Word: sultanic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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 turned from theocratic to temporal rule, and with the title of sultan instead of imam, built up a trading and slave-running empire that once extended from Zanzibar to Iraq...
...Hills. The present Sultan, eleventh of his line, is Said bin Taimur, 46, a portly greybeard who was educated at a college for princes in British India, writes precise letters in English on crested blue paper, reads the airmail London Times delivered by the R.A.F., and understands perfectly what oil could do for his depleted fortune...
...early 1950s he 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...
...attack from the hills took the British by surprise. ("There is supposed to be a gentlemen's agreement in the Persian Gulf area," grumbled one officer, "that nobody fights in the summer-it's too bloody hot.") With the temperature last week at 130°, the Sultan's commander in chief, Pat Waterfield, was on home leave in England. So was Britain's top political resident in the Persian Gulf, Sir Bernard Burrows. That left command of the Sultan's army to Major Pat Gray, one of the soldierly Britons who were tossed...
...they hoped not to land troops except as a last resort. Instead, after first dropping warning leaflets over Nizwa and its neighboring forts, they sent over the first jet planes that the Omani musketeers had ever seen. After three days and twelve rocket-and-bomb missions, the Sultan's red banner was seen flying in place of the Imam's white flag over the fort at Izki, and old hands at the R.A.F. base at Sharja were saying cheerfully that that was how it always worked in Aden and in the North-West Frontier province...