¹ Muslims adhering to the recommendations of travel prayer are instructed to group the five required daily prayers into three while traveling and shorten them after arrival at a destination. Discussion of these rules for prayer have circulated throughout the Muslim World for centuries, appearing, for example, in a chapter of Abu al-Walid Ibn Rushd’s famous twelfth-century text Bidayat al-Mujtahid wa Nihayat al-Muqtasid (The distinguished jurist’s primer). This text has served as a standard for legal debate and thought, even among scholars in the Indian Ocean and even if some of Ibn Rushd’s theological and legal positions would have been at odds with Ibadism, the branch of Islam dominant in Oman. See note 9 for references to the sayings and actions (hadith) about Prophet Mohammad’s migrations and declarations of homeland.

² For a study of continued Omani-Zanzibari elite diasporic attachment to East Africa after the 1964 revolution, see Mathews, Nathaniel, Zanzibar Was a Country: Exile and Citizenship between East Africa and the Gulf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024).Google Scholar

³ Mbembe, Achille, “At the Edge of the World,” Public Culture 12, 1 (2000): 259–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ The literature on pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, and territorial nationalism in the Middle East is vast. For an earlier summary of approaches to all three, see Khalidi, Rashid, “Arab Nationalism: Historical Problems in the Literature,” American Historical Review 96, 5 (1991): 1363–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here, Khalidi points out that pan-Arabism was rarely an actual contender to local nationalisms and hardly the only form of Arab nationalism. See also the special issue edited by Wien, Peter, “Relocating Arab Nationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, 2 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, including the paper by Michael Provenance, “Ottoman Modernity, Colonialism, and Insurgency in the Interwar Arab East (205–55). See, too, Willis, John, “Debating the Caliphate: Islam and Nation in the Work of Rashid Rida and Abul Kalam Azad,” International History Review 32, 4 (2010): 711–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Ghazal, Amal, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (1880s–1930s) (London: Routledge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ghazal, Amal, “An Ottoman Pasha and the End of Empire: Sulayman al-Baruni and the Networks of Islamic Reform,” in Gelvin, James and Green, Nile, eds., Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 40–58 Google Scholar; and Bang, Anne K., Zanzibari Muslim Moderns: Islamic Paths to Progress in the Interwar Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).Google Scholar

⁶ Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 2.Google Scholar

⁷ For an excellent discussion of spatial, but not territorial, conceptions of sovereignty, see Mark Drury, Disorderly Histories: An Anthropology of Decolonization in Western Sahara, PhD diss., City University of New York, 2018.

⁸ Zayde Antrim has illustrated how, contrary to claims by Bernard Lewis, who argued that the idea of waṭan emerged only in the eighteenth century in response to European expansion, waṭan actually appears in foundational Islamic literature, primarily in belles-lettres, or “adab,” and then in the growing geographical canon. Whereas the earlier adab literature, which served as guides for proper behavior, emphasized the experiences of homesickness (al-ḥanīn ilā l-awṭān), longing, and affective attachment to land, the geographical literature focused primarily on political rule and loyalty as well as borders. Here, Antrim notes, too, that “mobility or anticipated mobility was involved in locating home”; Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 14. Ulrich Haarmann also notes the use of the notion of waṭan among Sufi mystics of the same period to refer to a place, both real and metaphorical, serving as a man’s extraterritorial destination rather than his point of departure. U. Haarmann, s.v. “Waṭan,” in P. J. Bearman et al., eds., Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

⁹ According to Islamic tradition, Prophet Mohammad declared the town of Medina as his homeland after his migration (hijra) there from his hometown of Mecca. Then, in the eighth and tenth years after the initial hijra, when the Prophet returned to Mecca, he prayed the travel prayer. See Rabi b. Habib, Jami al-Sahih, no. 190; Muhammad al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 1102; Muslim b. al-Hajjaj, Sahih, nos. 685–86. (These hadith collections are available in many editions and are usually numbered for reference.)

¹⁰ This view of a pious polity is also different from the forms of “religious sovereignty” that scholars from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben and Jacob Taubes argued are the roots of modern states: divine rule and absolute power. It is, instead, closer to what Michel Foucault called “pastoral power,” or what Wilson Jacob has recently termed “sayyid sovereignty,” though for Omani scholars the emphasis is on the responsibility of self-disciplining individuals rather than on the role of a guide. See Yelle, Robert, Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jacob, Wilson, For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ For European notions and practices of jurisdiction, territoriality, geography, and sovereignty through the end of the nineteenth century, see Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the early twentieth century, see also Mawani, Renisa, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)Google Scholar. For an excellent review of European philosophies and notions of liberalism, freedom, and movement, see Kotef, Hagar, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).Google Scholar

¹² The extensive literature on trade networks of the Indian Ocean focuses on the monsoon winds as the only factor limiting travel until the imposition of European jurisdiction over the “free sea.” See, for example, Sheriff, Abdul and Ho, Engseng, eds., The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies (London: Hurst Publishers, 2014)Google Scholar.

