Twenty years ago, Oman was associated with little more than daggered tribesmen and the deserts of Arabia. Today it is the most nonconformist of Arab states and one of the last two sultanates in the world. Above all, it is strategically important because its northern tip borders the Strait of Hormuz. Oman's progress into the twentieth century is due to oil and to the farsighted efforts of His Majesty Sultan Qabus bin Said.
Born in the southern capital of Salalah in the Dhofar province in 1940, Qabus, the only son of Sultan Said bin Taimur, is the eighth sovereign in direct line of succession from the Al Busaid dynasty, founded in 1741. In 1958, young Qabus was sent off to a private school in Suffolk, England, where he studied for two years before entering the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He served as an officer with the First Battalion of the Cameroonians (Scottish Fusilliers), stationed in West Germany; at the end of his military service he returned to England for a course in public administration. In 1964, following a three-month world tour, Qabus returned to Oman and was installed in a few rooms opposite the Salalah Palace, where he was placed under constant surveillance by his father and became a virtual prisoner deprived of human contact. He spent his time studying Islamic law, listening to Western classical music, and playing the lute.
A Matrix for War
Like so many of his people, Qabus was a victim of his father's anachronisms, which finally provoked the first manifestations of civil war in the Dhofar province in 1965. Oman was locked into the past and the keys were held by Sultan Said bin Taimur, a man whose refusal to face the modern world relegated his country to the status of a backwater. Even when oil, discovered in 1960, began to be exported in 1967, the elder Said did nothing to improve his realm. Said forbade electric lights, sunglasses, and importing vehicles without his permission, which he usually refused or forgot to give.
Change came at last in 1970, when the inevitable happened. Backed by the British, Qabus, then 29 years old, assumed power to put down a Soviet-inspired rebellion that had infiltrated from South Yemen. He then initiated a nonviolent palace coup that forced Said to abdicate in favor of his son. The old man went into a comfortable exile in London, where he died two years later.
Seldom had a new monarch been welcomed with such enthusiasm. With this shy but determined young sultan came the winds of change. He was quick to proclaim that his country, formerly known as the territories of Muscat and Oman, would now be called the Sultanate of Oman.
In addition to having to usher his country into the twentieth century, Qabus had to heal ruptures caused during his father's reign. For instance, in 1954 Ghalib ibn Ali had attempted to establish an independent principality in central Oman. Ghalib's supporters, initially encouraged by the rising Arab nationalism of that period, eventually were driven from their mountain strongholds by the British, but the "Oman question" was regularly introduced at the United Nations and ignored by representatives of Sultan Said. The matter was finally resolved in 1971, when the majority of Arab countries ceased backing the separatist movement. Oman, no longer isolated, was admitted to both the Arab League and the United
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