Araby the Blessed

In the December of 1835 Lieutenant Wellsted of the Indian Navy was making his voyage, the first by a European traveller, through the Sharqiya and the Jawf. Sayyid Said, the then sultan of Muscat, had encouraged him on his travel, presented him with a horse, a gold-mounted sword and a pack of greyhounds, and had sought to pay all his expenses. Having travelled by sea to Sur and then overland to Bilad Bani Bu Ali, he continued his journey through the Sharqiya towns of Ibra and Samad towards the Jawf. On the 21st of December he reached the outskirts of a large oasis. Approaching the oasis of Minnà, a corruption of the name Manah, from the East, the party was astonished by its verdure, as Wellsted recounts in his 1838 book, Travels in Arabia,

As we crossed these, with lofty almond, citron and orange trees, yielding a delicious fragrance on either hand, exclamations of astonishment and admiration burst from us. “Is this Arabia”, we said; “this the country we have looked on heretofore as a desert?” Verdant fields of grain and sugarcane stretching along for miles are before us; streams of water flowing in all directions, intersect our path; and the happy and contented appearance of the peasants helps to fill up the smiling picture; the atmosphere was delightfully clear and pure; and so we trotted joyously along, giving or returning salutation of peace or welcome, I could almost fancy we had at last reached that “Araby the blessed”, which I have been accustomed to regard as existing only in the fictions of our poets.

Figure 3 (left) - “Is this Arabia”! Acres of date palm stretching in all directions between Fiqain and Bilad Manah. Wellsted marvelled at the verdant exuberance of the Manah oasis. The tip of the famous square tower of Manah is visible on the horizon. Figure 4 (above) - Camel grazing on the edge of Wadi Kalbu near Karsheh. The wadi-s define the western and eastern boundaries of Manah oasis.

Figure 5 (above) - A falaj official ensuring precise distribution of water in Misfat Al Abriyeen. The importation of this sophisticated technique of artificial irrigation date back to about 1000 BC. Figure 6 (above-right) - Jabal Al Fay marks the northern boundary of the oasis.

The next few pages continue with an excited description of Manah, the town, its people - happy and contented, and his encounter with the local sheikh of the Hinawis who were in conflict with the Ghafri groups occupying a neighbouring “settlement”. Forty years later, Colonel Miles, an excellent Arabist who was also meticulous in his observations and recordings, found this “large and straggling oasis standing in a rich and well-watered district”. Standing out amidst the arid barrenness of the regional landscape, defined by a rocky outcrop of Jabal al-Fay on the North and restrained by the desert-bound wadi courses of Kalbu and Mu’aydin, the oasis once truly affirmed the Arabic meaning of its name, “the gift of God”.

The gift of God The beginnings of oasis settlements date back to the very early days of human habitation in the region. The ancient Arab-Omanis did not fail to spot these areas of natural exuberance in an otherwise inhospitable terrain; they, as W. Robertson Smith noted, “seemed to be planted and watered by the hand of the gods”. Initially supported by the surface flow in the wadi-s but also utilising water from natural springs, these early agricultural communities were soon to develop, and later import (from Persia), sophisticated techniques of artificial irrigation we know today as the falaj. According to the Kashf al Ghumma, an 18th-century historical chronicle attributed to Sirhan bin Said

al Izkawi, Malik bin Fahm, the legendary forefather of all Omanis of Yemenite origin, excavated a falaj on the outskirts of Manah on his arrival in inner Oman. On leaving Yemen, so the legend goes, Malik’s party travelled up the coast to Qalhat where the women and children were left in safe custody. Malik then made his way to the interior and routed the Persian occupiers in a battle at Salut near Bisya, about 30kms West of Manah. Thereafter, Malik and his descendants ruled over Oman. Skeet, in the late 1960’s, found the local wali uninterested in the falaj; Skeet nevertheless “went off and found it, broken and dusty in a field and half covered with dead grass”, and it did not appear very archaic at all! However, the legend is very much alive today, even amongst the younger generation of Manhis, who are keen to point out the remains of a falaj within the oasis, close to the fortified settlement of Bilad Manah.

Contribution to Omani culture This natural gift was also to translate itself into a range of human endeavours that made Manah one of the important cultural centres of the interior. Throughout the “Golden Period” of the first and the second Ibadhi Imamates, Manah had remained a seat of learning for the Islamic and secular sciences and the arts. Even in the so-called Dark Ages of Nabahina power, as tyrannical petty rulers usurped control of some of the major oasis towns, the Ibadhi state (misr) continued to survive in and around Nizwa and Manah. The Portuguese traveller de Barros, who never actually visited the Dakhliya, listed Manah alongside Nizwa, Bahla and Izki as the principal fortified centres of the 15th century interior (Jawf). As part of the earnest but sadly fragmented effort to revive Ibadhi Imamate in the late 14th and early 15th century, the people of Manah in 1560 AD elected a Manah resident, ‘Abdullah bin Muhammad al-Qurn (al-Hina’i), as the Imam. Another important Manhi contribution to the 16th-century was the work of the school of craftsmen based in Manah, who created a series of richly decorated mihrab (prayer niche) in mosques of the interior, including four in Manah.

Figure 7 - Throughout history, Manah and the Manhis have contributed to the study of the Islamic and secular sciences and the arts.