Word: muscat
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...