Mona Ja‘bub, Leading Society Towards Change
Table of Contents
[English version of the text published in Spanish.1]
Mona Salem Said Ja‘bub, قيادة المجتمع نحو التغيير: التجربة التربوية لثورة ظفار (1969-1992) [Leading Society towards Change: The Educational Experience of the Dhofar Revolution (1969-1992)], Beirut: مركز دراسات الوحدة العربية [Centre for Arab Unity Studies], first edition 2010, second edition 2023, 368 pages.
This first book by Omani historian Mona Ja‘bub has earned praise in the Arab world for its approach to the social and cultural history of the Dhofar revolution in Oman. Published by a prestigious Arab publishing house specialised in social science, the book was initially withdrawn by the Omani authorities from the Muscat International Book Fair in 2012, but it returned the next day, a sign of the relaxation of censorship. The book focuses on gender issues and on the circulation of ideas. Through an analysis of historical events little known outside the Arab world, it makes an original contribution to the study of the global reception of Maoism and Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s.
From 1968 to 1975, a Marxist-Leninist revolution took place in the province of Dhofar in the Sultanate of Oman, against the Sultan Said and his successor Qaboos, who were dependent on the British Empire. At that time, Dhofar had a subsistence economy, and its population lived in extreme poverty. On the coast there was fishing, on the plains there was some agriculture, mainly cultivation of incense trees, and in the highlands cattle were raised. Even after oil exports began in 1967, the state collected taxes without providing any services to the population. Modern medicine was unknown, the only school was reserved for the Sultan’s court, and most of the inhabitants of Dhofar, and nearly all the women, were illiterate. In the Dhofari tribal system, land belonged to the tribes, not to individuals; some tribes enjoyed more prestige than others and had the privilege of bearing arms. At the bottom of the social hierarchy were people that the tribes and the Sultan had enslaved.
An armed Dhofari rebellion inspired by Arab nationalism, launched in 1965 by Dhofaris living in Kuwait and supported by the Nasser regime in Egypt, was discredited by the defeat of Egypt and its allies in the June 1967 war with Israel. Several months later, a group of Dhofari militants travelled to China to be trained as revolutionaries. They returned home convinced by Maoism, on a ship loaded with weapons and food. All this enabled Dhofari communists to take control of what was now called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arab Gulf. (Since it changed its name several times, I will simply call it the Popular Front.) This turn to the left was strengthened by the unfailing support that the Dhofari revolution received from South Yemen, Oman’s neighbour, which in 1970 became the only communist country in the Arab world.
However, the application of Marxist theory to the local context was controversial. When the Popular Front commissioned a Bahraini Marxist to write a report on the class structure in Dhofar, the report concluded that there were no social classes in Dhofar, only tribes. The Popular Front’s leaders refused to accept this conclusion, and the report was not published. They acknowledged that there was no proletariat or bourgeoisie in Dhofar, but claimed that the tribes were in fact classes.
The Popular Front banned slavery in the liberated areas. It abolished tribal ownership of land, and all land became public property. Under the impetus of feminist activists within its ranks, it made women’s liberation one of the pillars of its doctrine. Women therefore took up arms in the revolutionary army, women’s literacy was made a priority, and polygamy was abolished.
But the militants believed that the social transformation they aspired to required not only decrees imposed by force, but also an education system capable of instilling in its pupils values and behaviours that went against tradition. Other researchers have examined the political aspects of the Dhofari revolution, but the originality of Mona Ja‘bub’s book lies in its focus on the educational activities of the Popular Front, particularly the primary school and the secondary school that it established in Yemen, near the Omani border. Ja‘bub interviewed many former activists and former pupils of these schools, and this enables her to paint an intimate portrait of an attempt to adapt Marxist theory to a context that was very different from the industrial economy that Marx had in mind.
The idea that Dhofaris belonged to the Arab nation was a fundamental part of the Popular Front’s ideology. Standard Arabic, which they saw as the national language of the Arabs, was therefore a central aspect of the culture that the revolutionary teachers sought to transmit to their pupils. In the Arab world, many different Arabic dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible, are used in everyday life, while Standard Arabic, which few people can speak, is used mainly in writing and in formal discourse. In Dhofar, however, the language of everyday life was not Arabic at all; it was Shehri, a distant cousin of Arabic. Not only did the pupils not understand Standard Arabic, they did not understand any Arabic dialect. At first, the teachers dealt with this situation by requiring the pupils to speak only in Standard Arabic (which would have been seen as strange in all other Arab countries) and by forbidding them to speak in Shehri, even outside the classroom; offenders were punished. If the pupils needed a word that they did not know in Arabic, they could only use gestures to express their meaning. The teachers told the pupils that this was part of their duty to their Arab homeland. Ja‘bub shows that the pupils not only obeyed these rules out of fear, but also truly internalised them. A former pupil recalls that one day, while talking to the cook at the school canteen, she inadvertently used a Shehri word, and immediately felt ashamed. She reported herself to the school administration, and only felt better after having apologised in front of all the other pupils. Later, a new head teacher repealed the ban on Shehri, and implemented a policy of promoting Dhofari culture.
