Page 76 - A Hand book of Arabia Vol 1 (iii) Ch 1,2

POLITICS 37
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Sultanate of Oman (British Sphere).—This is an old principale
(••*)
• t|lo;l chequered history. For many centuries, from the eighth
" iwards it. was a purely elective primacy over the Ibadhi sectaries
f Oman’,-who hold, with their Ivhauarijite teachers, that the leader-
I I
Ijip ()f the faithful should depend not on an accident of birth, such
'|S ntembership of thp Qoreish tribe or descent from the Prophet, but
i'.n personal fitness or on political expediency. The person selected
l,v them to rule was styled Imam, and his residence was at Rostaq.
He was usuallvj derived from one of the greater tribes, first the
A/-d, and then the Ya'aVibah, preference, but no right, being given
to a son of thcflast Imam.
[t, was not till 1741 that a dynasty—the same which is still in
power—was initiated .by Ahmed ibn Sa'Icl of ihe Azcl tribe, who
had been elected Imam as a reward for his share in the expulsion
of Persian troops, invited by the last Ya'aribah. His second son,
iSa'fd, succeeded, and in the'eourse of a very long life, which lasted
till flbout 1815, saw himself supplanted in the reality of power
first’ by his own son, then by ins brother, Sultan, arid then by
his nephews, sons of the latter. One of these, (5a‘id, -who had
tfeen sole regent and de facto ruler since 1804, survived and
succeeded "litnf, but, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, not
aS Imam, but as Sultan, retaining as his title of honour Seyyid,
which he had held hitherto, like all Ahmed ibn Sa'id’s descendants
Seyyicls, not Imams, the Sultans of Oman have been ever since.
The fact is important, because, although the Ibadhi doctrine does
not absolutely require that there should be any Imam, a natural desire
for one has led constantly to the election of an Imam by sectaries
of the interior in opposition to the Seyyid reigning on the coast;
and most recently in 1913. That no Sultan since Ahmed’s son has
ever secured this recognition at the hand of the inland tribes, who
have grown more fanatical under Wahabite influence, is due in the
main to Sultan Sa'Icl’s transference of his seat from Rostaq to
Muscat in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, to his frequent
•. ! absences abroad at Zanzibar, &c., and to a certain suspicion of
irreligion which has fallen on all the house since it has been in close
relations with non-believers.
The result is that the recent Sultans of the A1 Bu Sa‘Id house
have often been in reality little more than Sultans of Muscat and
a stretch of the coast north and south, and that anarchv, tempered
by occasional tribal alliances concluded under a new ‘Imam’
against the Sultan, has reigned in inland districts. At the present
moment (1910) an Imam, rather than the Sultan, is recognized bv
the majority of the Oman tribes. °

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