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Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 109

death he passed the greater part of his time at Zanzibar, leaving the govern­
ment of Oman to one of his sons. He afforded no real protection to his people
against the Wahhabis, electing to pay the intruders Danegeld instead, which is
perhaps one reason why the Ibadi tribes never pressed the imamate upon him.
Another probable reason is that they considered him unfitted spiritually for the
office, being tainted by his trafficking with Christians and Hindus, by his

penchant for innovations, and by his consortings with Abyssinians and
Baluchis. For his part, so far as is known, Said ibn Sultan never sought election
as imam. He may simply not have wanted the office, or the responsibilities
which went with it, preferring to keep his court at Muscat, with its view upon
the open sea, rather than in the interior, at Nizwa, Rastaq or Sauhar, the three
towns where, so Ibadi custom decreed, the imam might properly conduct the

Friday prayer.
On Saiyid Said’s death in 1856 his eldest surviving son succeeded to his
dominions in Oman, while another son declared himself independent ruler of
Zanzibar and the East African dependencies. The de facto division of the
sultanate was made permanent in 1861 by the governor-general of India, acting
as arbitrator in the dispute between Said’s heirs. The loss of Zanzibar, and of
the East African slave trade of which it was the centre, aroused great resent­

ment among the tribes of Oman, a resentment which found expression in a
movement to revive the Ibadi imamate. The movement culminated in 1868 in
the expulsion of the reigning sultan from Muscat and the election of the head of
the collateral branch of the Al Bu Said, Azzan ibn Qais, the wali or governor of
Rastaq, as imam. Azzan celebrated his election a year later by driving the

Wahhabis from the Buraimi oasis, to which they were not to return for
three-quarters of a century. His reign, however, proved brief: in January 1871
he was overthrown and slain by one of Saiyid Said’s sons, Turki.
With Azzan’s death and the restoration of the main Al Bu Said line, the heart
went out of the imamate movement for years to come. Turki ibn Said ruled
with the fluctuating support of a shifting coalition of Hinawi and Ghafiri tribes,
whose loyalty he secured by the customary Al Bu Said policy of alternating

bribery with coercion. Though both his reign and that of his son, Faisal, who
succeeded him in 1888, were troubled by tribal unrest and rebellions, the
fractiousness of the tribes was not directed towards the re-establishment of an
Ibadi theocracy. The eclipse of the Saudi dynasty in Najd in the last two
decades of the century removed the threat of invasion from that quarter, and

correspondingly diminished the desire of the Ibadi tribes for the leadership and
unity that an imam might have given them. What sentiment for the imamate
endured was kept alive by the mutawwa class among the Ibadiya, the religious
zealots who never ceased to anathematize the Al Bu Said house for its laxity,
ebauchery and besottedness with foreign ways. With control of the imamate
movement falling almost wholly into the hands of the mutawiyah, the spiritual
nature of the office came to be portrayed as paramount, its temporal functions