Word: muscat
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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SULTAN IN OMAN, by James Morris (146 pp.; Panfheon; $3.50), is about one of those diplomatic escapades which Britain still occasionally stage-manages with a fine and crafty imperial hand. The sultanate of Muscat and Oman commands, like an Arabian Gibraltar, the entry to the Persian Gulf. In 1955 a fifth column of Saudi Arabian agents with oil-glazed eyes was busily subverting the sultan's power and touting the claims of the euphonically titled Imam of Oman. Four British-officered armies of the sultan set about trying to sweep the Imam out of Oman...
...feudal and impoverished place. Manama, the crumbling mud capital, did not even have its own water supply. (Water brought from the mainland by ship was hawked through filthy streets in goatskin bags.) The populace, illiterate, diseased and unruly, was forever trying to overthrow the Sheik. The police, imported from Muscat on the Arabian coast, were, if anything, even less law-abiding...
King Ibn Saud claims Buraimi as part of Saudi Arabia; and Britain, as "protector" of Trucial Oman, claims it for a Trucial Oman Sheik and the Sultan of Muscat. Since the summer of 1952, the claimants had fought their siege with angry words and glowering looks. Ibn Saud sent Emir Turki Ibn Utaishan to occupy Buraimi, supposedly in answer to an appeal for protection by the villagers. Britain countered by stationing three young officers and a batch of Trucial Oman levies in a string of Beau Geste mud forts sprinkled around the oasis, to harass and starve the Emir into...
...caravan lumbered into Buraimi bearing 40 Saudi officials, clerks and armed men headed by a doughty Arabian named Emir Turki Ibn Utaishan. They started wooing the bewildered inhabitants and chiefs with lavish feasts, silver riyals and sweet talk. Immediately, the Trucial Sheik of Abu Dhabi and the Sultan of Muscat appealed to their "protector" Great Britain to repel the "invaders...