Ibri

Ibri's plains were settled long before recorded Omani history. The stone tombs, towers and settlement mounds at nearby Bat, Al-Khutm and Al-Ayn belong to the third millennium BC, when this part of Arabia traded copper with Mesopotamia under the name Magan; the sites were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988 and remain among the most complete Bronze Age landscapes in the region. Water from wadis draining the western Hajar made date cultivation possible on the plain, and falaj channels supported the oasis settlements that followed.

In the Islamic centuries Ibri belonged to the world of the interior — tribal, Ibadi, and loosely tied to the imams at Nizwa rather than to the sultans on the coast. Its position on the routes between the interior oases and the Buraimi oasis to the north-west made it a trading and gathering point, and its fort and the walled settlement of Al Sulaif were built to control that ground. The rivalries of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the disputes over Buraimi that ran into the 1950s, all touched the town.

After 1970 the change was rapid. Ibri, the largest town of Al Dhahirah — a region that became a governorate in 2011 — gained schools, hospitals, a tarmac highway and later colleges of technology and applied sciences, and the population moved out of the mud-brick quarters into concrete housing. Al Sulaif was left empty; the fort was restored; and oil and gas fields in the desert to the south and west brought new employment to the area.

Ibri belongs to the conservative Ibadi interior, and its social life runs through family, tribe and mosque. Men wear the white dishdasha with an embroidered kummah or a wrapped massar and often carry a khanjar, the curved dagger, on formal occasions; women wear long dresses with a headscarf, and dress in public is more covered here than on the coast. Visitors are received with long greetings, kahwa poured in small cups and dates, and it is normal for a conversation to begin with several rounds of enquiries about health and family before anything else.

The town's calendar is religious and national: Ramadan, the two Eids, the prophet's birthday and Oman's National Day in November. Weddings are large and public occasions with drumming, sung poetry and the razha, the sword-and-chant dance of Omani men. In the days before each Eid the habta market fills with goats, cattle and camels alongside stalls of clothes, toys and halwa.

Because Ibri is a market town for the plains, Bedouin families from the desert south and west come in to trade, and camel rearing and camel racing have a following in the wilayat. Handicrafts — weaving, silverwork, palm-frond baskets — survive mainly as household or ceremonial production rather than a tourist trade. Few foreign visitors stop here, so those who do are usually met with curiosity and hospitality, and are expected to behave with corresponding restraint.

Ibri is the largest town of the Al Dhahirah governorate, strung along the highway, with villages scattered through the oases around it. Government employment is the backbone: the governorate administration, schools, the hospital and the security services. Beyond that, the economy rests on date farming and livestock, on the market that serves the western plains, on trade and transport along the road to the UAE border, and on jobs in the oil and gas fields of the desert and at the Ibri 2 solar plant, a 500-megawatt farm that is Oman's largest renewable energy project.

Housing has almost entirely shifted to concrete villas with air conditioning, and the old quarters — Al Sulaif above all — stand empty. Many families keep a plot in the oasis even when nobody works it full time, and falaj turns are still shared and timed as they always were. As elsewhere in the interior, a large share of younger residents study or work in Muscat and come home at weekends.

The rhythm of the day is set by heat and prayer. The souq and the offices work early, the streets empty in the afternoon, and the town revives after the late afternoon prayer, with shops reopening, families visiting and cafés busy into the night. The concerns people discuss are jobs for young Omanis, water for the gardens, and the long distances that shape life on the plains.

Food in Ibri is the food of the interior: dates first, in many varieties from the oasis, served with kahwa brewed pale and scented with cardamom, and halwa, the dense sweet of sugar, ghee, starch, rosewater and nuts, brought out for guests. Refusing a cup is awkward — the polite answer is to take one or two and then shake the cup lightly when handing it back.

The festive dish is shuwa, meat rubbed with a spice paste, wrapped and buried in a pit oven to cook for a day or more before families open it together at Eid. Majboos, spiced rice with goat, camel or chicken, and harees, wheat pounded with meat to a thick paste, appear at weddings and holidays. Camel meat is eaten more readily here than on the coast, and goat is the everyday festive meat. Laban, a salty buttermilk, is drunk with meals.

Daily eating is simpler and shows the region's migrant kitchens: grilled chicken and mashkul rice, Indian and Pakistani curries with roti, shawarma wrapped in bread, and fresh juices. Dried limes, known as loomi, give soups and rice their sour note; local honey from the Hajar and produce from the mountain terraces reach the market in season, and bread and sweets are bought from bakeries that work through the evening.