¹³ For a critique of the sedentarist bias, especially in refugee studies, that has equated “home” with “rootedness,” see Malkki, Liisa, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity,” Cultural Anthropology 7, 1 (1992): 24–44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495–523.

¹⁴ For an argument that outlines these two options in mobility studies, see Cresswell, Tim, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006).Google Scholar

¹⁵ See, for example, the excellent work of Bhacker, Reda, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: The Roots of British Domination (London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar; Bishara, Fahad, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hopper, Matthew, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mathew, Johan, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016)Google Scholar; McDow, Thomas, Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sheriff, Abdul, Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar (London: James Currey, 1987)Google Scholar; and John Wilkinson, The Arabs and the Scramble for Africa (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2015). For scholarly networks, see also Bang, Anne, Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860–1925 (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; Bang, Anne, Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2014)Google Scholar; Amal Ghazal, Islamic Reform; “An Ottoman Pasha”; and “Omani Fatwas and Zanzibari Cosmopolitanism,” Muslim World 105 (2015): 236–50; and Hoffman, Valerie J., The Essentials of Ibāḍi Islam (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Omani-Arabs were, of course, not the only ones facing the newly emerging political systems and navigating their diasporic places within them. As Sana Aiyar and Scott Reese have explored, Indian merchants and anti-colonial intellectuals in Kenya and Yemen in the first half of the twentieth century also struggled with ethno-national demarcations, sometimes opposing and sometimes supporting them. See Aiyar, Sana, “Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930–1950,” American Historical Review 116, 4 (2011): 987–1013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Reese, Scott, Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community, and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839–1937 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Mongia, Radhika, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).Google Scholar

¹⁸ A short-lived Imamate was formed between 1868 and 1871, with a cousin of Thuwayni bin Said’s, Azzan bin Qais, selected as Imam.

¹⁹ Cooper, Frederick, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (Portsmouth: Heinemann Press, 1997), 163–64.Google Scholar

²⁰ Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market.

²¹ “Control of Manga Arabs, 1939 Feb. to 1943 May, Vol. 1,” Zanzibar National Archive DO 40/52, 38.

²² See al-Salimi, Nur al-Din, Badhl al-Majhūd fi Mukhālafat al-Nasara wa al-Yahud (Bidiya: Imam al-Salimi Library, 1995[1910])Google Scholar; Jawhar al-Niẓām (Muscat: Ministry of National Heritage, 1989[n.d.]); Ḥall al-Mushkilāt (Muscat: Ministry of National Heritage, n.d.); and Jawābāt al-Imam Nur al-Din al-Salimi (Bidiya: Imam al-Salimi Library, 2010[n.d.]), vol. 2. See also his Ma’ārij al-āmāl ala Ma’ārij al-Kamāl, Sulayman Babziz, ed. (Muscat: Ministry of National Heritage, 1983[n.d.]), vol. 5, 190–95.

²³ al-Salimi, Badhl al-Majhūd, 6.

²⁴ Amal Ghazal, “Omani Fatwas.”

²⁵ See Masud, Muhammad Khalid, “The Obligation to Migrate: The Doctrine of Hijra in Islamic Law,” in Eickelman, Dale F. and Piscatori, James, eds., Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 29–49 Google Scholar. See also Verskin, Alan, Oppressed in the Land? Fatwas on Muslims Living under Non-Muslim Rule (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2013).Google Scholar

²⁶ al-Salimi, Badhl al-Majhūd, 25.

²⁷ al-Salimi, Jawābāt, vol. 2, 89–91.

²⁸ Ibid., 89. It is likely that Nur al-Din is referring to Abu Ishaq Ibrahim b. Qay al-Hamadani al-Hadrami from the eleventh century CE, an Ibadi commander who conquered the Hadramawt.

²⁹ al-Salimi, Jawābāt, vol. 2, 92–93.

³⁰ al-Salimi, Ḥall al-Mushkilāt, 70.

³¹ al-Salimi, Jawābāt, vol. 2, 96.

³² Ibid., 89–91.

