Sur to Nizwa, Oman
Before leaving the region of Sur, I paid a visit to Ras al-Jinz, a tiny beach which belies its immense importance to several endangered turtle species; loggerhead, green, Olive Ridley and Hawksbill. On a small stretch of sand under honey-colored cliffs, female turtles come up on to the beach at night to lay upwards of 100 eggs deep in the sand.
The beach at Ras al-Jinz
After about 50 days the eggs hatch all at once, and guided instinctively by the moonlight the tiny black creatures, about two inches long, set off determinedly for the sea. Only a few meters separate their birthplace from the ocean but they are treacherous – birds, crabs and foxes catch them on the sand, and if they reach the ocean alive, fish and sea birds await them. For this reason they swim far out to sea for hours after hitting the water. It is not surprising that only about 1 of every 50 survives.
The government of Oman is arguably the most proactive in the Arab world with regard to conservation in general, and the turtles are no exception. Many have had little satellites attached to their shells so their movements can be tracked to enable us to learn more about them. The day of my visit a dead turtle lay on the beach – a female who for whatever reason had not made it back to sea, (males do not leave the sea). It seemed symbolic both of the struggle the little hatchlings face at the very start of their lives, to the ongoing pressures turtles face as adults sharing their habitat with increasing human encroachment and the attendant detritus that 21st century man in the form of 6 billion people brings to the earth.
And now back to another of Ibn Battuta’s obfuscatory statements;
“We set out thereafter for the land of Oman, and after traveling for six days through desert country we reached it on the seventh.”
……so does he mean desert as in sand, indicating he skirted the edge of the Wahiba Sands? Or does he mean desert as in barren hills, which would indicate he took a path via Wadi Khabbah and thence across either the Western Hajar mountains or by Wadi Indam? I confess I paid little heed, not because I am not interested but it is hard enough on occasion to follow his path when he does give the information, let alone trying to figure out his route when he gives no clues at all. Each track would have taken approximately the same length of time to reach Nizwa, so I opted to take the road along the northern edge of the Wahiba Sands, with a side excursion to the lovely oasis outpost of Wadi Bani Khaled.
The tranquil pools of Wadi Bani Khaled
Here I found the palm trees afflicted by the same disease I had seen in the Hadhramut in Yemen; the upper fronds glisten as if they had been coated with a sugar glaze, the lower fronds turn yellow, then brown and eventually die off, hanging limply against the trunk. It appears to be ‘lethal yellowing disease’ although the symptoms of this disease do not include shiny fronds. It seems there is no effective cure as the affected trees I saw last year in Hadhramut, were now dead sentinel-like trunks, or stumps where they had been hacked down. This is quite disastrous, and in areas where traditional oasis farming is still practiced it is even worse as not only the palm is lost, but everything growing under it that relies on it for shade such as pomegranates, beans and onions, also dies. No such calamity awaited Ibn Battuta in Nizwa,
“It is fertile, with streams, trees, orchards, palm groves and abundant fruit of various kinds. We came to the capital of this land, which is the city of Nizwa – a city at the foot of a mountain, enveloped by orchards and streams, and with fine bazaars and splendid clean mosques”
Nizwa's oasis
Nizwa is nothing if not fertile, with huge date palm plantations watered by a series of falaj channels. The falaj system of irrigation works on the same principal as the qanat system in Iran and it may well have been brought over by the Persians in one of their innumerable forays to subdue the other side of the Gulf. (Several of the falaj systems have recently been named a collective UNESCO World Heritage Site.) There are several different methods of falaj, but the traditional system works by digging a deep well near the foot of a mountain then digging an underground water channel on a gradient towards the settlement. Vertical shafts are dug every few meters which are used to take out the earth and rubble during construction and thereafter for ongoing maintenance of the system. When the water reaches the village, it is distributed through a series of open channels where it is measured out equally.
The open channel of the Birkat al-Mawz falaj
In times past, everyone had a set time for irrigating their land and certain families were responsible not only for the construction and maintenance of the falaj but for making sure that everyone got their allotted share. Some were water diviners and knew instinctively where to dig a well. Simpler falaj systems capture the water from a spring through an open channel, or build dams in wadis to collect seasonal rains. Regardless of the system used, the water was always used firstly for drinking, then for ritual washing before prayer, bathing, washing dishes, then for animals, washing clothes and finally for irrigation. There are thousands of kilometers of such falaj in Oman and it was reckoned not so many years ago that this system irrigated over half of the country’s cultivated land. It is environmentally sound - another reason to preserve the old system even if most housing in Oman now has piped water.
