Mahra Sultanate

The Mahra Sultanate, in its later years called the Mahra State of Qishn and Socotra, was the South Arabian sultanate that ruled the Mahra coast and the island of Socotra from 1432 to 1967. The Banu Afrar dynasty governed from Qishn a people apart: the Mehri spoke Mahri, a modern South Arabian tongue unintelligible to Arabic speakers, and farmed frankincense in a monsoon-watered coastal strip that the desert behind could never match. Socotra, the dragon's-blood island in the Guardafui Channel, gave the sultanate its second half and its fame among geographers. Too small to defy empires, Mahra signed into the British Aden Protectorate in 1886 and sheltered under it for eighty years. When the British left South Arabia in 1967, the new People's Republic of South Yemen had no room for sultans: the state was abolished, its mainland folded into the Al Mahrah Governorate and Socotra administered from Aden. The frankincense still grows; the throne does not.