³³ Ibid., 89.

³⁴ Ibid., 95.

³⁵ See also, Nur al-Din al-Salimi, Ma’ārij al-āmāl, vol. 5, 180.

³⁶ al-Salimi, Jawhar al-Niẓām, 1989[n.d.], vol. 1, 120.

³⁷ Bishara, Sea of Debt. It should be noted that the seventeenth-century jurist Hugo Grotius also distinguishes between land and sea in property law, in The Free Sea, David Armitage, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004[1583–1645]).

³⁸ a-Salimi, Jawābāt, 2010[n.d.], vol. 2, 102. Al-Salimi makes similar arguments in Jawhar al- Niẓām; as well as in Ma’ārij al-āmāl, vol. 5, 173–78.

³⁹ al-Salimi, Jawābāt, 2010[n.d.], vol. 2, 107.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 103–4.

⁴¹ Ibid., 86.

⁴² Ali, Kecia, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).Google Scholar

⁴³ al-Salimi, Jawābāt, 2010[n.d.], vol. 2, 99–100.

⁴⁴ al-Salimi, Ḥall al-Mushkilāt, 69.

⁴⁵ al-Salimi, Jawhar al-Niẓām, 2010[n.d.], vol. 1: 120.

⁴⁶ al-Salimi, Jawhar al-Niẓām, 1989[n.d.], vol. 1, 122.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 119.

⁴⁸ See also, Benton, Search for Sovereignty. For more on tactical rather than strategic government, see Feldman, Ilana, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. Laura Fair and William Bissell have also both beautifully highlighted the incapacities and incoherence of colonial governance in Zanzibar. See Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001); and Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), respectively.

⁴⁹ The issue of immigration control also became highly charged in the 1950s, especially with the increase of immigration from the mainland. See Glassman, Jonathan, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thoughts and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Bishara, Fahad, “No Country but the Ocean: Reading International Law from the Deck of an Indian Ocean Dhow, ca. 1900,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 60, 2 (2018): 338–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, Hopper, Matthew, “Imperialism and the Dilemma of Slavery in Eastern Arabia and the Gulf, 1873–1939,” Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction 30, 3 (2006): 76–94 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Suzuki, Hideaki, Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean: Suppression and Resistance in the Nineteenth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Khalili, Laleh, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (London: Verso Press, 2020).Google Scholar

⁵¹ See “Restriction of Immigration into Zanzibar, 1903–1905,” Public Record Office FO 107/129.

⁵² Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma, “The Passenger Indian as Worker: Indian Immigrants in Cape Town in the Early Twentieth Century,” African Studies 68, 1 (2009): 111–34, 118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵³ Eventually, in 1906, a permit system was established.

⁵⁴ Radikha Mongia maintains that the practice of assigning “national” identities in migration prior to World War I took shape through the management of free (not indentured)—white—labor, and not only through a distinction between desirables and undesirables. Torpey, John, The Invention of the Passport (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration.

⁵⁵ See “Immigration Regulation Decrees, July 1920–July 1953,” Zanzibar National Archive AB 26/15.

⁵⁶ See ibid.

⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ See “Interpretation by HMG of the Zanzibar Nationality and Naturalization Decree,” Public Record Office FO 372/7122, Nationality and Naturalization Decree, 1911 (Cap. 134).

⁵⁹ See James Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan’s Flag: Sovereignty and Decolonization in Coastal Kenya,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, 4 (2008): 831–61.

⁶⁰ See “Muskat: Transfer of Oman Subjects to other Nationalities, June 1912–Oct. 1914,” India Office Records (henceforth IOR) R/15/1/426, 62. See also, Said bin Mohammad al-Hashimy, The Imamate Revival, PhD diss., University of Leeds, 1994, 46–47; Mathews, Zanzibar Was a Country; and Peterson, J. E., “The Revival of the Ibadi Imamate in Oman and the Threat to Muscat, 1913–1920,” Arabian Studies III (1976): 165–88.Google Scholar

⁶¹ See “Muskat: Transfer of Oman Subjects to other Nationalities, June 1912–Oct. 1914,” IOR R/15/1/426, 65, 67. For a discussion of allegiance and subjecthood among Indians in Muscat and in Zanzibar in the nineteenth century, see Bishara, Sea of Debt, 120–24.

⁶² See “Muskat: Transfer of Oman Subjects to other Nationalities, June 1912–Oct. 1914,” IOR R/15/1/426, 69.

