Madha and Nahwa

A doughnut on the map

Madha is a landlocked piece of Oman in the Hajar mountains, a few miles inland from the UAE’s east coast.^[4][1] It is surrounded on all sides by three of the UAE’s emirates: Sharjah, Fujairah and Ras Al Khaimah.^[4] It lies about halfway between the Omani mainland, some 50 km to the south, and Oman’s Musandam Governorate on the Strait of Hormuz, to which it belongs.^[1]

Inside Madha sits Nahwa, a village that is part of the emirate of Sharjah and so of the UAE.^[4] That makes Nahwa a counter-enclave: a piece of one country inside an enclave of another country, which is in turn surrounded by the first.^[4] CNN counted it in 2023 as one of only two counter-enclaves in the world, the other being Baarle on the Dutch–Belgian border.^[1]

Nahwa is an enclave twice over. It belongs to the Khor Fakkan district of Sharjah, which is itself cut off from the rest of Sharjah by Fujairah and Ras Al Khaimah.^[1]

The question put to Madha

Before oil, this part of Arabia had no fixed lines between rulers.^[4] A village’s allegiance showed in who it asked to settle its disputes and who it paid zakat (charitable giving for the poor) to, and those loyalties could shift.^[4] Madha’s land and water made it a prize: in the early 19th century it belonged to the Qawasim of Ras Al Khaimah, and the Shihuh took it by force some time between 1869 and 1900.^[4]

Madha then looked to Muhammad bin Salih, the Shihuh leader at Dibba Bai’ah.^[4] Eyewitnesses later described a meeting at Madha, attended by both Qawasim rulers (of Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah), the Sharqi ruler of Fujairah, the sultan of Oman’s wali (governor) from Suhar, and Muhammad bin Salih, to settle which ruler the village would follow.^[4] The timing is vague, but the best estimate is the late 1930s or early 1940s.^[4]

The villagers chose Oman.^[4] They said they needed a stronger government than Muhammad bin Salih could give them, and that the wali, Hamad bin Saif Al bu Sa’idi, was a good man.^[4] The National reported that the villagers believed Oman was better placed to protect their water supply from their neighbours.^[4] A Madha engineer told the paper in 2010: “If we belong to Oman they will not come here.”^[5]

Nahwa, further up the same wadi, stayed with the Qawasim of Sharjah.^[4][5] Like Khor Fakkan on the coast, it is dominated by the Naqbiyin, who remained loyal to Sharjah.^[5]

“Then they said to us, ‘Who do you want?’ And the people of Madha answered, ‘Oman’. And from then on we were Omani.”^[4]

Writing the lines down

In the 1950s a British political agent, Julian Walker, was given the job of recording the borders of the seven emirates, then called the Trucial States.^[6] He spent three winters crossing the country in a Land Rover, asking local people where their loyalties lay, and finished his report in around 1960.^[6] Walker said villages such as Madha, Masafi and Al Rams were said to have been independent, or nearly so, in the 1930s and 1940s.^[4]

Because the lines followed the loyalties Walker recorded, they split the emirates into 22 separate pieces of territory.^[6] Sharjah alone has five, one of them Nahwa.^[6] In 2010 the son of Nahwa’s leader said his father and the ruler of Madha had begun negotiating firm borders between the two villages about 40 years earlier.^[5]

Crossing today

Unlike the UAE’s other borders with Oman and Saudi Arabia, Madha has no barrier around it.^[4] There are no passport checks going into Madha, into Nahwa, or back out to the UAE.^[1] In 2012 the main sign of a border was a text message from Omantel as a visitor’s phone switched networks.^[4] Square white posts mark the edge of Nahwa, followed by a Sharjah police post.^[4]

Old Nahwa was abandoned in the 1990s, and most of the counter-enclave’s 300 or so people now live in New Nahwa, built on higher ground nearby.^[1] In 2010 it had about 40 houses, a clinic and a school for the first three grades.^[5] The third part of Nahwa is Shis, a village known for its pools.^[5]

The old choice now cuts the other way. Drivers from the UAE queue at Madha’s petrol station for cheaper fuel.^[1] “Back then Oman had the advantage, now the UAE does,” a 19-year-old from Madha told The National in 2012.^[4]