Word: muscat
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd faced the House of Commons with an air at once portentous and embarrassed: for the second time in a year British armed forces were on the shooting move in the Middle East. At the request of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, he said. British forces were being called upon to help put down a revolt in the desert...
...What if the sheikdom of Kuwait, now the world's richest known oilfield, should sever its connections with Britain and the sterling area? Or if the same idea should occur to oil-rich Qatar and Bahrein, or those shadowy Trucial* Oman sheikdoms, whose rulers, like the Sultan of Muscat and Oman himself, reign over barren sand and hope for oil strikes...
...Muscat and Oman (pop. 600,000) is a Kansas-sized land of racing camels, frankincense, lush oases and forbidding highlands that has had 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...
...would naturally side with Saudi Arabia, whose oil concessions are wholly American-but the fact is that U.S. oil money dominates even the areas where British protection prevails: U.S. companies own 50% of the stake in Kuwait, 100% in Bahrein, the Neutral Zones and Dhofar, 23.75% m Muscat and Oman...
...palm, which was made of the same clay as Adam") to vignettes of Arabs setting their watches by the sun and "sweetening" their beards with incense. There is still only one God and that is Allah, but oil is profit, and Author Morris is happy that he saw Muscat and Oman before its rulers became the Cadillackeys of their fate...