The Daris falaj - local boys often swim in this part
I visited two falaj systems – Daris and Tanuf. The latter, a little town, was a casualty of the ‘Jebel Wars’ during the 1950s when various factions- tribal, Imamate and Sultanate were in revolt. The British, allied to the Sultan, bombed the villages and redoubts of the rebels and now the adobe-built village is an abandoned ghost town, its remaining inhabitants ensconced in new housing in a new Tanuf. Its lasting claim to fame however is its gushing spring, the contents of which are bottled and sold all over the country.
The emerging falaj in old Tanuf
Ibn Battuta was much concerned with matters of ritual, which was far more important in 14th century Islam than it is now. He was writing for a Muslim audience of learned people so such things as he found that differed from the Maliki canonical school of his homeland were very important to him to disseminate. He thus noted of the people of Nizwa,
“They are Ibadi in rite, and they make the congregational prayer on Friday (an ordinary) noon prayer with four ‘bowings’, after they have finished these, the imam reads some verses from the Qur’an and delivers an address in prose, resembling the khutba, in the course of which he uses the formula ‘God be pleased with him’, in respect of Abu Bakr and Omar, but makes no mention of Othman and Ali.”
This is of interest to him because the standard Sunni procedure is to make two bowings before the khutba (or sermon) at the Friday noon prayer, and the reason four bowings were done here, rendering the Friday prayer a regular prayer, was because an Imam was needed for the Friday prayer to be valid, and during this period (12th-15th century) the ruling family in Nizwa, the Nabhani, were considered usurpers and therefore not legitimate Imams, by the Kharijites.
The Kharijite (sect of Islam), which literally means ‘those who leave’ in the sense of ‘seceders’, are neither Sunni nor Shia, but came into being during the First Islamic Civil War or fitna (656-661AD). They believed, as did the Sunnis, that anyone who was qualified could be Caliph, and not as the Shi’a believed, that the Caliph had to be a member of the Prophet’s family. They initially accepted Ali as the fourth Caliph, but they rebelled against his decision to accept arbitration, at the instigation of Mu’awiyyah, who had set himself up as a rival Caliph to Ali in Damascus, regarding the assassination of Othman, the third Caliph - a move which ultimately led to Ali losing first the Caliphate and then his life – he was assassinated by a Kharijite in 661.
The Kharijites now in open revolt against the afore-mentioned Mu’awiyya, moved to Oman and the outer edges of his sphere of influence. Ibadism is generally regarded as an offshoot of Kharijite Islam, which came into being in 750 after the fall of the Ummayad dynasty, when a sub-group of Kharijites known as Ibadis after their founder, chose their own leader or Imam. Despite attempts by the succeeding Abbasid dynasty to impose its rule over them, the Ibadis continued to follow their own doctrine as they do to the present. As for the matter of the mention - and omission - of the first four caliphs, traditional Ibadite dogma considered Othman, the 3rd caliph, to have been an ‘innovator’ who corrupted the early tenets of Islam, and the reasons for the omission of Ali are outlined above.
While this was all critical stuff in the14th century, it is no longer overmuch pored over except by Islamic historians and scholars. Ibadi Islam as it is practiced in Oman, is extremely tolerant and inclusive. One major difference in the matter of worship or prayer, between Islam and Christianity is that in Islam different sects of Muslims pray together, so it would not be at all unusual for an Ibadite and a Sunni to pray regularly in the same mosque, whereas a Catholic, a Greek Orthodox or even an Anglican would not routinely worship in a Lutheran or a Baptist church, or vice versa for that matter. All Muslims, regardless of denomination, accept the basic five pillars of Islam and despite doctrinal difference, the ritual of prayer is similar enough that it does not matter in what ‘kind’ of mosque they pray.
Oman is the only country where Ibadi’ism is the dominant form of Islam – in Dhofar province the population is mainly Sunni - but there are pockets of Ibadites in North Africa, usually in remote desert or mountainous areas such as Jebel Nafusa in western Libya, the M’zab Valley in Algeria and the island of Djerba in Tunisia.
