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The Ibāḍī imāma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

J. C. Wilkinson
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Extract

Any attempt to write about the Ibāḍī imāma is faced with the same kind of problem which besets all efforts to provide a generalized account of an Islamic institution: how far to concentrate on the abstract theory and how far to describe the actual practices observed in different places at various times. In this paper the writer has tried to strike a balance between these two approaches by taking as his theme an aspect of the Ibāḍi imāmate that involves basic principles about the nature of the contract which the Ibadi community enters into when it elects an Imām, and to study it specifically from the Omani point of view, through the writings of the local ‘ulamā’ and the way elections have been conducted in that country from the second/eighth down to the fourteenth/twentieth centuries. No attempts will be made to compare this material with the parallel sources from the Maghrib, nor to contrast the Ibāḍī concepts of the imāma with those of other Islamic systems.

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Articles
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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , October 1976 , pp. 535 - 551
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Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1976

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References

1 Cambridge University Library Add. 2896. The MS contains the first 32 of the complete 63 bābs. The author may well be the al-Ṣā'ighi/Ṣāyighī referred to in Ibn Ruzayq (History of the Imāms and Seyyids of ‘Omān (Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 44), London, 1871, 189Google Scholar) as a prominent figure in Ahmad b. Sa'īd's reign (for another al-Ṣā'ighī cf. ibid., 172). Schacht (‘Bibliothèques et manuscrits abadites’, Revue Africaine, c, 1956, pp. 375–98, item 35Google Scholar) lists another work by him and points out that he is not the author of the work attributed to him in Brockelmann (GAL, Suppl., II, 349Google Scholar). He is sometimes quoted by the late twelfth/eighteenth-century Jumayyil b. Khamīs al-Sa'di in his Qāmūs al-sharī'a where references (Zanzibar ed., 1297–9/1880–2, I, 18, II, 146) show he originated from Manḥ in the Jawf, a few miles from Nizwā. Al-Ṣā'ighī does not normally quote sources for his opinions and it is clear that he is writing about contemporary views of the imāmate and not just the views of early jurists.

2 A prominent qāḍī of Ya'āriba times (1034/1624 to mid-twelfth/eighteenth century), Darwīsh b. Jum'a b. ‘Umar al-Maḥrūqī al-Adamī, states in his Kitāb al-dalā'il (BM Or. 2085, fol. 19v) that barā'a and wilāya are two obligations (farḍān) on a par with ṣalāt and the other pillars of Islam.

