Page 145 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

142 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Izki and Nizwa presaged the spread of the insurgency in Dhufar io Oman in

general, did not believe that the situation could wait upon Said’s pleasure. He
would have to go, and go quickly, especially if his deposition was to be
accomplished, and his successor given time to consolidate his rule, by the close
of 1971, which, so far as the Foreign Office was concerned, was the date fixed
for Britain’s withdrawal from the Gulf.

Qabus ibn Said was then twenty-nine years of age. He had passed out from
the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and served for a year afterwards with
die Cameronians. Since his return to Oman in 1964 he had been cloistered in
his father’s palace at Salalah, a virtual prisoner. The commander of the sultan’s

guard, Buraik ibn Hamud, became Qabus’s close friend and confidant, and it
was with his help that Qabus made his move against his father on 23 July 1970.
Although he was later to explain that he had planned the forced abdication of
his father for some months, the coup when it came was in large measure made
possible by the participation in it of the British military commander in Salalah.

Said ibn Taimur, who was slightly wounded in the scuffles that took place
within the palace during the coup, bowed to the inevitable and abdicated in his
son’s favour. He was flown in an RAF aircraft first to Bahrain and then to
London, where he was to live out the remainder of his days in surroundings
both fitting and reminiscent of happier times - the Dorchester Hotel. It was

there that he died, in October 1972.
Although at the time of his deposition a number of harsh - and not particu­
larly well-informed - criticisms were made of him in the world’s press, along
with a good deal of Pharisaical comment about the concubines, slaves, stocks of

arms and pornographic films found within his palace, he was by no means the
inept, uncaring, capricious and mediaevally-minded ruler that his glib and
thoughtless critics made him out to be. He had, after all, ruled for nearly thirty
years over a country whose turbulent inhabitants did not take kindly to any
show of despotism. The two rebellions he had had to contend with among his

subjects had both been instigated from outside Oman, even though they were
rooted in the country’s politics, religious divisions and economic life. He
not, it is true, move rapidly or even hesitatingly with the times; yet when one
contemplates the social upheavals that have taken place in those Gulf states
which have so fervently and indiscriminately embraced the fads and fashions 0

the late twentieth century, one is less readily inclined to condemn ai 1 n
Taimur for his inaction. It may well be, as most contend, that the temper an
exigencies of the day demanded his deposition, and that subsequent eve op
ments in Oman have justified it. But it should be borne in mind, in Pas81”

judgement upon Said ibn Taimur, that his misfortunes and those o is Pe
were not wholly of his own making. His difficulties in Oman originate 1 $
small degree from the Foreign Office’s equivocations in the i95os an
about discharging the responsibilities it had inherited in the Gu rom from

India. The troubles which beset him in Dhufar, although they aro