Page 107 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

CHAPTER III

Tribal Rebellion,

Marxist Revolution

Our country will be able to play an effective role in spreading the
fire of revolution throughout the entire Arabian peninsula without
fearing hostile reactions from the coalition of imperialists and
reactionaries.

Programme of the National Liberation Front of South Yemen,
March 1968

Intrinsically, though not in terms of present wealth or power, Oman is the most

important of the minor states of the Gulf. It is also the most interesting, not
only for its geographical diversity but also because it possesses a history,
reaching back to antiquity, which none of the Gulf sheikhdoms can match. In
area, Oman exceeds Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates
taken together. Its cultivable regions are more numerous, its mineral resources

other than petroleum more substantial, and its potential for natural economic
development greater than those of these other states. For two centuries, from
the time of the expulsion of the Portuguese from Muscat in rhe middle of the
seventeenth century to the assertion of Britain’s paramountcy in the Gulf in the
nineteenth, Oman was the principal maritime power in Arabian waters. For
much of this time her rulers exercised dominion over Zanzibar and the adjacent

East African coast, over Bandar Abbas and parts of Makran, and on occasions
over Bahrain and Hormuz. Even after her power and influence began their
unremitting decline in the mid-nineteenth century - when Oman turned
inwards upon herself, morosely putting up the shutters against the world
outside - the ghost of her former greatness, like that of the Venetian republic,

continued to haunt the seas and shores around her for generations to come.
The dominant geographical feature of Oman is the Hajar mountain range,
which sweeps in a great arc from Ruus al-Jibal in the north, the high, roc }
promontory jutting into the entrance to the Gulf, down through Oman to en
just short of the headland of Ras al-Hadd on the Arabian Sea. Several va eys
cut across the Hajar, the largest of them being the Wadi Samail which sp its t e
range into two halves, the western Hajar and the eastern. Only a narrow n ge