Page 159 - UAE Truncal States
P. 159

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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