Page 115 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

112 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

prominent role in the election of Azzan ibn Qais half a century earlier. Isa ibn
Salih al-Harithi had nominated him, and he was chosen for his piety and his
knowledge of Ibadi theology. He possessed no power or authority that did not
derive from the backing of his patron, the Harithi chieftain. Taimur ibn Faisal

retired to India late in 1931 and abdicated in February 1932 in favour of his
eldest son, Said. A young man of twenty-one years of age at his accession, Said
ibn Taimur was content to carry on the government in unspectacular fashion,
his principal concern in the early years of his reign being to set its finances in
order and to secure a slackening of the reins of British supervision. Real power
in the interior of Oman in the 1920s and 1930s was wielded by Isa ibn Salih

al-Harithi, at the head of what was essentially a Hinawi confederation, the
original alliance with the Ghafiri tribal faction having gradually been attenu­
ated, if not completely dissolved, by the fortunes of war and the death of the
Ghafiri leader, Himyar ibn Nasir, whose place as tamimah of the Bani Riyam
was taken by his son, Sulaiman, a youth of morose disposition and dissolute
habits.
Isa ibn Salih al-Harithi died in 1946. He was succeeded in the chieftainship

of the Hirth and leadership of the Hinawi faction by his son, Salih, then about
twenty-seven years of age. The old Harithi chiefs death produced two
immediate changes in the balance of Omani politics. One was an accession of
power to the Imam al-Khalili, who despite his reputation for sanctity, learning
and judicial severity, had always lived in the shadow of his patron. The other

was the emergence into the political limelight of Sulaiman ibn Himyar, the
tamimah of the Bani Riyam, now grown more stable if scarcely more congenial
or less profligate. Two further developments in this period were to arouse the
interior of Oman from its placid introspection and to confound its politics, and
these were the beginnings of serious oil prospecting in northern Oman and the
concomitant revival of Saudi activity in the region after a lapse of three-

quarters of a century.

Petroleum Concessions Limited, the subsidiary of the Iraq Petroleum
Company which had secured concessions from the major Trucial Shaikhs
between 1937 and 1939, had also obtained a concession for Oman from Sultan
Said ibn Taimur in 1937. The company made a brief reconnaissance of the

Dhahirah, from Ibri to the Buraimi oasis, in the winter of 1938-9 and then
suspended operations for the duration of the war. After the war it recom­
menced prospecting on the Trucial Coast, and in the winter of 1947-8
extended its survey to the vicinity of Buraimi.
The appearance of the surveying party prompted the Imam al-Kha 11 to
declare that he would tolerate no oil prospecting in the districts where his writ

ran, or even allow Christians to set foot in the imamate domains. The warning,
however, did not deter Wilfred Thesiger from setting out from the Buraimi
oasis early in 1949, under the protection of Zayid ibn Sultan, the younge