3 Quoted in ch. 27 of the Kashf al-ghumma (attr. Sirḥān b. Sa'id of Izkī: quotation is from al-Ẓāhiriyya, Damascus, MS Tārīkh 346, p. 114Google Scholar). Its author was Muḥammad b. Mūsā, a member of an extremely learned family from the Banī al-Sayyār b. al-Ḥārith al-Aṣghar (Kinda descent) who lived in Upper Nizwā (also known as Samad al-Nizwā, cf. Salma b. Muslim al-'Awtabī, Kitāb ansāb al-'Arab, BN MSS arabes 5019, fols. 173v–9r). Their scholarship was such that al-Siyābī remarks of them (Sālim b. Ḥumūd al-Siyābī, Is'āf al-a'yān fī ansāb ahl 'Umān, Beirut, 1965, 137Google Scholar), ‘whilst the Kharūṣ are the aṣl of the imāma, the Kinda are the aṣl of fiqh’. Three closely related members (popularly held to be grandsons and great-grandsons of Sulaymān b. Muḥammad, a belief not supported by a variant genealogy) wrote particularly famous works (in the Rustāq school of. p. 548, n. 13) the Bayān al-shar' of Muḥammad b. Ibr¯hīm; the Kifāya; and the Muṣannaf by Abū Bakr Aḥmad b. 'Abdullāh. These works were written in that order ('Abdullāh b. Ḥummayid al-Sālimī, al-Lam'a al-murḍiyya min ashi“at al-ibāḍiyya, Tunis, n.d. (written 1905), 78–9) but there are variations in dating which make it impossible to be more precise than to say that they were written between the second half of the fifth/eleventh century and the middle of the sixth/twelfth (cf. in particular 'Abdullāh b. Ḥummayid al-Sālimī, Tuḥfat al-a'yān hi sīrat ahl 'Umān, ed. Cairo, 1380/1961, I, 333–5Google Scholar, and Koshf al-ghumma, ch. 39, Damascus MS, pp. 530–1).Google Scholar The originals of two of these works formed part of a huge library of 9,370 manuscripts destroyed by fire in the civil war in the early twelfth/eighteenth century (Muḥammad b. 'Abdullāh b. Ḥummayid al-Sālimī, Nahḍat al-a'yān hi ḥurriyyat 'Umān, Cairo, n.d., 45; al-Sālimī, Tuḥfa, I, 117–18; of. also Abū Sulaymān Muḥammad al-Ma'walī, Qiṣaṣ wa akhbār jaral hi 'Umān, al-Zāhiriyya, Damascus MS Tārīleh 386, p. 377Google Scholar; Kashf al-ghumma, Damascus MS, p. 510Google Scholar) but a complete copy of all 72 volumes of the Bayān is extant hi Mzāb (Schacht, art. cit., item 22) and there is a partial copy of the 41-volume Muṣannaf there too (the present writer has seen parts of this work in Oman). Of the history and survival of the 51-volume Kifāya, the writer is less certain. It does not appear in Schaoht's list and al-Siyābī (op. cit., p. 136, n.) Bays he has been unable to find it in Oman today.

4 al-Andalusī, Ibn Ḥazm (ed. Lévi-Provençal), Jamharat ansāb al-'Arab, 401.Google Scholar

5 The association of these two words in Ibāḍī doctrine explains why the Āl Bū Sa'īd sultans were reluctant to adopt this title by which the British designated them in official correspondence.

6 The events leading to the establishment of the imāmate are described by the writer in ‘The Julandā of Oman’, Journal of Omani Studies, I, 1976, 97–108.Google Scholar

7 Al-Sālimī, , Tuḥfa, I, 102–21Google Scholar, coupled to Kashf al-ghumma ch. 33, ed. Klein, H., Hamburg, 1938, 18Google Scholar, where Mūsā's ambivalent attitude to Ibn Abī ‘Affān is clearly brought out.

8 According to ‘Abū 'l-Ḥawārī’ (of. p. 551, n. 38), Muḥammad b. Maḥbūb (cf. p. 549, n. 15) and Bashīr b. al-Mundhir (a grandson of one of the leading Ibāḍī missionaries to Oman in the previous century) both renounced Muhannā (al-Sālimī, , Tuḥfa, I, 158–61Google Scholar) but according to Abū Qaḥṭ;ān Khālid b. Qaḥṭān, a contemporary of Abū 'l-Ḥawārī, this was done secretly (of. Kashf al-ghumma, ed. Klein, , 26Google Scholar and Anon., untitled history of Oman, BM Add. 23343, part I, fol. 81r).

9 Detailed references will not be given for the early history of the Ibāḍī movement in Baṣra as the writer intends to publish an account of the Omani aspects of it shortly: the reader may be referred to the standard article ‘al-Ibāḍiyya’, by Lewicki, T., EI, second ed.Google Scholar

