Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān

Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān (born 1791, Oman—died Oct. 19, 1856, at sea) was the ruler of Muscat and Oman and of Zanzibar (1806–56), who made Zanzibar the principal power in East Africa and the commercial capital of the western Indian Ocean.

Early years

Born in 1791, Saʿīd succeeded his father jointly with his brother Salīm in 1804, but their cousin Badr immediately usurped the throne. In 1806 Saʿīd assassinated Badr and became virtual sole ruler, though Salīm, a nonentity, had titular status until his death in 1821. Although Europeans frequently called him imam and sultan, Saʿīd himself used the style sayyid. He was never elected to the purely religious office of imam that all his predecessors held.

His earlier years were complicated by family and tribal quarrels, by Anglo-French rivalry in the Indian Ocean, by the expansion of the Wahhābī Muslim puritan movement in Arabia, and by the incessant depredations of the Qawāsim pirates. He developed a small army and a fleet that also served mercantile purposes. His pilgrimage to Mecca in 1824 demonstrated that he had overcome both internal and external enemies and could risk absence from his own land.

Rise to power

At this time the eastern African coast was divided into numerous small states owing allegiance to Oman because Oman had expelled the Portuguese from them in 1698. At Saʿīd’s accession Omani weakness made this allegiance little more than nominal, for at Mombasa the Mazarʾi family had set up a virtually independent dynasty. In 1822 Saʿīd sent an expedition that drove them from Pemba Island. A British naval force occupied Mombasa irregularly from 1824 to 1826, when the action was repudiated by the British government. In 1827 Saʿīd went to assert his authority in person: one effect was greatly to increase the revenues remitted. There ensued a struggle between Saʿīd and the Mazarʾi for Mombasa that ended only in 1837 when, by a ruse, he took some 30 of the enemy captive. All were deported and some were killed. If he preferred peaceable settlements, Saʿīd could show himself as ruthless as any Mamlūk.

Saʿīd first visited Zanzibar in 1828; he shortly acquired the only two properties on which cloves were then grown. He lived to make the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba the largest clove producers in the world. By 1834 it was believed that he intended to transfer his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar, but, until the 1840s, he divided his time more or less equally between them. His interest in East Africa was not simply to gain increased tax revenue: it was primarily commercial. From the 1820s caravans from Zanzibar reversed the immemorial system of trade by which African products had been brought to the coast by African caravans. Now the Zanzibar caravans, Saʿīd’s among them at latest by 1839, actively sought ivory, slaves, and other products, and a wholly new commercial system was created reaching beyond Lake Tanganyika and into modern Uganda. At a formal level the transfer of his court and other changes are marked by the establishment in Zanzibar of foreign consulates: United States (1837), Britain (1841), France (1844). These countries, with Germany, became the principal buyers, but Saʿīd also exported goods in his own ships to Arabia and India and, occasionally, to Europe and to the United States. By the 1840s he had made Zanzibar the principal power in eastern Africa and the commercial capital of the western Indian Ocean. There was no false modesty in his remark, “I am nothing but a merchant.” Trade was his predominant interest.

Throughout his reign he was under British pressure to end the slave trade. He told a captain of the Royal Navy that “to put down the slave trade with the Muslims, that is a stone too heavy for me to lift without some strong hand to help me.” By a treaty of collaboration with Britain concluded in 1822, he agreed to forbid his subjects to sell slaves to the subjects of Christian powers. By 1842 the average annual import of slaves was reported as approximately 15,000, some doubtless necessitated by the development of the clove plantations. In 1845 he signed a further treaty with Britain, prohibiting both the export and import of slaves from or into his African dominions. His domestic slaves may have numbered more than 1,000. On his death, his will freed them but not his plantation slaves.

Legacy

Saʿīd’s commercial empire had no developed system of administration. His government was essentially personal and patriarchal, and he sat daily in public to settle cases and complaints. He depended heavily in his commercial ventures on Indian merchants, whose immigration he encouraged. His naval force was commanded by officers who also traded on his behalf. Saʿīd belonged to the Ibāḍī sect of Islām, which, if puritanical, is notably tolerant of others. A majority of his subjects were Sunnite Muslims, and for them he appointed a special judge.

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His daughter Salamah’s Memoirs of an Arabian Princess (1886) gives an intimate portrait of his private life. He left no children by his legal wives, but he maintained some 70 surias, or concubines, chiefly Circassians or Ethiopians, by whom he had 25 sons and an unknown number of daughters. Strict in his habits, lavish in his generosity, he was an affectionate father, taking great pleasure in elaborate family gatherings. He had a patriarchal relationship with his many slaves, whose weddings he sometimes attended. He was a keen horseman and practical seaman. He died at sea in 1856 and was greatly mourned by his subjects. His will divided his dominions between his sons Mājid, who became ruler of Zanzibar, and Thuwayn, who received Muscat and Oman. Saʿīd, wrote the British consul, was “most truly every man’s friend: he wishes to do good to all.”