Oman’s Arabian Knight

There once was a boy who was shunned by his wealthy and powerful father. He was sent to a foreign land to be educated. To support himself, he had to join a foreign army. When at last his father sent for him, the young man hurried home full of expectations--only to learn he was to be kept out of sight.

It was an unpromising beginning to an Arabian tale, but it has had a happy ending for the boy, now known as Sultan Kaboos ibn Said, supreme ruler of the Sultanate of Oman, and especially for his 1.7 million people.

There are few countries in the world that have come so far so fast under the rule of one man.

At a time when many people think of the Middle East as unsafe, prone to violence, discriminatory toward women and minorities, chaotic and backward, Oman presents an opposite picture. It is clean, pleasant, stable, progressive. It prides itself on creating opportunity for all its citizens.

This has much to do with Kaboos, who in 1970 deposed his father, Said ibn Taimur, in a bloodless coup aided by relatives conspiring with the British army. His father was tied to a stretcher and put on a plane for London. And Kaboos went straight to work letting fresh air into what previously had been known as the hermit kingdom of the Middle East.

Three decades ago, the customs of Oman harked back to the Middle Ages. The wooden gates to Muscat, the capital, were closed each night to keep out intruders, and anyone walking about in the darkness (there was no electricity) was required by law to carry a lantern or risk being shot as a thief by city guards. The country had only three miles of paved road and 12 telephones.

Today, Oman is a paragon of development--webbed by thousands of miles of highways, linked to the rest of the globe by the Internet and cellular telephones, open to commerce and tourism, and building one of the largest container ports in the world to take advantage of its location on the world’s main east-west shipping lanes.

It also is one of the most tolerant countries in its region. The sultan himself has built churches and a Hindu temple for the Christian and Indian minorities amid the overwhelming Muslim majority. He has spearheaded the cause of women’s rights, admitting women to his Consultative Council and allowing them to serve as deputy ministers, a first for any government in the Persian Gulf. He also appointed the first female ambassador from an Arab gulf country.

It is rare on the eve of the 21st century for a traditional monarch to rule a state absolutely. The idea of a hereditary autocrat deciding what’s best for a people began to go out of fashion in Europe more than 200 years ago.

But the 59-year-old Kaboos, like several other of the emirs, sheiks and kings still ruling in the Arab world, has been attempting to adapt the traditional monarchy to modern demands.

Arguably, Kaboos has been more successful than his peers. In Oman, there are no hints of political or fundamentalist dissent, as there are in Jordan or Morocco; little dynastic jockeying or rumors of gross corruption, as in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait; no sectarian differences, as in Bahrain; and no tension with neighbors, as in the United Arab Emirates.

Western observers living in Muscat cite as Oman’s one looming difficulty the question of whether its economy, now starting to move from government-dominated to private-sector-led, will create enough jobs for the fast-growing younger generation.

A Place Where Rules Are Respected

Even in such mundane matters as buckling seat belts and refraining from littering, Omanis seem less recalcitrant and more law-abiding than people in other Arab countries. All government buildings are nonsmoking zones, and unlike in almost every other place in the region, such rules are respected.

How has Kaboos effected these improvements? It has not been by coercion. The country has a small police force and an even smaller army, both of which are almost invisible compared with those in other Arab nations. And it’s not oil money alone that has facilitated Oman’s advances--the country has less per capita than any other gulf state except Bahrain, and it has had to spread spending over a much larger, geographically diverse area about the size of New Mexico.

Kaboos himself, in a recent interview, said one key to his success has been leveling with his people.

“I always try to be honest with them,” he said.

Another is his penchant for patient, calculated actions.

“When you take a step, you ought to be worrying about the next step.”

Relations between the Arabs and Israelis is one sphere where Kaboos has been candid. Unlike other Arab leaders who fulminate against Israel in public and quietly say in private that peace with the Jewish state is inevitable and a necessity, Kaboos has been frank about accepting Israel as a permanent state in the Middle East. He was the only fellow Arab leader at the time to applaud the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

“I thought it was very courageous!” Kaboos recalled. “Somebody had to start, and he did it.”

