Page 122 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution TI9

of the Omanis. Saiyid Said’s outlook was governed by mistrust - of his people,

of his neighbours, of his servants, of his own family. Considering the history of
his dynasty, the mistrust was perhaps not ill-founded. To warnings from his
British advisers that he was courting danger by failing to exert himself (at a
time of nationalist and revolutionary fervour in the Arab world) to lift his
country out of the slough of mediaeval backwardness in which it lay, he

invariably pleaded poverty as an excuse for inaction. Yet he had quite substan­
tial revenues from customs duties, he had acquired £3 million from his sale of
the Omani enclave of Gwadur, on the Makran coast, to Pakistan in 1958, and
he was receiving pavments both from oil companies for exploration rights and

from Britain for social and economic development. It was not enough, how­
ever, to overcome his ingrained parsimony, which had its roots in the struggle
he had waged in the first decade of his reign to rescue the finances of Oman
from the bankruptcy into which his father had allowed them to slide. For the

rest of his life he was to be haunted, however irrationally, by the spectre of
another descent into penury.
Saiyid Said was also oppressed by the fear of what the improvements he was
pressed to make by the British - rather gentle pressure and consequently rather

trifling social and economic improvements - might bring in their train. ‘We do
not need hospitals here,’ he once toid David Smiley. ‘This is a very poor
country which can only support a small population. At present many children
die in infancy and so the population does not increase. If we build clinics many

more will survive - but for what? To starve?’ When Hugh Boustead tried to
persuade him to set up primary schools to educate the sons of tribal shaikhs and
religious dignitaries, he snorted in reply, ‘That is why you lost India, because
you educated the people.’ He expressed a similar opinion to Smiley:

Where could the teachers come from? ... They would come from Cairo and spread
Nasser’s seditious ideas among their pupils. And what is there here for a young man
with education? He would go to the university in Cairo or to the London School of
Economics, finish in Moscow and come back here to foment trouble.

The strength of this last argument could not be denied, especially when one
glanced northward to Kuwait and Bahrain, and even Saiyid Said’s harshest
critics were forced to admit that as often as not he had logic on his side.
Like his namesake a century' earlier, Saiyid Said in the latter part of his reign

turned his back upon his country and his people. Salalah in Dhufar was to him
what Zanzibar had been to the earlier Said, and it was there that he spent most
of his days from the late 1950s onwards. He rarely visited Muscat, and he never
again set toot in the interior after his progress through Oman at the end of 1955.
Seek though he might to shut himself off from the world, he could not entirely

escape its importunities. When trouble fell upon him in the mid-1960s it came,
y a fitting irony, nor out of the turbulent highlands of Oman but from the
anguid confines of Dhufar itself. The shape it took, however, was determined