. Custers, al-Ibāḍiyya. A Bibliography, 1–3. Maastricht, 2006). The texts are strongly tinged by their religious origin; this is where Ibāḍism comes in, a variety of early Islam which combined a certain antipathy for the caliphal system with the cautious quietism typical of tradespeople. For understanding the idiosyncrasies of the jargon and the way of thinking which comes with it we now have the Dictionary of Ibāḍī Terminology (1–2, Muscat, 1429/2008, in Arabic, which Wilkinson does not mention).

The problem with Ibāḍism is that there is an important “diaspora”, a mahjar, in the Maghrib (Algeria, Tunisia, Libya) which has developed a Geschichtsbild (an “imaginaire”) of its own and aroused the interest of other colonial powers whose languages are no longer so well known, i.e. France and Italy; the ensuing plurality of secondary literature may sometimes strain scholarly flexibility a little. But Wilkinson has lived in Paris for a long time, and he visited the communities in the Mzāb in order to gain access to their manuscripts. He ends his book with a comparison of the two branches and insinuates that their differences in conceiving their past are due to late “madhhabization”. He is, however, also aware of the possibility that the Maghribi tradition (which does not depend on Oman but on Basra) may preserve information about the Iraqi interlude which got lost when the Ibāḍī community decided to give up its Basran emporium and withdrew to the periphery again.

Yet this book, though indispensable, is also largely unreadable, a torture for anybody who does not belong to the “happy few”. Those who are initiated into the field will learn a lot, and will certainly appreciate Wilkinson's study as a painstaking and sometimes very personal interpretation of what happened. He seems to have travelled to every spot in Oman, and the susceptibilities of a tribal society lie open before his eyes. But there is little by way of an attempt to lead the reader through the maze of topography and proper names. In our age of specialization the expert may still enjoy the confidence of his audience; to keep their attention, however, is not as easy as it once was. Frustration arises when the English text is interspersed with Arabic terms which are neither translated nor explained. See, as one example among many, the chapter on Omani taxation (pp. 314 ff.): What is “ʿawâbi land” or “khabûra (which may have been called âd by the Persians in Oman)”? Even an Arabist needs some moments of reflection in order to realize that “Muqannis” (p. 315) means people who dig canals (qanāt). The problem is aggravated by the fact that the transcription of Arabic is highly erratic; the vocalization is a matter of chance, and the rules of Arabic grammar, especially morphology, are grossly disregarded. Specialists will ultimately find their way, but a beginner's capacity of creative combination is severely tested. Who would imagine that a “large work for Qadis entitled al-Ayḍaḥ (fî'l-aḥkām)” (p. 356; the same form also in the bibliography, p. 440) is in reality a K. al-Īḍāḥ until the same title appears on p. 372 as “Ayḍâh”, with a circumflex? And what is “seizin” (p. 308 and again 315)? Is “Mâlik b. Marwân” (p. 434) really the caliph ʿAbdalmalik? But I should not go on; a geographer is not necessarily a philologist. The book remains informative; it is flawed only with regard to transparency. And this is not the author's fault alone; the publishers have also done their best not to produce a manageable tool of research. Printing mistakes in English abound. Cross-references have been avoided, probably because in computerized printing they lead to additional costs. The author therefore refers by chapter number, but the publisher did not think to add these numbers to the running headlines. In addition to that, the topic is complicated and highly conjectural, and there is still no competent scholarly “network” which, with authoritative gesture, would point to the broad horizon. We shall have to wait for new illuminations to come.