10 Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Qays al-Hamdānī al-Ḥaḍramī, Dīwān al-Sayf al-Naqqād, Kuwait, n.d., 119. Abū Isḥāq, like hit, father before him, was the leader of the Ḥaḍramī Ibāḍī community. When the imāmate in Oman was restored under the Imām al-Khalīl b. Shādhān al-Kharūṣī (c. 407/1016–c. 420/1029) Abū Isḥāq recognized him as Imām and with Omani support was able within a fortnight to bring back the Ḥaḍramawt into the Ibāḍī fold: he subsequently pursued his campaign against the Ṣulayḥid ruler of Yemen who was only saved by Fāṭimid support from Egypt. Abū Isḥāq continued to act as governor in Ḥaḍramawt under the Imām al-Khalīl's successor Rāshid b. Sa'īd but the development of the extremist Rustāq school doctrine (cf. below, n. 13) and the manner in which Rāshid's son Ḥafṣ acceded to the imāmate (described in the text) eventually led to his breaking away from the Omauis. Although for a while he was successful in leading the separatist community the Ibāḍīs in Ḥaḍramawt could not for long survive without the active support of the Omanis and their final demise must have followed soon after. Apart from the Dīwān, which tells most of the story related above (cf. also Wilkinson, J. C., ‘Bayāsirah and Bayādīr’, Arabian Studies, I, 1974, p. 84, n. 10Google Scholar), Abū Isḥāq also wrote a work much quoted in Ibāḍī literature the Mukhtaṣar al-khiṣāl. A copy of this exists in the Mzāb (Schacht, art. cit., item 23) and a part probably also in the British Museum (cf. the early untitled MS apparently of South Arabian origin BM Or. 3744, fols. 1–17, described in Rieu, C., Supplement to the Catalogue of the Arabic MSS in the BM, London, 1894, p. 762Google Scholar; a rhymed summary of this work has been made by ‘Abdullāh b. Ḥummayid al-Sālimī under the title Madārij al-kamāl, Cairo, n.d.

11 Abū Bilāl, Mirdās b. (Ḥudayr) b. ‘Udayya whose ‘martyrdom’ in 61/680–1 profoundly stirred the Khāriji quietista who had failed to respond to his appeal to action.

12 The full phrase is 'alā 'l-jihād fī sabīl al-difā' (cf. oath to Rāshid b. Walīd and ‘Azzān b. Qays (al-Sālimi, , Tuḥfa, I, 281, and II, 247)).Google Scholar

13 The dogma of the so-called Rustāq and Nizwā schools originate in the dispute over the deposing of the aged Imām al-Ṣalt b. Mālik al-Kharūṣī al-Yaḥmadī in 272/886 by the Banī Sāma ‘ulamā’, and their supporters in the Jawf (capital Nizwā) and their election of Rāshid b. al-Naẓr of the Fajḥ. section of the Yaẓmad as Imām, an act which raised the fury of the rest of the Yaḥmad tribes (who for the most part lived in the Rustāq region) who had more or less established a de facto right to provide the Imām. The conflict eventually led to full-scale civil war, invasion by Caliphate forces, and the end of Oman's golden age of the ‘first imāmate’. When the imāmate was eventually restored under the main Yaḥmad line in the fifth/eleventh century the Rustāq school of thought, by now fully developed in the writings of Abū 'l-Ḥasan al-Bisyānī (variant Bisyawī), became official doctrine (cf. the letter of the Imām Rāshid b. Sa'īd al-Yaḥmadī of Shaw, 443/1052 cited in al-Sālimī, , Tuḥfa, I, 312–13Google Scholar) and Oman once again became divided. Despite their remarkable scholarship their extremism eventually led to the collapse of the imāmate in Oman for several centuries and al-Sālimī is constrained to remark of them (Tuḥfa, I, 112Google Scholar) ‘The people of Truth renounce their treatises and reject their extremism’.

14 At least this is the writer's presumption although the Kashf al-ghumma, ch. 34 (Damascus MS, pp. 470–1), which is the actual source of the citation, does not give the name of the work. It could therefore also derive from the less important Mu'tabar, the Jawābāt, or the Kitāb ziyāda al-ashrāf. This whole passage is extremely complex and whilst an attempt has been, to keep as close as possible to the original in translating, certain liberties have been taken and in places the sense, in so far as it can be determined, has been condensed.

