Page 117 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

114 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

candidates for the imamate had been spoken of in the years immediately
preceding his death, one a son of the previous imam, al-Kharusi, the other a
son of a prominent mutawwa historian. Both were passed over in favour of
Ghalib ibn Ali, a thirty-five-year-old shaikh of the Bani Hina, who was at the
time acting as the imam’s qadi, or judge, at Rastaq. Though much is still
obscure about Ghalib ibn Ali’s elevation to the imamate, one thing is clear and
this is that he was from the first very much under the thumb both of Sulaiman
ibn Himyar and of his own brother, Talib ibn Ali, the wall of Rastaq.
With Ghalib ibn Ali al-Hinawi installed as imam the way was now clear for
Sulaiman ibn Himyar to extend his collaboration with the Saudis. The change
of circumstances had come none too soon, for Petroleum Development
(Oman) Limited — the Oman offshoot of Petroleum Concessions Limited - was
preparing to send a prospecting party into the interior to survey the Oman
steppes and the adjacent sands. Since the disturbed state of the Buraimi region
made an approach from the north impracticable, PDO decided to work from
the south. In February 1954 a surveying party landed at Daqm, on the
southern coast of Oman. After spending the next few months exploring the
country to the south-west, it turned its attention northward, to the central
Oman steppes, with the aim of surveying the tribal range of the Duru. Talib
ibn Ali, determined that any oil that might lie in Duru territory or anywhere
else in the interior of Oman should come under the nominal control of his
brother, the Imam Ghalib, declared the concession under which the company
was operating to be invalid, since it had been awarded by the sultan in 1937
without the knowledge or consent of the late imam. To force the Duru to
withdraw their permission to the surveying party to prospect in their dirah,
Talib sent an armed party to seize the tribe’s date plantations at Ibri. The tactic
rebounded upon him: the Duru appealed for help to the troops of the Muscat
and Oman Field Force escorting the surveying party, and with their support
the Duru moved on Ibri in October 1954 and expelled Talib ibn Ali’s men. A
month later the Sultan Said ibn Taimur reinforced the troops at Ibri and
appointed a wali to the town, bringing it back under direct Al Bu Said
authority for the first time in many years.
This manifestation of Al Bu Said authority at this particular time and place
threatened to play havoc with Talib’s plans. Not only did it drive a wedge
between him and the Saudi outpost at Buraimi, upon which he relied for
tactical and material support, but it also interfered with his endeavours to
secure assistance from abroad. Towards the close of November I954> he
submitted an application in the name of his brother for the admission of the
imamate of Oman (described in the application as an ‘independent Islamic
state’) to membership of the Arab League. The application was unsuccessful,
the members of the League’s political committee being unable, so it was
reported, to locate the imamate’s territories on any map. A year later, following
the expulsion of the Saudi police detachment from the Buraimi oasis, the sultan