Page 157 - Truncal States to UAE_Neat

■W

Chapter Four

formed part of an Omani Slate, and were also considered to be within
the province of Oman when it was administered by the Caliph’s
amir.10 But the tribes of the mountain foreland and the desert beyond
it were, although involved in the politics of Oman, not always tin
integral and taxable part of it. The arrival, probably during the 16lh
century ad, of Sunni tribes such as the Bani Yas confederation,
became an important enough factor on the eastern Arabian scene to
give al GharbTyah (Sahil fUman) a political character of its own, so
that it could no longer be automatically regarded as an integral part
of Oman.

3 The religious communities in Trucial Oman
at the turn of the twentieth century

Muslim and other communities
At the turn of the century the population of the Trucial States was
not only entirely Muslim—with the exception of the few Hindu
merchants living in some of the towns—but was also almost
completely Sunni.
The homogeneity with regard to religious practice was not
disturbed by the fact that three of the four schools of jurisprudence
which are recognised by Sunnis were adhered to by the tribal
population. These madahib were the Hanbali, the Maliki, and the
Shafi’i madhab. The three schools do not differ in the fundamentals
of religious belief, but only in minor rules concerning the perform­
i
ance of the religious rites and certain legal interpretations of concern
to the learned and the experts in Islamic jurisprudence.
Because there was not even a formally trained qadi in each of the
towns of the Trucial States, and a learned man, mula wwa\ acquired
his knowledge from a very limited number of written sources besides
the Koran, arguments about finer points of difference between these
schools could never form part of jurisdiction in this society. Thus,
rather than consciously following in one shaikhdom a madhab which
differed from that followed by the neighbours up or down the coast,
\
each community continued to accept most readily the judgements
which were in conformity with earlier judgements in identical or
similar cases. These judgements, which were thus bound to take
precedents and analogies into account, almost inadvertently per­
petuated the adherence to a particular madhab. But for the people
themselves these differences did not exist.

132