⁶³ Col. Yule, Henry and Burnell, A. C., Hobson-Jobson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015[1886]), 447.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ C. E. Bosworth and Suraiya Faroqhi, s.v. “Ra‘iyya,” in P. J. Bearman et al., eds., Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

⁶⁵ al-Hashimy, Imamate Revival, 87.

⁶⁶ See “Muskat: Transfer of Oman Subjects to other Nationalities, June 1912–Oct. 1914,” IOR R/15/1/426.

⁶⁷ See “Immigration Regulation Decrees, July 1920–July 1953,” Zanzibar National Archive AB 26/15. Zanzibar was not alone in promulgating new immigration decrees in 1923 and 1924. The United States instituted its Immigration Act of 1924 affirming a quota system, first introduced in 1921, that cemented the passport system. See also Torpey, Invention of the Passport.

⁶⁸ For a history of the Arab Association, and as noted by Glassman, War of Words, see al-Falaq, 21 Dec. 1946.

⁶⁹ See “Immigration Regulation Decrees, July 1920–July 1953,” Zanzibar National Archive AB 26/15.

⁷⁰ See “National Status of the Subjects of Muscat, 1936,” IOR L/PS/12/2979.

⁷¹ European jurisprudence had long established these legal customs. Emer de Vattel’s eighteenth-century text, The Law of Nations (Carmel: Liberty Fund, 2008[1714–1767]), for example, outlined such distinctions and categories. Here, I wish to highlight the continuing need to declare and disseminate the definitions since such legal categories were still unclear, even to officials in the early twentieth century. Emer de Vattel, Laws of Nation.

⁷² See “National Status of the Subjects of Muscat, 1936,” IOR L/PS/12/2979.

⁷³ See “Consular: Passport and Visa Regulations (governing Bahrain, Muscat, Kuwait and other Sheikhdoms), Dec. 1929–Oct. 1934,” IOR R/15/2/1748.

⁷⁴ Lindsey Stephenson, Rerouting the Persian Gulf, PhD diss., Princeton University, 2018.

⁷⁵ See also Herzog, Christopher, “Migration and the State: On Ottoman Regulations Concerning Migration since the Age of Mahmud II,” in Freitag, Ulrike et al., eds., The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity (New York: Routledge Press, 2011).Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Fahad, “No Country.”

⁷⁷ As the Persian Gulf agencies were discussing the passport books and passport papers, one official, possibly in Bahrain and in recognition of the regular traffic across the Indian Ocean, noted that it would also be useful to have access to the Zanzibar ordinance for review. See, “Consular: Passport and Visa Regulations (governing Bahrain, Muscat, Kuwait and other Sheikhdoms), Dec. 1929–Oct. 1934,” IOR R/15/2/1748.

⁷⁸ See “Passport Problem in Burshire with Muscat Subject and Persian Policy,” IOR R/15/6/332.

⁷⁹ See “Consular: Passport and Visa Regulations (governing Bahrain, Muscat, Kuwait and other Sheikhdoms), Dec. 1929–Oct. 1934,” IOR R/15/2/1748.

⁸⁰ See “Muscat Miscellaneous, Dec. 1925–March 1928,” IOR R/15/1/423. See also “Correspondence Relating to the Rebellion of the Sur Area, Dec. 1928–June 1930,” IOR R/15/1/442.

⁸¹ These documents were issued by the “Government of Ja’alan and its dependencies,” and signed by the “governor of Ja’alan and its dependencies in the East of Arabia in Oman.” See, “Illegal Travelling Permits Issued by the Emir of Jaalan, Beni Bu Ali, to Muscat Subjects, Dec. 1929–March 1949,” IOR R/15/2/1408.

⁸² Peterson, J. E., Oman in the Twentieth Century: Political Foundations of an Emerging State (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 127.Google Scholar

⁸³ See “Consular: Passport and Visa Regulations (governing Bahrain, Muscat, Kuwait and other Sheikhdoms), Dec. 1929–Oct. 1934,” IOR R/15/2/1748.

⁸⁴ See ibid.

⁸⁵ Ahmad Abu l‘Wafa, “Mafhūm al-Waṭan wa al-Makan fī fiqh al-Ibādi” (The notions of waṭan and place in Ibadi fiqh), unpub. MS, n.d.

⁸⁶ Mathews, Zanzibar Was a Country.

⁸⁷ ‘ al-Salimi, Abd al-Rahman, “Zakāt, Citizenship, and the State: The Evolution of Islamic Religious and Political Authority,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 25, 1 (2015): 57–69.Google Scholar