Musandam

Position

Musandam is the horn of mountain country that closes the mouth of the Gulf and divides it from the Gulf of Oman across the strait. It belongs to Oman but is cut off from the rest of the sultanate by the territory of the Emirates, so it is reached by sea or by crossing a border.

The name

Musandam is not the name the classical geographies use of this peninsula. What they describe is the northern extremity of Oman: mountain country running down to the sea. The name in its earliest use belongs to the cape itself, and its extension to the whole peninsula — like the district name ruʾūs al-jibāl, 'the heads of the mountains', by which the country is commonly known — is later usage. The lexicons give no origin for the word. Its form suggests the root s-n-d — the sanad being what one leans against, and also the ground that rises at the foot of a mountain — but the dictionaries do not record that as the source of this name, and it is given here as the sense the word is read from rather than as an attestation.

The country

Ridges of limestone drop straight into the sea, and the drowned valleys between them make the deep inlets, the khors, that the peninsula is known for. Villages stand on terraces cut into the slopes or at the head of an inlet reachable only by boat; grain and dates are grown on the terraces, and stone building suits the ground.

In genealogy

The mountains are recorded as the country of al-Shiḥūḥ, whose Shiḥḥī speech is markedly distinct from the Arabic around it — a distinctness that suggests long settlement in one place and says nothing about descent. The family name al-Shiḥḥī is the nisba to them. This is recorded as an association of place, with no lineage claim attached.