The provision of modern healthcare in the Arabian Peninsula has been a central feature in the changing relationship between residents and the state over the course of the twentieth century. Today, citizens and many non-citizen residents enjoy government coverage of their medical care, generously endowed hospitals and medical schools, and even state-funded “medical tourism” abroad. These public health privileges are often framed as a characteristic of the oil-rich welfare state. The beginning of modern medical care, however, predates the advent of oil wealth in this region. This presentation explores early twentieth-century transnational moments of healthcare provision on the ground in Bahrain and Muscat in which hospitals functioned as constructed social spaces where officials who considered themselves the harbingers of international expertise interacted with—and often misunderstood or ignored—local practices and expectations. The establishment of hospitals in Bahrain and Muscat in the first decade of the twentieth century emerged from a complex political environment characterized by tensions between British officials, local elites, and American missionaries. From its medical facilities in Bahrain, the American Mission sought to expand its presence to Muscat, a move that alarmed both the Omani Sultan Faisal bin Turki and the British authorities. In response, local British officials collaborated with the Sultan in 1909-1910 to establish a hospital of their own, calling on the support of entities ranging from representatives of various local communities to the British Navy and the Government of India. Citing archival records on the founding of early hospitals in Bahrain and Oman, this presentation demonstrates how specific flows of medical knowledge and individual patients and practitioners depended on and contributed to the Arabian Peninsula’s global connections in the early twentieth century. I am interested in how different methods of categorizing people—such as by gender, place of origin, local community, or religious affiliation—were institutionalized in the process of constructing medical facilities that were meant to serve a range of patients, from local women suffering the complications of pregnancy to British sailors in transit to India gripped by dysentery. Public health projects from this period offer rich material that demonstrates how the intimate political and societal connections between different regions in the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean regions shaped the experiences of residents.

The decline of the Ibadi Islamic school of thought (madhhab) in the Zanzibar archipelago is often attributed to the island’s tumultuous political history, which came to a head in the revolution of 1964 when residents of Arab and South Asian descent fled the region in fear of persecution at the hands of the new regime. The Zanzibar revolution led to the overthrow of the controversial Omani sultanate and the governing Arab elite in Zanzibar, as well as the subsequent dissolution of various Ibadi institutions. In the mid-1980s, the Grand Mufti of Oman, Ahmad bin Hamad Al-Khalili, called for a revivification of the Ibadi madhhab in eastern Africa. This call was reinforced by pledges from Oman for moral and monetary support in the construction of Ibadi charitable and educational institutions throughout Tanzania and, especially, Zanzibar. Today, Ibadis in Zanzibar welcome this renewed Omani interest in local institutions, which they hope will revitalize what was once, in their view, an intellectually and spiritually vibrant community. Building on existing scholarship on Ibadi political history and Omani-Zanzibari religious and social networks, this study aims to describe how developments in the community since the 1964 revolution have contributed to the formation of a uniquely Zanzibari conception of the madhhab and of this institution’s place in society. The presenter’s findings are based on an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of archival and oral sources collected during extensive fieldwork at various national and Ibadi institutions in both Oman and Zanzibar. The paper examines current understandings of the Ibadi maddhab and its relationship to other Muslim groups in Zanzibar, especially those recorded from formal interviews, public lectures, and casual conversations with Islamic leaders and community members on the main islands of Unguja and Pemba. While a self-consciously Ibadi institutional structure does exist in Zanzibar today, unofficial narratives suggest that members of these institutions adopt a more inclusive, non-madhhab, approach to Islamic worship and learning. Despite the enduring Omani physical and intellectual influences on Ibadi practice in Zanzibar today, the madhhab’s revival in Zanzibar is markedly less political in tone than its equivalent in Oman, where the memory of a former Ibadi political leadership under the imamate is palpable. This paper aims to draw attention to Oman and Zanzibar’s enduring social and economic relationship in the post-revolution era while also reassessing the nature and significance of Islamic institutional identities across time and space.

During the middle of the twentieth century, unprecedented demand for labor in the Persian Gulf reshaped patterns of movement that had long crisscrossed the Indian Ocean world. This new wave of migration came just as the region’s burgeoning nation-states sought to consolidate territorial control and unify the shattered sovereignties of a British imperial system built on intermediaries and collaboration. By the 1960s, the layered and fluctuating identifiers of tribe, religion, and place of birth had been superseded by the flattening category of legal citizenship, which bureaucratized indigeneity and excised an army of migrant workers from the body politic. National identity and state institutions in the Persian Gulf are usually framed as top-down impositions forged by imperial officials and local elites. This paper, however, examines how these transformations were shaped by a sustained wave of protest that swept across the Gulf, challenging the exclusionist paradigm of the nation and building cross-class and multinational coalitions. Protests in one country sparked unrest in others, as intra-Gulf migration brought workers and ideas into contact with one another. Nasserism, Arab nationalism, socialism, and communism refashioned Gulf politics from the 1930s to the 1960s, while strikes—and the responses they triggered— were crucial to shaping both the coercive apparatus that came to dominate Gulf states and the legal and social definitions of citizenship and foreignness. This paper uses documents drawn primarily from the British Archives to investigate the formation of formal and informal institutions in Kuwait. Kuwait is the ideal case study, as its protracted debate over “who is Kuwaiti” was complicated by the crucial role of Palestinians in the early oil years, the still-unresolved question of the bidoon, or people without nationality, and the narrative of the 1920 Battle of Jahra, which is often mobilized as an emblem of Kuwaiti independence. While the Kuwaiti Nationality Law of 1948, Private Sector Law of 1964, and new visa requirements imposed in 1969 have received some attention, the paper argues that legal measures responded to anxieties around wider issues of labor, foreignness, and indigeneity. While it focuses on Kuwait, the paper complicates the binary between “sending” and “receiving” countries by highlighting the importance of intra-Gulf migration, particularly from the areas that would become Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Thus, the paper reexamines state formation as a contested process in which issues of labor were pivotal to the formation of nation, class, and citizenship in the Persian Gulf.

Between 1899 and 1913, the British Residency of Zanzibar and the East African Protectorate enacted a series of measures to bring extensive urban and plantation holdings under the control of the colonial administration. These properties were considered charitable endowments (wakf) both in Islamic law and by the Omani sultans of Zanzibar, who occasionally intervened in wakf affairs. The British justified their desire to control wakf in Zanzibar and on the coast in terms of making its administration more rational and benevolent, but the move has also been seen as part of a British attempt to establish hegemony over Islamic populations in the Middle East, Africa, and India (Carmichael, 1999). Based on the presenter’s research in Wakf Commission archives located in Zanzibar and Mombasa, Kenya, this paper suggests that British control over wakf was in fact largely fictional, with most of the decisions about individual endowments being made at the local (mtaa, or neighborhood) level. This colonial fantasy paralleled in some ways the larger British project in Zanzibar, which encouraged urban growth while simultaneously misunderstanding the functioning of the city itself. As such, this paper argues that following the network of locally-controlled wakf endowments through the winding streets of Zanzibar helps to elucidate the internal logic of the city by suggesting how Africans, Indians, Omani Arabs, and Europeans each domesticated the Islamic institution for their own purposes. Using the concept of domestication also allows us to see institution building as a process of trans-oceanic negotiation between peoples and ideas from the Persian Gulf and the residents of Zanzibar. Building on growing literatures about urbanization in Africa and about the realm of emotion in African life, this paper will explore the affective terrain of the city as experienced in terms of institutions and notions of charity, obligation, and cosmopolitanism in East Africa.