How One School Became a State's Law

Ibadi communities spread out from Basra along trade routes into North Africa and Arabia in the centuries after the school's formation, and for a period an Ibadi dynasty, the Rustamids, governed an imamate centered on Tahert in what is now Algeria from the mid eighth century until its fall to the Fatimids in 909. When that state collapsed, Ibadi communities in the Maghreb persisted mainly as a minority presence in Algeria's Mzab valley and on the Tunisian island of Jerba, holding their distinctive legal tradition without a state of their own to enforce it.

Oman took the opposite path. Ibadism became established there early and, through a long and interrupted history of Imamate government, remained the school followed by the country's majority population into the present, giving Oman a legal-religious identity distinct from both its Sunni Gulf neighbors and Shia Iran across the strait. Modern Oman under the Al Said dynasty has not restored the historical Imamate as a political office, but Ibadi jurisprudence continues to inform the country's legal and religious institutions, and Omani Ibadi scholarship remains the tradition's most active living center, alongside smaller communities that maintain the same school in East Africa, a legacy of Omani trade and, in Zanzibar's case, of direct Omani rule during the nineteenth century.