Jan Morris - Sultan in Oman

O ne fine Arabian morning in the middle of December 1955, I walked into the palace of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, on the shore of the Indian Ocean in Dhufar. Through the great gate of the outer courtyard I passed, and the slaves bowed low; through the gate of the inner courtyard, with the sea glistening beyond the wall; into the polished hall of the palace, lined with bearded and begowned retainers, their rifles in their hands; until there approached me from the darkened recesses of the building a small dignified figure in a brown and gold aba, a turban on his head, a sword by his side, a soft scent of frankincense emanating from his person.

Goodmorning, Mr Morris, said his Highness the Sultan Said bin Taimur. I wonder how familiar you are with the map of south-east Arabia?

I was not familiar with it at all, if only because that distant corner of the Arabian Peninsula remained the least known of all the Arab lands. In the atlas it was shown vaguely, a big brown sandy triangle, bounded by the Gulf of Oman on one side and the Arabian Sea on the other, a smudge of mountains in the centre, a howling desert around its perimeters: and it was marked, as if by somebody not entirely sure of his facts, Muscat and Oman. Where Muscat began and Oman ended, the cartographer did not seem at all certain; and this was not surprising, for nobody else was either.

My frankincensed Sultan, descendant of a dynasty which had once ruled Zanzibar, and which had been in office since 1744, believed himself to be the lawful ruler of the whole triangle. Dhufar, the southern coastal province, was certainly his; so was Muscat, on the Gulf shore; so presumably was the sparsely inhabited coastline, running around the horn of the peninsula, which connected the two. But the interior of the country, loosely called Oman, was a very different matter. It was a rough, mountainous territory, isolated by deserts and high ranges, inhabited by tough, unruly Arab tribesmen of varying degrees of peaceability: now squabbling with each other, now combining to repel some common enemy; owing diverse loyalties to tribal leaders and misty historical federations; often fierce, rapacious and xenophobic; many of them devotees of an Islamic sect, the Ibadhiya, which had died out everywhere else in Arabia. Was the travelled and urbane Sultan, a paternal autocrat educated in India, the complete and lawful ruler of these difficult people?

The British government, which protected the Sultans domains for him and largely handled his foreign affairs in other words, which was still the basic power in south-east Arabia was convinced that he was, and recognised him in its treaties as absolute ruler of both Muscat and Oman (as his title implied). Elsewhere opinion varied. The frontiers between Saudi Arabia, which controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula, and the various little states along the Persian Gulf had never been properly defined, and there were those who thought that King Saud of Saudi Arabia had, if anyone, legal paramountcy over the tribes of Oman. Moreover, for many generations the Ibadhis of Oman had elected themselves an Imam, originally a spiritual leader, who had in later years acquired substantial political power too. The present incumbent, Ghalib bin Ali, apparently egged on by his ambitious brother Talib, had tried to set up Oman as a totally independent state, even issuing his own passports and applying for membership of the Arab League. In this intent he had won the support of the Saudis, who supplied him with money and arms and printed the passports for him, and of Egypt, the most powerful indigenous force in the Middle East, whose rulers were dedicated to the eradication of all Western influence in the Arab world, and who therefore preferred a chauvinistic Imam to a reasonably Anglophile Sultan. Their case was perfectly arguable. In 1913 many of the tribes of the interior had rebelled against the Sultans authority and had fought a fairly successful war against him. The agreement which concluded it, called the Treaty of Sib, had pledged the Sultan not to interfere with the internal affairs of Oman. Could he still be its legitimate sovereign ruler, with such a limitation on his authority? At the time of the treaty, some British observers believed it to establish, in effect, two separate states: and the Imam agreed with them.