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This significant recount was graciously written by Professor Dawn Chatty for our British Omani Society News section.
I first met the Harasiis tribe of the Jiddat-il Harasiis in 1978 on a medical expedition to locate a few tuberculosis patients who had not completed their course of treatment at the hospital in Salalah. This trip was to refocus the direction of my work with mobile herders in Arabia. Before 1978 I had worked with Bedouin communities in Northern Arabia and was confident in my Arabic language fluency. But here in the Jiddat il-Harasiis, the core central desert of Oman, known as Al Wusta, was a community whose first language was Harsousi, one of the five Modern South Arabian Languages along with Mahri, Jibbali, Socotri, and Batahiri.
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Two years later, in 1980 I was living in Muscat and was approached by the then Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Qais Zawawi. He had a problem. Sultan Qaboos bin Said had issued a Royal Decree that government services were to be extended to the mobile herding tribes of the interior without forcing them to settle. In order to meet that challenge, the government had proposed the building of six tribal centres. The first was being built at Haima just about the halfway point between Muscat and Salalah. But there were concerns that it might become a ‘white elephant’ and not be used . For although it was in the middle of the territory the Harasiis tribe had occupied for centuries, it was located on a salt flat and there would be no graze or browse for this tribe’s animal herds. Would I look into this and come up with a plan?
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Some archival research at the main PDO library revealed that the Harasiis tribe had been visited by Bertran Thomas in the late 1920s on one of his expeditions across Oman in preparation for his longer trek from Oman to Saudi Arabia. He gave them the name ‘Tree People’ as at that time, the Harasiis created their camps sheltering under umbrella thorn trees (acacia tortilis) and occasionally Ghaf trees (Prosopis Cineraria). A decade later as oil exploration began in Oman, the coastal Jeneba tribe went to Sultan Said bin Taimur and challenged the Harasiis’ right to have the Jiddat named after them. Bertran Thomas is said to have advised the Sultan, that as it was only Harasiis occupying the Jiddat, it should rightfully take their name.
By 1981, I had secured funding from the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations to set up a study and advise the government of Oman. Working closely with the Minister of Health, of Education and of Social Affairs and Labour, my work was attached to the offices of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Muscat. Over a four-year period, my team of two Arabic speaking Peace Corps volunteers, a Harsousi guide and a Harsousi driver and I worked closely with 25 Harasiis families - about 20% of the total population at the time – to understand their concerns, their needs, and their aspirations. With their cooperation, my team, and my Omani counterparts, were able to successfully run the first expanded immunization program ( Diphtheria, Pertussis, Poliomyelitis, Measles, Rubella, and Tetanus) in the Jiddat achieving more than 85% cover. The following year we were able to open a weekly boarding school for boys and a day school for girls. This was followed by a permanent veterinary service and a social affairs office at Haima. Eventually the four bedded mini-hospital was expanded into a 50-bed hospital with a monthly mobile clinic following up on immunizations and primary health care.
By the early 1990s, the Harasiis regularly came into Haima to avail themselves the health care that was available, to collect children from the boarding school, buy simple provisions, and fill up their four-wheel drive vehicles with petrol. Haima became a centre of life, with its post office, police station and reverse osmosis water plant. And no one had been ‘forced’ to settle.
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However, the Ministry of Housing decided to build social housing at Haima and to award Harasiis household heads title to these townhouses. For a number of years these houses remained empty or were rented out to oil workers at the nearby PDO camp at Bahja. By the turn of the 21st century some families – particularly with children in the school - began to live in these houses seasonally. But they were not giving up their attachment to their herds of camels and goats; this period was the time in which the azbah (azab, pl.) came into its own1. Nearly every family who took up residence in the Haima housing complex maintained an azbah, a temporary and mobile camel and goat camp. These camps were maintained by hired herders from Baluchistan, Sindh and even the Sudan. And the families visited most weekends, and all holidays. It was, as many elders claimed, an opportunity to teach the young about their way of life in the desert and about the care of their animals.

Over the past two decades more tribal administrative centres have emerged, in Ghubar, in Mughsin, and briefly in Zawliyya. Within these government centres, herding families have taken up residence, but they have also maintained their azabs. Some who have managed to be particularly entrepreneurial have found means to build large houses, which one could easily compare with a villa in Muscat.
Over these past 44 years, I have watched the Harasiis progress from sheltering under trees to comfortable air-conditioned villas as well as azabs with portable kitchens, water bowsers, mobile rooms with air conditioning and Wi-Fi access as well as large marquees under which the extended families sit and enjoy festive as well as ordinary occasions together. They have come a long way thanks in large part to the government services they received. But they have also made their own choices and designed their own ‘settlement’ which continues to draw in the desert life and their animal herds.
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Professor Dawn Chatty will be hosting a lecture her forty five year experience with Harasiis tribe at the BOS on the 26th of February 2025.
Book your spot now!
About the author
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Dawn Chatty is a social anthropologist whose ethnographic interests lie in the Middle East, particularly with nomadic pastoral tribes and refugee young people. Her research interests include a number of forced migration and development issues such as conservation-induced displacement, tribal resettlement, modern technology and social change, gender and development and the impact of prolonged conflict on refugee young people.
She is both an academic anthropologist and a practitioner, having carefully developed her career in universities in the United States, Lebanon, Syria and Oman, as well as with a number of development agencies such as the UNDP, UNICEF, FAO and IFAD. After taking her undergraduate degree with honours at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles), she took a Master’s degree in Development Studies from the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague, Netherlands. She returned to UCLA to take her PhD in Social Anthropology under the late Professor Hilda Kuper.
Following the award of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, Dr Chatty spent the period October 2005-September 2007 researching and writing a manuscript on Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Middle East. The volume was published by Cambridge University Press (May 2010) with the title Dispossession and Displacement in the Modern Middle East.
Her most recent book is Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State (Oxford University Press and Hurst Publishers, 2018).