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Countries / Middle East

Oman

works
6
6 books
period covered
907–2000
language of writing
Arabic

In 1840, the sultan of Oman transferred his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar. An Arab state was therefore governed from East Africa, with a fleet, clove plantations, a slave trade, and a language that mingled with Swahili. The separation of the two crowns would not take place until 1861, and Omani families would remain on the other side of the ocean until the revolution of 1964, when many returned to a country they had never lived in.

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Oman therefore looks to the sea rather than to the desert, and to the Indian Ocean rather than to the peninsula. Its sailors navigated as far as China, its communities settled in Baluchistan, on the Swahili coast and in the Comoros, and its majority Islam, Ibadism, is neither Sunni nor Shia. Those three features make Oman a country apart in the Gulf, and its literature bears the mark: it is less occupied with the desert and more with departure, elsewhere and return. The Hajar mountains and the two-thousand-year-old irrigation channels provide the other half of the landscape.

Literary modernity arrived there late and from outside. The country had almost no schools before 1970, and the authors of the first generation wrote away from home: Saif al-Rahbi lived in Cairo, Damascus, Algeria and Paris before founding a literary review in his own country. Writing as an Omani first meant writing in voluntary exile, in other people's reviews, and then returning to build the institutions that were missing: a review, a publishing house, an audience. That generation built the place where it would be read, and the Omani novel really appeared only after it.

What awaits the reader is a poetry of displacement, peopled with ports, boats and foreign cities, in which the native country appears as a point one looks at from a distance. The book that opens this page returns to the desert of childhood after twenty years of exile, and its author founded the journal Nizwa.

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A way to begin

A Man from the Empty Quarter

Saif al-Rahbi · 1994

The desert of childhood seen again after twenty years of exile, by the founder of the review Nizwa.

The entry See the author

Written between 1990 and 1992, in The Hague and Muscat, these poems make the Rub' al-Khali desert less a place than a space of emptiness. The Bedouin night, the wolf, sand, the tent and the herds return, in brief fragments founded on the instant, along with memory, lost time and exile.

Timeline

  1. 1500–1800ChroniclesThe Omani written tradition lies in historical chronicles and diwans of poetry.
  2. 1970OpeningThe end of the sultanate's isolation opens schools, press and publishing houses.
  3. 1990–2010The Omani novelA generation of writers, several of them women, brings the novel into the country.
  4. 2019International BookerJokha Alharthi receives the prize for Sayyidat al-qamar, the first Arabic book so honoured.

Reading keys

1Names and kinship
  • The name reads as a genealogy with bin and bint, very frequent in writing in that form rather than as ibn.
  • The last element indicates the tribe or the region, and tribal belonging remains an active social datum.
  • Names of Swahili or Baluchi origin are common and attest to the country's maritime history.
  • The kunya, "father of" followed by the name of the eldest child, serves as a respectful form of address.
2What is said and unsaid
  • The Dhofar war, from 1963 to 1976, and the period before 1970 are little recounted head-on. Authors come back to them by allusion.
  • Slavery and the slave trade, of which Oman was a major actor in the Indian Ocean, remain a difficult subject.
  • Confessional debate is avoided: Ibadism readily defines itself by moderation and the refusal of polemic.
  • Restraint is valued, and ostentatious eloquence is regarded as suspect, which produces texts more sober than in the rest of the peninsula.
3Religion and the unseen
  • Ibadism, in the majority, is a distinct branch of Islam, derived from Kharijism, with its own juridical tradition and a historical mistrust of hereditary power. It is neither Sunnism nor Shiism.
  • The elected imam, a figure of classical Ibadism, coexisted with the sultan, which gives the country two ancient legitimacies.
  • The jinn and the creatures of the mountains and the wadis belong to the local stock.
  • The falaj, underground irrigation channels two thousand years old, have an almost sacred value and a law of their own.
4Colours, rites, mourning, feasts
  • Muslim mourning is brief and discreet, burial takes place on the same day.
  • The khanjar, a curved dagger worn at the belt, appears on the country's arms and marks status at ceremonies.
  • Ramadan and the Eids order the calendar, with a nocturnal rhythm.
  • The white of the dishdasha and the coloured masar turban are ordinary, and the colour of the turban may indicate the region.
5Shared references
  • The navigation narratives of the Indian Ocean, including the voyages attributed to Sindbad, are claimed as an Omani heritage, the port of Sohar being given as his town.
  • The memory of Zanzibar and the Swahili coast is a common reference, with its houses, its plantations and its families who stayed over there.
  • Ibadi traditions and the chronicles of imams provide a stock of exemplary narratives.
  • Nabati poetry and the Mu'allaqat are shared with the rest of the peninsula.
6Misreadings to avoid
  • Oman is not an oil country like its neighbours: the windfall came later and is more modest there, and the literature does not speak of sudden fortune.
  • Ibadism is regularly confused with Sunnism or presented as a sect. It is an ancient tradition and the majority one in the country.
  • The link with East Africa is not exotic but constitutive: some Omanis were born in Zanzibar and speak its language.
  • The silence of the texts about the period before 1970 is not an oversight but a caution.

Tales and mythologies 1

Available in English 1

The books from this country that can be read in English, in the original or in translation.

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