Oman, The Reborn Land

By Frank A. Clements. New York, N.Y.: Longman Inc., 1981. 182 pp. $27.00

Reviewed by Dana Adams Schmidt

Oman is an almost unknown land with extraordinary importance for our times. That is, it lies at the tip of the Arabian peninsula at the entrance to the Gulf, through which passes so much of the oil needed by the rest of the world.

Oman is different from other countries of the Arab Middle East, ethnically, culturally and historically. Shut off from the interior of the peninsula by mountains and desert, it preserved some of its aboriginal people and evolved quite separately, while developing far-flung contacts with India and Africa.

Mr. Clements has written a careful, balanced, useful book about the rebirth of Oman after a long period during which it remained moribund under the grip of repressive rulers, poverty and isolation. The country was indeed reborn when the present ruler, Qaboos bin Said bin Taimur, took over from his father in July, 1970. His father, Said bin Taimur, had grown up and become Sultan at a time when the sultanate was not only impoverished but deeply in debt to local merchants and to the British government. He made austerity his highest virtue and pulled Oman out of debt. But, apart from this virtue he was personally reclusive, spending most of his time hidden away in a remote palace in the primitive southern province of his country, and imposed isolation on his people. He kept the world out of Oman, avoided education for the young, and declined to spend his first oil revenues on much-needed things like roads and hospitals. On top of which he niggled and harrassed Omanis with tight police supervision and rules such as one requiring the gates of Muscat to be closed three hours after sunset and insisting that everyone on the street after that hour carry a hurricane lamp.

Filling in the Chinks

Clements is, by profession, librarian at the College of St. Mark and St. John. So it should be no surprise that his book is not only scholarly, orderly, painstaking, complete and detailed, but also a little dull.

His book fills in many chinks in the knowledge even of specialists about the pre-history and early days of the Omanis: their overseas trips by dhow all the way to China; their constant warfare; and the operations of pirates, Portuguese, and British who tried to transform the Gulf into something of a British lake. He tells about Oman's confusing succession of Imams and Sultans, and the time of its glory in international trade, when it ruled over an empire that stretched from the shores of what is now Pakistan to the coast of northeastern Africa. And finally he tells about the pennypinching poverty that engulfed Oman after the British took away the slave trade and modern steam ships crowded the dhows out of international commerce.

Then comes the exciting tale of young Qaboos's modernization, made possible by newly discovered oil. At the moment of his succession Oman was ensnared in a rebellion in Dhofar, its westernmost province, and Qaboos succeeded in putting down the guerrillas with help from the Shah of Iran, and the British.

Making up Lost Time

After taking over, Qaboos went to work in a hurry. He found a good deal of money stashed away and quickly spent it on the things his father had economized on—hospitals, schools, and roads.

The oil that the country depends on is not overly bountiful. It is enough to pay the bills of development and to last perhaps 35 or 40 years. Lately, the Omanis have been fortunate in making new finds. But they know that the time will come when Oman, like the rest of the Gulf, will have to do without its oil.

With this in mind, Sultan Qaboos has developed a philosophy based on having an alternative economy to the one supported by oil alone. And he knows that, more than most other areas along the Gulf, Oman has the plentiful natural resources for such an alternative. As Clements recounts, there is a wide-ranging hinterland of mountains and plains as well as desert, and these contain bountiful mineral deposits, such as copper (which Oman will begin refining in the fall), chromite, magnesium and magnesite, and coal. Along with fertile fishing grounds and excellent agriculture, this should be enough to make Oman a very prosperous country some day.

It seems a pity to criticize such painstaking work, yet it must be noted that with all his intricate detail Clements sometimes misses the dramatic highpoints. We do not hear the swashbuckling bloody tales of the pirates, nor sense the adventure of seafaring on the monsoon winds to Africa, India and the Far East. Nor does he bring alive Oman's remarkable sultans, including one who sent a trading dhow laden with spices to New York, with horses for the President of the United States, and thereby opened up commercial relations with America. Finally, he does not really do justice to the role of his countrymen in imposing peace in their country and in beginning their economic development even before oil.

Dana Adams Schmidt is a free-lance writer on Middle East affairs who has visited Oman many times.