How revolutionary values survive repression in postwar Dhufar
The Dhufar region of Oman was famous in ancient times for its frankincense. Visitors today can learn about this past in “The Museum of the Frankincense Land” near the ruins of the former port city where medieval traveler Ibn Battuta sojourned. Visitors can later enjoy a frankincense flavor ice cream at a peaceful café that looks out from the edge of Dhufar’s mountain interior, across its coastal plain, to the city of Salalah and the Arabian Sea beyond. But it was not always frankincense that brought Dhufar renown, nor did the mountains, plain, and coast always offer such peaceful landscapes.
From 1965 to 1976, Dhufar captured global attention for its anti-colonial revolutionaries and their liberation movement. Fighting against the British-backed al-Busaid dynasty of Sultans, the front pursued political and social emancipation, initially for Dhufar but later for Oman and the Arabian Gulf under formal and informal British colonialism. The increasingly internationalized, British-led counterinsurgency militarily defeated the movement in 1976. This campaign deployed indiscriminate violence such as airstrikes and food and water blockades that destroyed Dhufari lives and livelihoods. Subsequently, the Sultanate expunged the revolution, and other episodes of dissent, from official history.
In postwar Oman, former revolutionaries have lived, worked, raised families, and buried peers while living under the authoritarian rule of the very government that they once opposed. As such, theirs is a predicament reminiscent of that of later generations of disappointed activists and sympathizers of the revolutions in Southwest Asia and North Africa that met with backlash, repression, counterinsurgency, and counterrevolution. Taking a close look at the postwar lives of former revolutionaries in Dhufar offers the opportunity to ask: what happens to the ideas and values of revolution after military defeat and repression?
The official silence in Oman about the revolution implies that the story of the revolution ends with its military defeat in 1976. Yet beyond government censorship, Omanis seek out opportunities to reflect on the revolution in novels, memoirs, historical studies, and blogs, among other initiatives. This suggests how many Omanis engage with the revolution as an episode of national history that continues to hold importance in the present, and for the future. Omani novelist Bushra Khalfan, whose acclaimed novel Al Bagh (The Garden) addresses the events and legacies of the Dhufar war for Oman, has compared the country’s official silence about its past to a wound that, whilst covered, will be unable to heal. Yet however much the government tries to conceal it, Oman’s revolutionary past resurfaces.
In postwar Oman, former revolutionaries have lived, worked, raised families, and buried peers while living under the authoritarian rule of the very government that they once opposed.
While doing ethnographic fieldwork with former militants in Dhufar in 2015, I learned of further ways in which Oman’s revolutionary past has resurfaced, remaining significant in postwar lives. Some former militants reproduce revolutionary values of social egalitarianism along lines of gender, social status, ethnicity, tribe, and racialized identities. They produce these lasting legacies of revolution in everyday interactions, ranging from kinship and mundane socializing to unofficial commemoration, as well as occasional extraordinary acts.
Beyond the social circles of erstwhile militants, revolutionary values resurface elsewhere in postwar Dhufar. Former pupils of revolutionary schools, who had learned there to value “the common good”, were more willing than other Dhufaris who lacked a revolutionary background to work in postwar initiatives that served multiple communities, rather than a particular tribe. As such, they played key professional roles in staffing postwar development projects in Dhufar. Conventional Sultan-centric narratives of national development nevertheless overlook such contributions.
The revolutionary past has also resurfaced in Dhufaris’ platforms for postwar progressive politics. One such instance concerns the protests in Salalah in 2011. An anonymous blogger, commenting on the sit-ins, praised protestors’ social inclusivity, a quality of the demonstrations that harks back to the earlier values of the revolution.
These reappearances of the revolutionary past are part of the diverse afterlives of revolution. These afterlives, that I explore at greater length in my book, Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman », do not merely challenge the Sultanate’s official silence about the revolution, and its attempted erasure of the contributions of former revolutionaries to Oman’s past and present. In addition, the book takes up afterlives of revolution to challenge, disrupt, and decolonize conventional narratives of revolution, counterinsurgency, and their aftermaths.
Afterlives problematize both claims that a “model” counterinsurgency in Dhufar “won hearts and minds”, and doubts about the popular appeal among Dhufaris of revolutionary social change programs. The resurfacing of revolutionary values instead suggests their lasting appeal, and the shortcomings of counterinsurgency violence and rentierism for erasing them. By foregrounding the inadequacies of apologies of counterinsurgency and dismissals of revolution, afterlives point to how these narratives serve to legitimize the colonial violence of counterinsurgency.
The forms of Oman’s past that resurface in the present, then, are not only the delicate flavors that make frankincense ice cream so delicious. The values of Oman’s revolutionary past continue to resurface too. They are part of Omanis’ present, as well as the platforms through which Omanis imagine alternative futures.
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