Page 159 - UAE Truncal States

Chapter Four

relatively small community compared to the over one thousand
Khojah merchants living in Matrah, I he coastal trading centre or
Oman.23
The Hindu community was even smaller, barely 200 at that same
lime, who were all immigrants from Sind and Gujarat. They mostly
engaged in the pearling trade and therefore their numbers rose
seasonally when more of them came for this business, particularly to
Dubai and Abu Dhabi. They left their families in India and visited
them frequently; thus they did not become integrated into the society
of the Trucial States. They also did not mix easily with the Khojah
communities either, and in some instances the presence of one
appears to have excluded the other: there were about 65 Hindus in
Abu Dhabi around the turn of the century, but no Khojahs at all,
while Ra’s al Khaimah town had 33 Khojah merchants with their
families, but no Hindus. In Sharjah the Hindu community numbered
about 50.24 In the 20th century Hindus are usually referred to as
“Banians" by the Arab population of the Gulf.
There were no Sabaeans nor any Oriental Christians, Nestorians
or other Christian communities living in Trucial Oman at the turn of
the century. Some members of the American Arabian Mission,
working in Basra, Bahrain and Muscat, had visited Trucial Oman in
1896 and claimed to have sold “more than 100 portions of Scripture"
there,25 but the object of their work and travels being of an
evangelistic, philanthropic and medical nature, they did not solicit
the conversion of Muslims to Christianity.
It may be seen from this enumeration of religious communities that
the society of the Trucial States was quite homogeneous. The only
substantial non-Muslim group of inhabitants, the Hindus, de­
monstrated by constantly travelling back to their Indian homes that
they did not want to be integrated fully into the local society. Thus
the all too common struggle for cultural supremacy between two
different religious groups was wholly absent. The political compli­
cations which arose out of the British protection of their Indian
subjects will be discussed later.20

The unifying force of Islam in this society
As far as the overwhelming majority of the ordinary inhabitants of
the Trucial States was concerned, the differences between the
various schools, Maliki, Hanbali, Ibadi, within their Sunni Muslim
faith were rarely realised and were certainly never reasons, in recent

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