A History of Modern Oman

An ideal introduction to the history of modern Oman from the eighteenth century to the present, this book combines the most recent scholarship on Omani history with insights drawn from a close analysis of the politics and international relations of contemporary Oman. Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout offer a distinctive new approach to Omani history, building on postcolonial thought and integrating the study of politics and culture. The book addresses key topics, including Oman’s historical cosmopolitanism, the distinctive role of Omani Islam in the country’s social and political life, Oman’s role in the global economy of the nineteenth century, insurrection and revolution in the twentieth century, the role of Sultan Qaboos in the era of oil and Oman’s unique regional and diplomatic perspective on contemporary issues. Jeremy Jones has an Oxford-based consulting business and has worked on Oman since the 1980s. His first book, Negotiating Change:  The New Politics of the Middle East (2007), anticipated the Arab Spring. He is Senior Associate Member at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Nicholas Ridout has worked with Jeremy Jones on research in Oman since 1989. Their first book together, Oman, Culture and Diplomacy, was published in 2012. He is also Professor of Theatre at Queen Mary University of London and has published extensively on theatre and performance.

A History of Modern Oman

JEREMY JONES NICHOLAS RIDOUT

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York ny 10013-2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107402027 © Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Jones, Jeremy, 1954– A history of modern Oman / Jeremy Jones, University of Oxford, Nicholas Ridout, University of London. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00940-0 (hardback) – isbn 978-1-107-40202-7 (pbk.) 1. Oman – History – 20th century. 2. Oman – History. I. Ridout, Nicholas Peter. II. Title. ds247.o68j66 2015 953.53–dc23 2015016106 isbn 978-1-107-40202-7 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures List of Maps Acknowledgements

page vi vii ix

Introduction

1 Part One Foundations

1 2 3

Oman and the Al Bu Said Oman, Zanzibar and Empire Oman in the Age of British Ascendancy and the Arab Nahda

23 35 64

Part Two Modern History 4 5 6 7 8

The Sultanate as Nation, 1932–1959 Dhofar Oil, Government and Security, 1955–1980 Shura, Diplomacy and Economic Liberalisation, 1980–2000 Oman in the Twenty-first Century

Bibliography Index

99 132 161 195 232 273 281

v

Figures

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Sultan Barghash, a carte de visite, 1865 page 83 Sultan Faisal with Sayyid Taimur and Sayyid Said, 1913 93 Sultan Taimur and his court, 1913 96 Sultan Said in 1957 101 Nizwa after its capture by Sultan Said in 1957 126 Imam Ghalib and Sulayman bin Himyar with President Nasser in 1959 129 The ruins of Sulayman bin Himyar’s house at Birkat al Mowz 130 Jabbalis at the Salalah perimeter fence, 1968 140 Eid al-Adha at Muscat, 1969 (Sayyid Ahmed bin Ibrahim, Sayyid Nadir, Sayyid Sultan, Sayyid Thuwaini, Sayyid Abbas, and Sayyid Malik) 145 Lieutenant Said Salim with Said Musalim Said al-Mahri 148 Shaikh Buraik 148 Sultan Qaboos’s accession to the throne, with Sayyid Shihab officiating 149 A Dhofari rebel commander, 1971 151 Sultan Qaboos, Shaikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi and Sayyid Tariq in Muscat, 1970 154 Sayyid Thuwaini attending Oman–UAE border demarcation work 155 A Dhofari dancer at Sultan Qaboos’s wedding 159 Sultan Qaboos with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, 1994 218 Elections in Muscat, 1997 229 Sultan Qaboos with President Rouhani of Iran, 2014 245 Protests outside Majlis ash Shura, 2011 253 Sultan Qaboos, 2013 259 vi

