Oman faces a water resources crisis as the demand of fresh water increases day by day. Most of the renewable water resources in the country are directly or indirectly dependent on the rainfall. The Western Hajar Mountains extend to the borders with the UAE. This area is a very important source of ground water for both countries. A collaborative program to investigate the feasibility of rainfall enhancement over the Omani mountains by means of hygroscopic cloud seeding was implemented in the UAE during the summer of 2003 and 2004. Due to the complicated logistics and astronomical cost involved in the cloud seeding experiment, it is crucial that timely and accurate forecasts are made for these mesoscale storms. However, convective clouds of the Al Hajar Mountains are notoriously difficult to predict as they result from mesoscale circulation. This study developed forecasting techniques for seedable storms over the Western Hajar Mountains in the Sultanate of Oman. A period of 10 days (5th-14th of July 2004) was investigated in order to describe the differences in the atmospheric parameters between days when convection occurred and days which remained dry. The main ingredient for convective development is the influx of surface moisture from southeast over the Arabian Sea. This moisture often results from the circulation around the surface low over the central part of the Arabian Peninsula but may occasionally be caused by the sea breeze circulation. The northeasterly sea breeze moves in from the Gulf of Oman to the mountains where it converges with the southeasterly moist flow and this may result in the occurrence of convective clouds. Localized wind convergence zones near the mountains are good indicators of the onset of convection. The Oman Convection Index (OCI) was developed to replace the K-index (KI) and was found to provide a good indication of convective development over the mountains. A forecasting decision tree table for predicting convective storms over the Al Hajar Mountains is proposed where circulation criteria are stipulated as well as critical values for meteorological variables. The ingredients includes the location of the heat low over the centre of Arabian Peninsula, latent instability of the atmosphere, and critical values of mixing ratio and the OCI. This research results have shown that careful investigation and manipulation of the available data allow for increased accuracy in the forecast of convection. The OCI was developed to describe the conditions favorable for summer convection over the mountains of Oman specifically. The results show that the OCI fairs considerably better than the KI in identifying days when significant convection is likely to occur. However, the OCI is only one element of the forecasting techniques table. For truly significant convection to occur there are at least four other circulation criteria which should be satisfied. The forecasting decision tree table provides a systematic approach to the forecasting of convection of the mountains and therefore, for the first time in Oman, objective verification is possible and opens the door for improving these and other forecasting techniques. The techniques developed here may therefore contribute to future cloud seeding projects in the mountains of Oman. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology / MSc / Unrestricted

Mountain building is the result of large compressional forces in the Earth’s crust where two tectonic plates collide. This is why mountains only form at plate boundaries, of which the Al Hajar Mountains in Oman and the United Arab Emirates is thought to be an example of. These mountains have formed near the Arabian–Eurasian convergent plate boundary where continental collision began by 30 Ma at the earliest. However, the time at which the Al Hajar Mountains developed is less well constrained. Therefore, the timing of both the growth of the mountains, and the Arabian–Eurasian collision, needs to be understood first to be able to identify a correlation. Following this a causal link can be determined. Here we show, using apatite fission track and apatite and zircon (U-Th)/He dating, as well as stratigraphic constraints, that the Al Hajar Mountains were uplifted from 45 Ma to 15 Ma. We found that the mountains developed 33 Myr to 10 Myr earlier than the Arabian–Eurasian plate collision. Furthermore, the plate collision is ongoing, but the Al Hajar Mountains are tectonically quiescent. Our results indicate that the uplift of the Al Hajar Mountains cannot be correlated in time to the Arabian–Eurasian collision. Therefore the Al Hajar Mountains are not the result of this converging plate boundary.

Shīʿī aḥādīth, particularly on women, are an immensely understudied area. Studies on Shīʿī aḥādīth on women usually centre on Fāṭimah al-Zahrāʾ, and little research explores pre-Islamic sacred female figures in Shīʿī aḥādīth. At the same time, there an urgent interest in Shīʿism as well as women in Islam, and a desire for new methods to be applied as well as new questions to be asked. This thesis will analyse Shīʿī aḥādīth about women in pre-Islamic sacred history who appear in the Qurʾān (focusing on Eve, Sārah, Hājar, Zulaykhā, Bilqīs, and the Virgin Mary), and apply the methodologies of ideological criticism and feminist hermeneutics (to be explained in Chapter 1) to explore the subtexts about the essential nature and role of women communicated through these narrations. In addition to exploring the roots of these ideas, it will compare them against the contemporary Shīʿī ideology of gender referred to as the ‘separate-but-equal’ ideology to explore how well this ideology corresponds to Shīʿī narrations. (What constitutes an ‘ideology’ will be explored in Chapter 1.) Rather than attempting to derive the ‘authentic’ teachings of the Prophet or the Imāms, this study will take a stance of inauthenticity with respect to narrations and treat narrations as socio-cultural artefacts representing the diversity of views and beliefs of the Shīʿī community. This distinguishes it from other works which either attempt to derive the ‘authentic’ teachings of the Prophet, or else which presume that all narrations equally reflect what the Prophet and Imāms actually said. This avoids the sticky question of which narrations are actually ‘true’ and allows them to be treated equally as cultural artifacts in negotiating a Shīʿī ideology of gender. Because this study focuses on sacred female figures shared with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, it allows for the exploration of how ideas about women from outside the Islamic tradition were integrated into the Shīʿī corpus through isrāʾīlīyāt, particularly through the intertextual synthesis of pre-Islamic material (such as the Bible) with post-Prophetic notions (such as normative paradigms of jurisprudential discourse). Two trends will emerge from these narrations. The first heavily reinforces patriarchal norms, such as women’s seclusion, the need for male authority, and male guardianship over women. These narrations reflect jurisprudential discourse and are largely found in two of the four most prominent books of Shīʿī ḥadīth, al-Kāfī and al-Faqīh. However, in the second, other narrations form a ‘counter-narrative’ in which women and men are portrayed as equals; these narrations invoke the imagery of esoteric Shīʿism and focus on the narrative of wilāyah (loyalty to and love of the Prophet, Fāṭimah al-Zahrāʾ, and the Shīʿī Imāms). Since both sets of narrations address uniquely Shīʿī concerns, such as the Imāmate, it can be deduced that these differing portrayals of women reflect competing concerns in the early and mediaeval Shīʿī communities with respect to determining Shīʿī identity and orthodoxy, and may also reflect the spread of and resistance to Arabization. Lastly, because many narrations attributed to Imam ʿAlī convey strikingly different views about women, the penultimate chapter will explore whether Imam ʿAlī was misogynistic through a comparison of two foundational Shīʿī texts: Kitāb Sulaym ibn Qays al-Hilālī (c. 100 AH) and Nahj al-Balāghah (c. 400 AH).