Oman

Oman is the only country where Ibadi Islam is the tradition of the majority, and Ibadism is neither Sunni nor Shia. It descends from the earliest schism in Islam, the Kharijites who abandoned Ali at Siffin, but it separated from the militant wing of that movement and developed a quietist jurisprudence that rejected the assassination of opponents and the declaration of other Muslims as unbelievers. Its distinctive doctrine concerns the imamate: the imam is elected by the learned for his qualities rather than inheriting the office, may be deposed if he fails, and the community may exist without one when circumstances require, a position with obvious political consequences.

Ibadi Oman elected its first imam in the eighth century, and for more than a thousand years the interior of the country was governed by imams from centres such as Nizwa and Rustaq, while the coast looked outward. That divergence produced the country's central historical tension, between an inland Imamate and a maritime Sultanate that at its height in the nineteenth century ruled Zanzibar and much of the East African coast and moved its capital there. The two were reconciled by force in the 1950s, and the modern state dates from the accession of Sultan Qaboos in 1970.

Omani religious policy is unusually explicit about coexistence, and Ibadi doctrine is part of the reason. Because Ibadism has spent most of its history as a minority tradition regarded with suspicion by larger ones, it has strong internal resources for arguing that difference need not be resolved by force, and the state has drawn on that deliberately: the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs has run a long programme presenting Ibadism as a school of tolerance, and mosques do not identify themselves by school.

Sunni Omanis, particularly in Dhofar and among coastal communities, and Shia Omanis of Lawati and other backgrounds worship without the sectarian tension found across the Gulf. Non Muslims, who make up a large share of a population that is roughly 45 per cent expatriate, worship on land granted by royal decree. The Hindu temples in Muscat's Matrah district serve a Gujarati merchant community present since the eighteenth century and predate the modern state; Christian compounds host many denominations sharing a single site by rota. The constraints are real and are the same across the region: all places of worship require ministry approval, religious materials are subject to review, proselytising Muslims is prohibited, and conversion from Islam has no legal path. What distinguishes Oman is the absence of the sectarian competition that shapes its neighbours, and that absence is a policy as much as an inheritance.