Looking for Flaws in the Most Attractive Member Of the Class

By Richard H. Curtiss

In an old Anglo-American folk song, a family asks, “Where have you been Billy Boy, Billy Boy?” “Charming Billy” responds that he has found a delightful young lady who has become “the apple of my eye.”

“Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy?” they ask.

“She can bake a cherry pie,” he answers, “fast as you can blink an eye.”

And so goes the song, with his family’s skeptical questions, and Billy’s confident answers.

Throughout the 1970s I made annual business trips to Oman and felt like young Billy each time I returned.

“Okay, so it has the prettiest scenery,” a skeptic would ask, “but what about the people?”

“Well,” I would answer, “the other Arabs say the Omanis are the kindest and most gentle of them all.”

When my daughter joined the Peace Corps and asked me what countries she should volunteer to serve in, I recommended Oman or Yemen. But when she actually left for Oman, suddenly I had deep qualms, thinking it might seem very different to someone living for two years in the boondocks than it did to me visiting for no more than one week at a time in the capital.

But she stayed on happily for five years in three of Oman’s remotest towns.

On my first visit to Oman for the Voice of America in 1971, the country’s brand-new ruler had invited Dr. Donald Bosch, the American director of the country’s first hospital, and his wife to dinner in the palace.

Now the Bosch family, the country’s only resident Americans, wanted to repay the hospitality by inviting the Sandhurst-educated Sultan Qaboos to dinner at the hospital followed by a film about America.

Obviously the reciprocal visits went well. Dr. Bosch retired years ago and his children are scattered around the globe, but he and his wife still spend every winter in a lovely home the sultan put at their disposal near his palace for the rest of their lives as a farewell gift.

In my experience, all Oman stories seem to have happy endings. On my second or third visit to Oman an American diplomatic mission had been opened in a picturesque old building in Muscat, then still a tiny walled city with a gate that was locked at night.

Now both the capital area and the U.S. Embassy have grown and spread out. So has America’s relationship with Oman, which controls the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which half of the world’s petroleum passes. Today Oman may be America’s firmest Middle Eastern ally.

Oman’s remarkable health and education statistics are matched by the major Arab oil-producing countries of the Gulf, but Oman is not a major producer. It has had to allocate its limited foreign exchange among conflicting national priorities, and it has done so wisely.

Oman skipped the socialist phase through which some Arab countries passed from the 1960s through the 1980s. Because it was still a feudal country when Sultan Qaboos took over from his father, he listened to largely British advisers and did whatever he decided had to be done to get development started quickly. It worked, and although some foreign advisers remain, their numbers are shrinking very rapidly.

Oman is not yet a democracy, but it no longer is an autocracy. The sultan’s consultative council falls about half way between the traditional Arab ruler’s Majlis al Shura and a constitutional monarchy’s elected parliament. All of the members are elected by the people of their own districts. But of those elected, the sultan appoints only half to actually serve.

It’s a system that Omanis respect because the trend is toward steadily greater citizen participation, both in voting and in governing. Most important is the fact that, according to U.S. diplomats, there are no political prisoners. None at all.

That’s a claim not too many of Oman’s 45 or 50 nearest neighbors in the Middle East, East Africa and South Asia can make.

Economically, Oman seems simply to have skipped Third World status in its emergence from feudalism. In 1970 it had no educated populace or health care facilities or physical infrastructure at all outside the capital area. Today, its children all at least start school, which is free through the university level. Even Oman’s remotest villages have access to an elaborate system of health care. And its government officials quite unself-consciously compare the nation’s vital statistics with European rather than other Middle Eastern countries.

The economy is thriving. It seems unhampered by red tape and untouched by governmental corruption, that greatest curse of the Third World, and the resulting benefits are spread quite evenly throughout the country. Its people, descendents of settled fishermen and farmers who have always worked hard to survive in their isolated sea coves and mountain oases, need no instruction in the work ethic. And as the government follows the world-wide trend toward privatization, there is no lack of home-grown entrepreneurs to take over services at all levels, and keep them running.

Remarkably, in its modern garb, the country retains its charm. Now, instead of providing a glimpse into the Middle East of the Middle Ages, it has become a model of what a fully developed Middle Eastern country can aspire to be. And, according to both the Omanis and the foreign diplomats a visiting journalist encounters in the national capital, the credit goes to one man, Sultan Qaboos.

The anecdotes they tell are not just the lip service routinely accorded to long-term rulers in developing countries. Omanis really love and the diplomats deeply respect this leader. He is a little removed and pensive in his formal portraits. But he seems to radiate warmth and genuine happiness when, accompanied by his ministers, he is pictured seated on the ground listening to his subjects during his annual visits to all parts of the country.

Old-timers all tell stories about the early years of the sultan’s rule. Accompanied by responsible officials, he made nightly tours to inspect every project in his country’s rapid development. If an unsightly window air conditioner or an obvious violation of the building or zoning codes caught his eye, an official would be ordered to pursue the matter the next day. In those days the officials who accompanied the ruler’s nightly inspection tours and then had to run offices in the daytime were said to be haggard from lack of sleep.

But the results are beautiful streets, residences, public buildings and entire towns and suburbs that are said to have been laid out and approved, street by street and building by building, by the country’s ruler.

In more recent years the sultan devoted the same personal attention to drafting the country’s basic law with which, in the words of the current U.S. ambassador, no American member of Congress would have a problem. It was personally drafted, word by word and line by line, by Sultan Qaboos and his closest government officials after meticulous study of the constitutions and legal codes of the world’s leading countries.

In its developing years, Oman did not admit non-Arab tourists, fearing their impact on the country which, in any case, had no facilities to accommodate them. Recognizing that tourism can provide needed foreign exchange and employment, however, Oman’s doors were cautiously opened five or six years ago.

The results are astonishing. Upon revisiting Oman, the writer seized every opportunity to strike up conversations with vacationers in the hotels in the capital and in Salalah, far to the south, by asking if this was their first visit to Oman. At least one out of three said no, it was their second or third visit. Happy campers!

So, it seems, are the people of this beautiful country. Their illustrious history is intertwined with the spread of Islam, by sea, to the ends of the earth, and blends seamlessly into the fabulous adventures of Sindbad the sailor and the even more ancient myths about unicorns and legends about the secret sources of frankincense and myrrh.

Now Omanis are making history, not myths. Here is a country that has moved directly from feudalism to modernity in 28 years, with, as yet, no unwanted side effects. So far it’s a case study in success.

In the song, the apple of Billy’s eye was still “a young thing who cannot leave her mother.” Oman’s emergence into modernity is also a “young thing.” But its people are blessed with a benevolent and conscientious ruler who is cautiously but steadily introducing democracy into a culture that combines the deep conservatism of the Arabian desert with the open-mindedness of those who grow up facing the sea. Whatever challenges history has in store for once “unknown Oman,” its kind, gentle and outward-looking people are well-prepared to meet.

Richard Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.