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Oman: The Strategic Sultanate
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14729 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1988 |
3,125 Words |
| Author
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Gill Marais
Based in Paris, Gill Marais is a free-lance photojournalist
specializing in cultural, travel, and medical reportage. Her
book on Tibetan medicine is due to be published next year.
She has traveled widely in India, Pakistan, China, Europe, and
Africa. |
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
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