Page 108 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution IO5

separates the head of the Wadi Samail, running northwards to the Gulf of
Oman, from the second of the great wadis of Oman, the Wadi Halfain, which
runs due south towards the Arabian Sea. Towering above the Samail Gap is the
Jabal Akhdar, or Green Mountain, a cluster of peaks rising to over 10,000 feet,

while a few miles to the west rises the almost equally impressive height of the
Jabal Kaur. Enclosed between the Hajar and the Gulf of Oman is a narrow
coastal plain known as the Batinah, which ends just north of Muscat where the
mountains reach the sea. On the inner side of the western Hajar the foothills
gradually give way to a bare and rock-strewn sand-steppe, scored by numerous
straggling wadis. In its northern reaches the steppe is known as the Dhahirah;

in the south, where it becomes a broken, rocky plateau, as the Hamra Duru.
To the south-west the steppe merges with a series of gravel plains and sabakha
(the plural of sabkhah, a salt-flat), at the southern edge of which lies the tract of
quicksands known by the grim name of Umm al-Samim, ‘Mother of Poison’.
Further westward the gravel plains and sabakha give way to the forbidding
sandhills of the Rub al-Khali.

East of the Samail Gap the Hajar spreads out in range upon range of steep,
jagged hills which continue all the way to the coastline south-east of Muscat.
The region is called the Sharqiyah (or ‘eastern’) and it ends where the hills give
way to the sandy plain below Ras al-Hadd known as Jaalan. South of the
Sharqiyah the highlands of Oman are left behind, and for nearly five hundred

miles, until the confines of Dhufar are reached, the landscape is a dreary
succession of dune country, like the Wahibah Sands, of gravel plains, like the
Huqf, and of stony steppe, like the Jiddat al-Harasis. Dhufar, a fertile enclave
on the Arabian Sea, is doubly blessed - by the brief visit every year of the
south-west monsoon, which brings rain, and by the Qara Mountains, which
shelter it from the scorching winds that blow out of the Rub al-Khali to the
north.

The population of Oman, which has been variously estimated in recent years
at anything between 650,000 and 900,000, probably numbers less than half a
million. It is still intensely tribal in composition: the main non-tribal elements
are the Indians, Pakistanis, Baluchis, Persians and others who form the larger
pan of the polyglot communities of Muscat, Matrah and the towns of the

Batinah. There are some 200 major and minor tribes distributed throughout
the country, mostly along the Batinah coast and in the valleys and foothills of
the Hajar mountains, especially in and around the towns of Nizwa, Izki, Firq,
Bahlah and the other ancient centres of habitation in central Oman. The
tribesmen live by agriculture, the raising of livestock and fishing, producing
ntle in the way of an exportable surplus. Centuries of feuding have bred in

t em a rancorous disposition, and long isolation has made them intensely
suspicious of strangers and foreign influences.
The contentiousness which is so marked a feature of Omani life is due in
arge measure to the inveterate religious discord and factional rivalry that exists