Hadramaut, Oman, Dhufar: the experience of revolution

Abstract

When the ill-fated Federation of South Arabia came into being on January 1, 1963, it did not include among its member states the Hadramaut and the Mahra country to the east. It was not difficult to see the reasons for their exclusion. The Mahra territory, nominally under the rule of the sultan of Qishn and Socotra, was the wildest and most inaccessible corner of the eastern Aden Protectorate. Any effective display of authority there by the sultan or the protecting power was confined to the few villages along the coast. Inland a kind of formalized anarchy reigned among the tribal nomads and cultivators. The Hadramaut was a rather different case. Although the land was itself forbidding its very name means 'death is present' the energies and enterprise of its inhabitants had made it relatively prosperous, at least by the standards of southern Arabia. The coastal towns, the chief of which were Mukalla and Shihr, had been the centres of a wideranging maritime commerce, while in the interior, beyond thejol, the broken and desolate plateau which rose abruptly behind the coastal plain and stretched inland for a hundred miles, the fertile regions of the Wadi Hadramaut supported a thriving agriculture and a number of imposing towns, of which Shibam, Saiyun and Tarim were the best known. The comparative prosperity of the Hadramaut, however, did not derive primarily from its native economy but from the wealth accumulated overseas by the large colonies of emigre Hadramis, especially in India, the Philippines, Malaya and the East Indies. The constant intercourse they kept up with their homeland, no less than the steady flow of remittances they sent to it, was in large measure responsible for the country's progress before the Second World War; for this intercourse was the means by which innovations and improvements in agriculture, commerce and transport were introduced into the Hadramaut. What the Hadramis, resident and emigre alike, could not do, however, was to put an end to the constant feuding among the tribes, which all too often impeded or stultified the country's development. Sovereignty over the Hadramaut was exercised by the Qu'aiti sultan of Shihr and Mukalla, whose territory extended for some 200 miles along the coast and another 150 miles inland, to Shibam and its related towns and settlements in the Wadi Hadramaut; and by the Kathiri sultan of Saiyun and Tarim, whose lands formed an enclave athwart the Wadi Hadramaut with no access to the sea. Neither sultan's writ, however, ran much beyond the environs of the coastal and inland towns. Elsewhere the tribesmen, and especially those across whose diyar (ranges) the routes to the coast ran, acknowledged no authority but that of their own shaikhs and the more influential saiyids (or sada), the putative descendants of the Prophet, who were the wealthiest and most prominent class in Hadrami society. It was the great achievement of Harold Ingrams, who first visited the Hadramaut as a political officer in 1934 and three years later was appointed resident adviser at Mukalla, to bring the contentious tribes to conclude a truce among themselves in 1937, and by so doing to reinforce the authority of the Qu'aiti and Kathiri sultans. Ingrams's own account of his time in the Hadramaut is contained in his well-known Arabia and the Isles, one of the finest books on Arabia ever written. His widow, Doreen Ingrams, added her account of their