The schools of the Popular Front were sorely lacking in resources during their early years. At first, there were no buildings, only tents. With no textbooks available, pupils copied their lessons by hand. For four years, the only book available in sufficient quantities for teaching reading and writing in Arabic was a translation of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, of which China supplied many copies with each delivery of weapons. It was also the Front’s most important political textbook, alongside texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. Mao was by far the most admired figure among the Dhofari people, and many wore Mao badges, not only, according to the author, because he sent them weapons and food, but also because his ideas corresponded to their concerns, because he had a well-developed conception of anticolonial struggle, and because he wrote for peasants.
The Marxism that was taught was nevertheless filtered in one respect: at least during the early years of the revolution, the Front’s leaders and teachers did not mention the Marxist critique of religion, probably to avoid conflict with a population composed of very devout Muslims. On the contrary, although they did not offer any religious instruction, they asserted that there was no contradiction between socialism and Islam. The author agrees with them on this point. In her view, before the revolution, Dhofari society was already based on a sort of tribal communism in which the state was nearly absent. She asserts that the population of the Arabian peninsula was already comfortable with the idea of the rule of the proletariat, since, she says, this idea appears in the Qur’an, and she cites this verse: ‘We wished to favour those who were oppressed in the land, to make them leaders, the ones to survive’ (28:5)2. This has been one of the Islamic Left’s favourite verses since the 1970s.
In 1970, the UK replaced the Sultan of Oman with his son, Qaboos. While maintaining his father’s authoritarianism, Qaboos tried not only to defeat the revolution on the battlefield, but also to win over the population, by promoting economic development, building state schools, restoring some of the tribes’ privileges, proclaiming ceaselessly that Islam was the basis of his rule, and claiming that the Popular Front was against Islam. According to Ja‘bub, while this accusation was false for a long time, the Front’s leaders, believing that they had gained the population’s complete confidence, eventually said openly that religion is the opium of the people. In response, their own soldiers rebelled against them, and this led to a schism within the Popular Front. In Ja‘bub’s opinion, if the revolutionaries had continued their selective use of Marxist thought, adapting it to the local society and to its Islamic beliefs, they could have had more success than all the other leftist movements in the Arab world.
After the military defeat of the revolution in 1975, what happened to the social changes that it had brought about? Ja‘bub’s answers to this question are among the most interesting parts of the book. The revolutionaries encouraged and celebrated marriages between members of tribes and formerly enslaved people. The former pupils that Ja‘bub interviewed remember being delighted at these marriages. During the revolution, words associated with racism became repulsive to them, and they even refused to use the word ‘black’ to refer to a person’s skin colour. They proudly told the author that, since they were convinced at the time that tribalism was unjust and reactionary, they spontaneously stopped writing the name of their tribe when they wrote their name. But Ja‘bub observes that, when she met them for the first time, the first question they asked her was ‘What tribe do you belong to?’ and that that their conversation was peppered with remarks about the quality of this or that person’s tribe. Similarly, women educated by the Popular Front are now among the most conservative Omani women and the most attached to the outward signs of patriarchal tradition. On one hand, they have become doctors, teachers, and managers, but on the other hand, they have rejected the feminism that the Popular Front advocated and practised.
In Ja‘bub’s view, Marxist theory cannot be applied as is to the tribal social order that existed in Dhofar before the revolution. Nevertheless, there was social injustice, and many of the founders and leaders of the revolution belonged to the non-tribal social categories that suffered from this injustice. This book, which has become an important reference for historical research on the Arabian peninsula, is therefore an important contribution to debates about the relevance of Marxist concepts in different social contexts. It also provides a fascinating glimpse of a population’s ability to sincerely adopt revolutionary values in a quasi-state constructed by militants, only to abandon them with the arrival of the following state.
Bibliography #
Geer, Benjamin. 2025. “Mona Salem Said Ja‘bub, Qiyadat al-mujtama‘ nahw al-taghyir: al-tajriba al-tarbawiyya li-thawrat Dhufar (1969-1992) [Conducir la sociedad hacia el cambio: la experiencia educativa de la revolución de Dhofar].” Prismas. Revista de historia intelectual 29 (1): 412–14. https://doi.org/10.48160/18520499prismas29.1626.