Page 51 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

44 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

tradition, by tribal custom and by Islamic prescription. Lacking such sanc­
tions, a revolutionary regime would have no recourse but to rely upon superior
force to compel obedience to its decrees.
The campaign of denigration against the federal rulers was not confined to
left-wing political circles and publications. It was carried on also, albeit more
urbanely, in what were, by repute, the more responsible organs of the press.
Much of the criticism was inspired by nothing more than a frivolous desire to
be fashionable. In the shallowly cynical and infinitely knowing intellectual
atmosphere of Britain in the 1960s all that was traditional, long established or
revered was deemed fit only for mockery, contumely or relegation to oblivion.
In an Arab world dominated by progressive, socialist regimes headed by
dynamic and astute colonels, South Arabia, with its sultans, amirs and saiyids,
its rifle-carrying tribesmen, British political officers and isolated up-country
garrisons, was deemed hopelessly demode, an anomalous survival from the
nineteenth century. As Trevelyan put it in his memoirs, ‘It was all very
romantic in the old way’. Men who should have known better, ex-diplomatists
and colonial officials, lent their voices to the orchestrated chorus of denuncia­
tion of the Federation of South Arabia, or joined in the modish chatter about
the necessity for the termination of the ancien regime in Arabia, the inevitability
- and hence the desirability - of a new political order, and the ineffable
blessings which it was bound to confer upon the Arabs at large.
The collapse of the federation, and the abdication and flight of the protec­
torate rulers under the assaults of the NLF, were afterwards held up as ample
vindication of all that had been said in condemnation of them. There was
particular rejoicing among the British left, accompanied by sneers at the ease
with which the federal rulers had been deposed and the rapidity with which
they had fled their ancestral lands. Neither the satisfaction nor the sneers
proceeded from any searching analysis or prolonged reflection. The deposition
of rulers is not exactly a new or unusual occurrence in the Middle East or
elsewhere, nor is flight from the certainty of death an unnatural human
response. Even today, more than a decade afterwards, we are without reliable
and adequate information about the sequence of events in the protectorates in
the summer and autumn of 1967. What is certain is that the overthrow of the
hereditary sultans and amirs was not accomplished by widespread popular
revolution against their rule. Nothing in the character of this rule had altered
for the worse in the years up to 1967, no sudden heightening of its severity had
occurred such as to make it oppressive beyond endurance. It was not, in any
case, in the make-up of the tribesmen of South Arabia to suffer misrule
patiently. As Trevaskis summed it up: ‘With bullets in their cartridge belts
they had the most effective means of influencing their rulers. ’ The fact is that in
these years the lot of the tribesmen had grown easier, with the provision of
economic aid and technical services by Britain, improvements in agriculture,
communications, health and education, and the application of pressure upon