Be Careful What You Wish For
The solution to the eighteenth-century drought that had displaced interior Omanis and driven up well water prices in Muttrah was intercession from the sultan. Hamed bin Said al-Busaidi (r. 1784–1792) took decisive action to end the drought: he gathered people and led them in prayer for rain in three different wadis around Muscat on three subsequent days. As a result, “clouds covered the sky, and the rain descended, as if poured from buckets.” Hamed bin Said mounted his horse and rode quickly back to his house in Muscat before waters coursed down the wadis and washed into the sea. The outcome in this case was favorable—great fertility followed, crops were abundant, and prices were low.59 Some storms, however, brought too much rain, and the consequences of downpours were also dire.
Evidence from the nineteenth century shows that, in the face of devastating flash floods in Oman, out-migration to East Africa increased. One exception to this was the Sumayl valley, where a newly robust market for their particular dates created economic resiliency. In most other regions of the interior, however, environmental damage prompted some to move across the Indian Ocean. In general, most Omanis welcomed rain. In 1835, a cold drenching rain from a December downpour delighted the Jenebeh of eastern Oman by ensuring pasturage for the coming months.60 People knew that violent rains sometimes fell, and the community expected them with some regularity, as often as every three years. These rains turned the valleys into dangerous streams, so swollen and swift that camels could not pass through them.61
Voluminous, unseasonable rains could also turn sinister and flash floods in wadis could carry date palms and houses as far as the sea. Writing in the early twentieth century, Ibadi scholar and historian Abdullah bin Humayd al-Salimi recounted Oman’s worst flood, a heavy June downpour in 251 (Hegira) / 865 that swept down the wadis, washed away whole villages, pulled date palms from their roots, and carried bodies out to the sea. The same floods inundated the aflaj.62 In addition to the immediate loss of life and livelihood, floods compromised the irrigation system by damaging watercourses, filling them with detritus, and hastening the silting of the falaj.63 Damage to aflaj increased the cost of maintaining the water source. Beyond their economic consequences, floods and storms contributed to out migration from Oman across the Indian Ocean in an era of new mobility.
Data from the 1870s suggest a variable pattern of heavy rains and storms that destroyed large numbers of date palms, dismantled houses, and led to transoceanic emigration. In 1874 and 1875, unseasonably heavy rains destroyed the date crop in central Oman. The next year, however, rains fell plentifully at the appropriate time (at the beginning of the year), and this precipitation pattern promised an abundant date harvest.64 The following year, severe storms in December flattened five thousand date palms in the Ma‘awīl and Sumayl valleys.65 At that time the Sumayl valley was rapidly expanding its production of fard dates for the United States market. In 1875, an American visitor to Muscat estimated that six million pounds of dates traveled from Muscat to New York that year.66 Farmers in Sumayl discovered that they could sell all the dates that they could harvest, and the value of this export peaked in the 1880s.67 Thus, while we have insufficient data to quantify the effects of a storm that toppled five thousand palms, it is likely that the loss of thousands of trees producing the region’s most valuable export devastated some residents.
In the following season—from 1877 to 1878—heavy floods overran “the whole of Oman,” and the country’s date crop was almost entirely lost. The environmentally marginal Sharqiya region was hardest hit, with an estimated crop loss of 90 percent. Surrounding districts suffered almost as much. By harvest time, the specter of famine was clear, and the British resident in Muscat expected distress and possible political disturbances.68 While political grievances simmered, some people whose lives depended on date farming in the 1870s made the same decision as those who faced the catastrophic drought in Nizwa the 1840s: they left their homes. In Muscat, observers reported a steady emigration to Zanzibar. Between 1877 and 1878, an estimated one thousand Arabs decamped in response to the poor date harvest.69
In March 1885, a cyclone hit central Oman, inundating villages and settlements. A flash flood ripped down the Sumayl valley, destroyed thousands of date trees, and rendered homeless the poorest inhabitants who lived in makeshift shelters of matted palm leaves. The recovery from such destruction was slow. Nine months later, a visitor still found wrecked houses, ruined date gardens, and many headless palm trees broken or bent to the ground.70 The strong international market in fard dates from Sumayl may have been a saving grace. In response to demand in the 1870s, farmers in Sumayl had greatly increased the number of date trees they planted. The loss of thousands of trees was proportionately smaller than the preceding decade’s loss. Still, Sumayl producers exhibited some resilience, probably because of the thriving production and high prices of dates. Throughout the 1880s, the date trade to the United States was at its peak, averaging more than $100,000 per year. The producers earned about 80 percent of the export value.71 Unfortunately for most Omanis, the lucrative, particularistic market for fard dates from Sumayl had no cognates in other sectors of the economy. As the nineteenth century closed, Sumayl fell more in line with the rest of the country, as both local political disturbances and a North American recession significantly diminished export earnings.72 This set the groundwork for waves of emigration to East Africa that would continue until the 1960s.
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What conclusions should we draw from the people of Oman’s relationship to their environment in the nineteenth century? The sometimes tenuous balance that Omanis sought in maintaining their date groves and their livelihoods faced the same challenges in the nineteenth century as they had in previous periods. Droughts and floods were endemic. What was strikingly different about this era, however, was that Indian Ocean emigration was an option for many more people than it had ever been before. A close connection between the interior of Oman and Zanzibar and other East African locales became firmly established during this period. For example, Nasir bin Ahmad al-Riyami escaped drought in the eighteenth century by moving his family from the village of Al Jede’iya to the larger settlement of upper Ibra (Ibrā‘ ‘Alaya). After Said bin Sultan had paved the way to East Africa in the early nineteenth century, however, Nasir bin Ahmad led his family there in the 1820s, and his family prospered.73 Africa became a refuge and a source of wealth. The degree to which environmental difficulties prompted people to move is hard to isolate, yet the extreme droughts of the 1840s and the destructive, variable rain patterns of the 1870s both preceded periods of Arab migration. Desiccated water sources and ruined date groves put individuals and families in precarious conditions. When their homes and farms were unsustainable, and an absent sultan was unable to lead prayers for rain, Omani Arabs could temporize. Moves to the Arabian coast and to East Africa bought time for droughts to end, rain to come, and land to revive.
Following historian Claude Markowitz’s terminology, this movement should be seen as a pattern of circulation.74 Some Arabs did settle in East Africa, but emigration began as a response to particular factors in Oman, and nothing suggests that individuals left Arabia with no intent of returning. As we shall see, some of these migrants used wealth gained abroad to invest in their homelands. Some renovated aflaj or built new ones, while others underwrote the construction of impressive houses. Far from being isolated, the interior of Arabia continued to be connected to the Indian Ocean world, not just through the circulation of goods, but also through the circulation of people, their wealth, and the religious and political ideologies that motivated them. By understanding the temporizing strategies that individuals pursued in the face of difficult conditions, we can appreciate the contingent nature of mobility in the western Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century. The evidence of this mobility can be found among the former halwa-makers of the caravan routes of central Africa, and