15 An elector of al-Ṣalt b. Mālik and his qāḍī in Suhar (the family's home town and the then commercial capital of Oman): there he died in 260/873. One section at least of his 70-volume work was still extant in al-Barrādī's time (second half of the eighth/fourteenth century). He was from an extremely distinguished Ibāḍī family for his great-grandfather was exiled with Abū Shā'thā' to Oman, his father was one of the Baṣran ‘Imāms’, and his grandson was an Imām in Oman. It is worth noting that while this family (the Āl Raḥīl) is the only one in Oman to claim relationship with Quraysh they were leading supporters of a system which rejected all Qurashī claims to head the Muslim state. All Omani sources give them as Ka'b b. Lu'ay and a forbear was reputed to be a horseman of the Prophet cf. sixth/twelfth century commentary on Ibn al-Naẓar's Dīwān, BM Or. 2434, fol. 108. On the other hand Lewicki, , Revue d'Études Islamiques, VIII, 1, 1934, 71, n. 4Google Scholar, basing himself on the seventh/thirteenth century Maghribī al-Darjīnī, gives them as of ‘Abd al-Qays origin.

16 Although there are no examples of attempts to make a woman Imām in Oman (other Khārijī groups had done so, notably the Ṣufriyya), the ‘election’ of a minor c. 1133/1719 was a major contributory cause of the civil war which marked the end of the Ya'āriba imāmate (see Bathurst, R. D., The Ya'rubi dynasty of Oman, unpublished D.Phil, thesis, Oxford, 1967).Google Scholar

17 The Imām's head-dress, the seal of the imāmate, and the keys to the treasury are the three symbols of the Imām's investiture (cf. al-Sālimī, , Tuḥfa, 1, 200–1 plus the above-cited passage).Google Scholar

18 Except to notice here the timing of the election which should take place immediately after, but never before, the death of the old Imām. This means that the dying Imām has no say in the selection of his successor although his views will doubtless be known. The first duty of the Imām, according to al-Ṣā'ighī, is to officiate at the burial of his predecessor (i.e. the election should occur within a few hours of his death) but if the Imām has not been elected then the qāḍī 'l-miṣr/al-Imām (cf. below, n. 20), failing whom the old Imām's deputy in his town, says the burial prayers. If corruption, opposition, and disorder break out upon the death of the Imām then his successor is confirmed at the first opportunity on which the ‘people of justice’ can assemble.

19 Some aspects are discussed in the writer's forthcoming book Water and tribal settlement in south-east Arabia: a study of the Aflāj of Oman (Clarendon Press).

20 Because the Imām has no formal advisory body consultation is essential if he is to remain in touch with the views of his followers. More specifically it is with the leading ‘ulamā’ that he must consult, notably with the qāḍī'l-Imām. Now this actual title seems to have been used only during the first imāmate and a footnote by the editor of the Tuḥfa, 1, 151Google Scholar, explains his role thus: ‘the qāḍī'l-Imām is the equivalent of the Shaykh al-Islām of the present day and is the authority for the fatwā in the imāmate. He is the head of the ahl al-ḥall wa 'l-'aqd and it is therefore to him that the people of position and religious responsibility turn in the Islamic matter of allegiance and renunciation. Similarly, as I understand it, in the Rustamid imāmate of the Maghrib the qāḍī'l-Imām was Shaykh of the Muslims’. But although in later periods the actual title seems to have fallen into disuse (the only man who officially bears a title in the imāmate is Imām al-Muslimīn), the position none the less existed and may be equated with that of the chief elector. (N.B. qāḍī 'l-Imām should not be confused with qāḍī 'l-quḍāt who is the chief qāḍī in an important centre.)

Consultation may be made an absolute condition of wilāya in the case of a ḍa'īf (weak) Imām, that is an Imām who has been selected as a pis aller in a particular political situation. The only Imām specifically so-designated in Omani history is ‘Azzān b. Qays of the Āl Bū Sa'īd, and at his election in 1285Z/1868 the conditions in the oath of allegiance were ‘the conditions the Muslims impose on the weak Imām so that he should not intervene in matters that he is not qualified to intervene in’: the tell-tale phrase in the oath, which otherwise contains little more than the usual formulation made at all elections, is the addition of the words ‘on condition that you do not hold a (legal) opinion, effect a judgement, nor judge an affair except as the Muslims opine and you consult them’ (al-Sālimī, , Tuḥfa, II, 247).Google Scholar

According to some opinions these conditions mean that the ḍa'īf Imām may not himself even appoint wālīs and qāḍīs (al-Şā'ighī, fol. 91r). Of course such conditions are perilously close to a breach of the basic principle of ‘no shurūṭ on the Imām except God's’.