Maps

1 2 3

Oman Oman in the Gulf Oman in the Indian Ocean

page x xi xii

vii

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all the friends, citizens and officials in Oman who have generously given their time to conversations and discussions with the authors over the many years of their work in Oman. Thanks are also due to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. They are grateful, also, to two anonymous readers for the Press, whose advice helped refine and develop the book. Special thanks, for assistance with the preparation of materials for the book, to Debbie Usher at the Middle East Centre Archive, St Anthony’s College, Oxford, and to Orlagh Woods and Liz Heasman.

ix

Hormuz

I R A N

it of Ho Stra Khasab

e

uz rm

P

rs ia n G ulf QATAR

MUSANDAM

Doha

Sea of Oman Abu Dhabi

Sohar

Buraimi

B

A

H

TI Seeb j a NAH Muttrah r Barka Dank Rustaq Muscat Nakhl M Jebel o Akhdar Sait u n Ibri ta Hamra Tanuf in s Izki Bahla DHAHIRAH Nizwa SHARQIYAH

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

a

Sur

Adam

Fahud

DAKHLIYA

N

SAUDI

A

ARABIA Masirah

Duqm

M O DHOFAR

Arabian Sea

Thamrayt

YEMEN

Salalah Taqa Mugsayl Rakhyut Raysut Mirbat

0 0

1. Oman

x

100 50

200 100

300 km 150 miles

Tehran

Baghdad

I

R

A

N

Basra Kuwait

Bushehr

H

Dammam

Abu Musa Ras Doha Dubai al-Khaimah Abu Sohar Dhabi Buraimi Muscat Nizwa Sur

I

J

Diriyah

Medina

A

N

A

Riyadh

J

Bahrain

Greater and Lesser Bandar Abbas Tunb Qishm

D

N

Z

A

Mecca Duqm

M O Salalah

0 0

2. Oman in the Gulf.

xi

500 250

1000 km 500

750 miles

Pe

r

s ia

n

Gu

lf

R

SIND Karachi

e d

Gwadar Sohar Muscat Sur

GUJARAT

OMAN

Diu Head

S

Duqm

e a

Salalah

Bay of Bengal

Mumbai

Arabian Sea

Goa

Mysore Kannur Malabar Coast Kozhikode Kollam

Pate Mombasa Pemba Dar es Salaam Zanzibar Malindi

INDIAN

OCEAN

Kilwa Cape Delgado

Mauritius Réunion

0 0

500 250

1000 500

3. Oman in the Indian Ocean.

xii

750

1500 1000

2000

2500 km

1250

1500 miles

Introduction

What is modern Oman? Today, Oman looks and feels like most people’s idea of a modern country. This is particularly true in the capital city, Muscat, with its busy freeways and malls full of the latest consumer goods, and its high levels of Internet penetration and smartphone use, which are evident to even the casual observer. But at the same time Oman today retains many features that might be considered typical of distinctly premodern or traditional society. It is ruled by a hereditary monarchy, everyday social life involves widespread religious observance, ‘traditional’ conceptions of the family are a powerful influence on the decisions made by individual Omanis, and even in the capital city, Omani men and women wear what most observers would instantly recognise as ‘traditional’ dress. Most Omanis, too, probably think that it is the freeways and the technology, along with some of the more striking achievements of the contemporary state  – the comprehensive welfare system and public education – that make their country modern. That is to say, they identify as modern those things in which Oman resembles countries whose economies and social systems are the result of a process of industrialisation that began, typically, in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century. To call Oman modern in this sense, and to contrast its modern and traditional elements in this way, then, is to imply a process of linear development, to suggest a narrative of progress from a ‘backward’ or ‘underdeveloped’ state towards the achievement of a recognisable condition of modernity. This is a perspective shared by many Western accounts of Oman’s history, and it is also the dominant commonsense Omani understanding of that history, often reinforced by the present 1

