ABSTRACT
The twenty-two-year-old Ibn Sumayt ˙ thus joined the ranks of the official Bu¯
Sa\ı¯dı¯ \ulama¯| and of the Zanzibari scholarly class. However, his first official appointment was to be brief.
In the h ˙ ijra year of 1302 – probably some time in the early autumn of 1885 –
Ibn Sumayt ˙ left Zanzibar. He had then been qa¯d
˙ ı¯ for less than two years. Why he
chose to resign from his qa¯d ˙ ı¯ship – a position that must have been both
attractive and rewarding for a relatively young man – is an open question. Several hints point in the direction of a conflict with Sayyid Barghash, although none are too specific about its nature. Farsy merely states that Ibn Sumayt
˙ repeatedly begged Sayyid Barghash to be released from his position, but to no avail. When he eventually left without the Sultan’s permission, Sayyid Barghash declared him persona non grata under threat of death.1 When insisting on leaving Zanzibar, Ibn Sumayt
˙ may merely have heeded the general Islamic
injunction to travel in search of knowledge – or he may have followed more specific instructions given by his masters in H
˙ ad ˙ ramawt. His son \Umar simply
writes that ‘. . . his soul was longing for travel in the lands and societies of the \ulama¯| of the big cities’.2
