Word: imam
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Imam. Some of the headlines made it appear that the British were once again shooting up primitive desert tribesmen, defending a despotic ruler and creating a "second Suez." But in fact this was a case when the British were going to the help of a Sultan who, in the London Economist's words, "is not contending against an electorate of the future-a nationalist movement of young and educated men-but against a reactionary rival." The British showed their might almost hesitantly. They acted in Oman, fearing that if they did not, their position would be weakened along...
...treaty ties with Britain for more than 150 years. In the center of it lies Oman, the most isolated part of Arabia, a place of fiery tribal rivalries and religious idiosyncrasies, bounded by the sea on one side and a wall of desert peaks on the other. The first Imam of Oman set himself up in the 8th century as chief of the Ibadhiya, a Moslem sect so ascetic that it still bars minarets around its mosques as too ornamental. The present ruling house descended from the wild peaks and established its capital at Muscat two centuries ago. Its dynasts...
...granted a British-run subsidiary of the Iraq Petroleum Co. a concession to drill for oil in the Omani hinterland. But he was not quite master in his own house. The fanatic Ibadhis in the hills, resentful of the Sultanate rule, had long ago elected a new dynasty of Imams and in 1920, after decades of hard fighting had won from the then Sultan a grudging acknowledgment of the Imam's rule in the mountains. So when two years ago the Sultan's foreign oil drillers went to work near the northern border, the Imam's tribesmen...
...White. Fortnight ago, the Imam donned his curved dagger of command, and with his brother Talib took to the warpath again. With 200 modern rifles and up-to-date automatic weapons, mountaineers swiftly took their old capital of Nizwa. The British were quickly convinced that the modern equipment came from King Saud's arsenal, even though that Saudi Arabian potentate, as if indifferent to the whole affair, was off in Ethiopia calling on Haile Selassie. They also feared that the U.S. would naturally side with Saudi Arabia, whose oil concessions are wholly American-but the fact is that...
...into New. As Imam, the Aga Khan was a king with no temporal kingdom, a sovereign without subjects, but his inherited spiritual authority fell upon his shoulders at a time when British rule was strong in the Moslem world. Reared by a strong-minded and worldly wise mother, his Moslem training tempered by English tutors, young Mahomed learned early to reconcile the vast differences in two disparate worlds and from the beginning cast his lot and his influence in the direction of British authority. When the Germans tried to win over Islam in World War I, the Aga Khan...