2

A History of Modern Oman

government’s own narrative of national ‘renaissance’ and economic development since 1970. The reality is a little more complex. The achievement of the visible and commonsense modernity so evident in Oman today has indeed been quite remarkable. The familiar story of a country that was considered ‘medieval’ in its social arrangements and lack of infrastructure (paved roads, schools, hospitals and so on) in the mid-twentieth century, but which was transformed through the investment of oil revenues after 1970 into the self-evidently ‘developed’ nation of 2015, is, in many respects, entirely true. But it leaves out two complications. First, many underlying features of this contemporary Omani modernity can be traced to a much earlier period in the country’s history, most particularly to its long participation in global trade networks. Second, several key aspects of what look like residues of Omani ‘tradition’ are in fact products of the very same earlier history. Above all, the hereditary monarchy of the Al Bu Said was itself an innovation, forged not in some ‘medieval’ past but, rather, in the late eighteenth century, at precisely the moment at which Oman decisively established itself as a significant participant in an increasingly global capitalist economy. So it might make more sense to draw a distinction between two related senses of modern and modernisation in Oman. One is the familiar, everyday sense, referring to capitalist economic development, technological advances, centralised administration and the provision of public services. The other might refer to features of Omani society that look, in these terms, much less modern but which, in the context of a history of Oman such as this one, are in fact best understood as characteristics of a distinctively Omani modernity. These might include, therefore, the hereditary monarchy, the consolidation of a coherent ‘traditional’ national identity, as well as the country’s participation in cosmopolitan networks of commerce and cultural exchange. At some points, these two senses of modernity converge, but not always. Modernity, in the sense intended in this book, then, is a state of contradiction and tension among elements of a culture. Modernity in Oman is not the resolution of this contradiction, but the experience of living with it: living with tensions between urban and rural patterns of life (and in the case of many Omanis, moving on a weekly basis between them) or negotiating the place of religious observance and practice in relation to a dominant global secularism. The example of Oman might also help us think about the nature of modernity

Introduction

3

elsewhere in similar terms. To be modern is to live in the present a set of tensions between a knowledge of the past and an imaginary future. In other words, the condition of being modern involves the persistence of the non-modern, a continual negotiation over what it is to be modern and, in the case of Oman, what it is to be Oman or Omani.

Political Geography The Sultanate of Oman, to give the modern nation its official title, is located in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula, with three land borders – with the United Arab Emirates to the north and west, Saudi Arabia to the west and Yemen to the south and west. To the east of Oman’s long coastline is the Indian Ocean. From the coastal capital of Oman, Muscat, to Karachi on the other side of the Indian Ocean is a voyage of about 900 kilometres. Rising up behind Muscat is a dramatic line of rugged dark mountains, the Hajar range, which separates the two main axes of the traditional Omani nation – the coast and the interior – from one another. Northwest along the coast itself, between Muscat and another historical Omani port, Sohar, is the narrow plain called the Batinah. This is the region from which Omanis have traditionally ventured abroad, building multiple trade connections in the Gulf, across the Indian Ocean and even south to the coast of eastern Africa. Crossing the Hajar mountains brings you into the interior of the country, the Dakhliyah, where the people have tended to focus more exclusively upon subsistence agriculture and where Oman’s traditional religious institutions are at their strongest, especially in the old capital and oasis town, Nizwa. Rising in the heart of the interior is the plateau known as the Jebel Akhdar (Green Mountain), where the altitude creates a cooler climate than in the desert below and where fruit and flowers grow on mountainside terraces. North and west of the Dakhliyah is the Dhahirah, beyond which lies the desert area of the Rub al-Khali (Empty Quarter). Southeast and beyond Muscat in the opposite direction from Sohar, the coast is rockier as it reaches down to another famous port town, Sur. Inland from Sur is the desert region known as the Sharqiyah. South of here, and for many centuries reached primarily by sea, is the distinctive region of Dhofar, where another coastal plain sits at the feet of mountains that separate the cultivable lowlands from the vast expanses of the Arabian Desert. Dhofar is the only part of the Arabian Peninsula with weather affected by the Indian Ocean monsoon, which produces every July and August the season known as khareef, in which