[oman-l] Ibri

[Joachim Duester]

Ibri belongs to the Dhahira region and is the the centre of a wilayat 
of the same name. Other important towns in this wilayat are al-Araqi and 
al-Diriz. The "Socio-Economic Atlas" for the Sultanate of Oman published 
in Nov 1996 gives the following population statistics 
total population    22,921 (9460 male, 13461 female)
thereof Omanis:   16,983 (8500 male, 8483 female)
non-Omanis:          5,938 (4961 male, 977 female)

Number of households: 3068

Ibri has several schools and a Vocational Training Institute. 
It also has a hospital and a health centre, a tourist guest 
house and a fort.

I am afraid there is nothing spectacular about Ibri. When I 
visited it for the first time in 1981, you could still find many 
camels outside the suq, but when I visited last in 1995, the 
traditional suq was in a bad state of repair and most shops 
had moved to new quarters. The deserted mud settlement 
of al-Sulaif, a few kilometres away from Ibri, is a very interesting 
place and would merit a detailed survey. 

Material on the history of Ibri is found in most books on Oman,
but there is no "history of Ibri" as such. 

There is at least one Omani student from Ibri on the Internet,
Saif Hamdan Saif al-Rubaiei, (now studying in Bangalore, India). 
His homepage is at http://members.tripod.com/~SAIFR , his 
e-mail is saifr@mailcity.com.

Joachim Duester
Oman Studies Centre
http://www.oman.org
omandoc@pobox.com