21 An example of the Imām deputizing his control of the bayt al-māl took place in 1370/1960 when the Imām placed Ṭālib b. ‘Alī, brother of the Imām-to-be, Ghālib b. ‘Alī al-Hinā'ī, in charge of financial affairs to the consternation of a number of prominent Omanis (al-Sālimī, Muḥammad, Nahḍa, 423).Google Scholar

22 A wālī's position, however, does not automatically cease with the death of his Imām. One should note that the distinction between the offices of qāḍī and wālī represents in some measure the division between ‘church and state’. During the ‘first imāmate’ the Imām's ‘deputy’ in the main centres was always a qāḍī but in the desert borderlands he might be referred to as wālī (cf. Kashf al-ghumma, ed. Klein, , 24).Google Scholar

23 The first Ya'rabī Imām, 1034–50/1624–5–49.

24 Suitability to the position of Imām does not necessarily mean that the candidate is the most learned religions authority: this as we have seen in p. 549, n. 20, is the qāḍī 'l-Imām. In the case where a dispute arises the practice appears to be for the ‘ulamā’ to meet in conclave and announce the general consensus of opinion. If certain of them persist in dissenting, this fact is appended to the fatwā or other issued document. For an example of an Imam dissenting from a written decision see al-Sālimī, Muḥammad, Nahḍa, 408.Google Scholar

25 Certain aspects of these precepts are discussed more fully in another section of his work; here al-Ṣā'ighī is only concerned with bayt māl al-muslimīn ‘the commonwealth of the Muslims’ in so far as it affects the Imām as its custodian.

26 This is a somewhat simplified view of a complex issue discussed in the writer's forthcoming book.

27 Whatever the legal entitlement, no pious Imām or official would take from the bayt al-māl anything but the minimum for his ascetic life (Omani biographies of worthies often start with examples of their frugality). On the other hand, the tribal chiefs who are frequently appointed as imāmate officials for political expediency, rarely show such abstinence so that in effect a large part of the state's budget is given out as subsidies to them.

28 ‘aṭā’ probably means allowances for those who render special services for the state; historically it was the allowances for the shurāt, its precedent being the ‘aṭā’ paid from the dīwān to the muqātila in the military organization of the early Islamic state.

29 Two roots are used ‘azal and Khala’: the former tends to signify ‘removal’ from office by the community whilst the latter implies a forcible removal or ‘deposing’. In their reflexive form i'tazal and khala' nafsahu it is the Imam who removes himself from office and they might therefore be translated as ‘resign’ and ‘abdicate’ respectively; but in so doing the sense of reneging may be lost. Since none of these English terms corresponds exactly with the internal view of Ibāḍī law they have been translated with no great attention to consistency.

30 It is interesting to note that the history of senile Imāms has been an important contributing factor to two great tragedies in Oman's history: the collapse of the ‘first imāmate’ stemmed from the deposing by one faction of the aged Imām who was proving incapable of firm and just government, whilst the recent unhappy history of the country in part derives from the fact that the Imām Muḥammad b. ‘Abdullāh al-Khalīlī (d. 1373/1954) was allowed to retain the imāmate ‘until he reached the brink of senility, his body weakened, and his sight failed’ (quotation only— al-Sālimī, Muḥammad, Nahḍa, 431Google Scholar) and was unable to adapt to changing circumstances or retain control over the forces threatening his state.

31 Of necessity a personal crime; the writer has been unable to find any quoted example of this in Omani history.

32 For further discussion of the principles of a tawba see Khamis, Jumayyil b., Qāmūs al-sharī'a, VIII, 95 f.Google Scholar For a fifth/eleventh century example and the reply of the chief qāḍī see al-Sālimī, , Tuḥfa, i, 329 f.Google Scholar

33 It should be noted that there does appear to have been some sort of retrospective election but in the eyes of most this was no more than a constitutional cover-up (al-Sālimī, , Tuḥfa, 1, 315 f.).Google Scholar

34 Tuḥfa, II, 169.Google Scholar

35 Aḥmad's election took place in the aftermath of the Ya'āriba civil war and the Persian occupation of Oman. The sequence of events seems to have been that after ejecting the Persians from their strongholds on the Bāṭina coast Aḥmad b. Sa'īd moved against the last Ya'rabī claimant to the imāmate, most of whose followers had in any case deposed or deserted him, and in the battle at Nizwā Bal'arab was killed whereupon Aḥmad was elected to the imāmate. It should be noted that the Umbū Sa'īdī who was his main supporter belonged to the then dominant clan of Nizwā: this had nothing to do with the Āl Bū Sa'īd.

36 And consequently make disentangling actual attitudes at the time of the event extremely difficult. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the crisis at the end of the ‘first imāmate’ when the tragedy which ensued from the initial act of deposing a senile Imām caused many retrospective changes of opinion. Furthermore, just as in the case of Aḥmad b. Sa'īd, many of the figures whose names are quoted as dissociating from an Imām are frequently found to be people who were not even alive in his time (Abū Nabhān was certainly a young man when Aḥmad was elected and so in any event would not have been consulted, whilst his son Nāṣir must only have been a child when Aḥmad died).

37 al-Sālimī, , Tuḥfa, 11, 218–19.Google Scholar

38 Al-Faḍl b. al-Ḥawārī of the Banī Sāma and his contemporary ‘Azzān b. al-Ṣaqr of ‘Aqr Nizwā were two of the most distinguished ‘ulama’ of their time ‘like two eyes in a face’. ‘Azzān, however, died before al-Ṣalt's deposition. Al-Faḍl was an important transmitter from the early ‘ulamā’.

39 Mūsā b. Mūsā b. ‘Alī b.(?) Mūsā b. Abī Jābir, the leading ‘ālim of the Banī Sāma family of Izkī who had in effect become chief electors. His father was qāḍī ‘l-Imām and the most powerful figure in the state until his death in 230/844, while his great-grandfather was the Ibāḍī missionary who actually founded the imāmate in Oman.

40 Abū ‘l-Mu'thir al-Ṣalt b. Kharaīs al-Kharūṣi of the Yaḥmad was an elector of his kinsman the Imām al-Ṣalt in 237/851 and lived through to the time of the eviction of the Qarāmiṭa: at his death he must therefore have been getting on for 100 years old. Following the civil war at the end of the third/ninth century it is said that the politics of the state of Oman revolved around three figures, the blind Abū ‘l-Mu'thir, the lame Abū ‘Abdullāh Nabhān b. ‘Uthmān from Samad Nizwā, and the deaf Abū Jābir Muḥammad b. Ja'far of Izkī (author of a particularly important jāmi’), three bigots whose diatribes illustrate the sad state the imāmate had fallen into. Abu ‘l-Mu'thir may be considered the leader of what became known as the Rustāq school.

41 Nizwā developed as the ‘capital’ of the imāmate because it represented suitable neutral ground from a tribal point of view (see Wilkinson, J. C., ‘The origins of the Omani state’ in Hopwood, D. (ed.), The Arabian Peninsula, London, 1972).Google Scholar

42 Muḥammad b. ‘Abdullāh al-Sālimī, Nahḍa, 322, 338–9.Google Scholar

43 Since completing this study, the author has written an article ‘Bio-bibliographical background of the crisis period in the Ibāḍī imāmate of Oman (end of ninth to end of fourteenth century)’, Arabian Studies (Cambridge), III, 1976Google Scholar; this enlarges on some of the material contamed in the preceding footnotes.