Without peace between the Arabs and Israel, the region will never be secure, the sultan believes.

“We cannot continue to have conflicts and hostilities for the rest of our lives,” he said. “We have a responsibility for the generations who come after us.”

Both Israelis and Palestinians have suffered injustices, he added.

The sultan’s concern for future generations may have been shaped by the meagerness of the legacy he inherited.

Oman, legendary home to Sinbad the Sailor, for centuries had been a thriving seafaring nation, its wooden dhows plying the waters between India and the east coast of Africa. It governed Zanzibar and the now-Kenyan seaports of Mombasa and Lamu, and grew rich on spices, gold, ivory and slaves. But its merchant ships could not compete with French and British steam vessels that arrived after the Napoleonic Wars, and the country gradually sank into bankruptcy and decay by the early 20th century.

Kaboos’ father inherited a near-penniless state from his own father, who had abdicated and moved to India. Believing he could survive best by keeping his subjects ignorant, Said permitted only three elementary schools in all of Oman, educating a maximum of 900 pupils. There was only one hospital, operated by missionaries. Disease was rampant and life spans short. Travel was by foot, donkey or camel, because private cars were banned along with such other modern conveniences as eyeglasses. All visas to enter Oman required the sultan’s personal approval, which came seldom, and most Omanis also were forbidden to leave.

An “arch-reactionary of great personal charm,” according to one journalist’s account, Said agreed to let his only son go to Britain’s Sandhurst Military Academy but gave him no support. Upon graduating, Kaboos was forced to serve in a Scottish regiment stationed in Germany to earn his keep.

Later, he was recalled by his father--but instead of getting a public role, he was locked away in a backwater palace in Salalah and for six years was allowed to see almost no one but his mother and a teacher of the Koran. The reason for the father’s harsh behavior toward his son remains obscure to this day.

In the meantime, opposition to the sultan had reached such a crescendo inside Oman that a rebellion had broken out, and members of Said’s own family were conspiring to oust him. British officials, who had been handling Oman’s external defense for decades, also had developed misgivings about Said’s peculiar rule.

The coup took place July 23, 1970, and on Kaboos’ triumphant arrival in Muscat several days later, he pledged to the people that he would make changes. Ever since, he has been upending the old sultan’s dictum that the best way for a traditional monarch to stay in power is to shut out the modern world.

“I remember it was like we were in prison. The country had been hijacked,” recalled history professor Isam Rawas, who was then 10.

The sultan “created Oman,” he said. “We started from nothing.”

Kaboos preferred to win the loyalty of his subjects not by holding back the clock but by encouraging modernization--in the form of education, commerce, technology and democracy. In the interview, he said his greatest pride is the state’s Sultan Kaboos University, established in 1985, where--he noted proudly--a majority of the students are female. His government has announced plans to charter four more private institutions of higher learning.

The government also wants to diversify the economy before Oman’s oil runs out, which by some estimates will be in about 25 years, and has set a goal of 90% “Omanization” of the work force by 2010--in other words, the replacement of most of the 500,000 foreign guest workers now in the country with Omani nationals.

But to do that, the sultan said, Oman needs to raise skill levels, and the new private universities will be key to training people in fields the private sector wants.

“You are teaching people to look after themselves, and that is the most important thing,” he said.

Democratic innovations instituted by the sultan have included allowing women to vote and to run as candidates for the Consultative Council, where four women sit as members. Oman was the first of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries to allow women to vote and hold national office, beginning in 1994. This year, the emirate of Qatar followed with an election for local councils in which women could participate, though none were elected.

By contrast, Kuwait’s elected parliament, established under Western pressure after a U.S.-led coalition restored the country’s sovereignty in 1991, voted Dec. 1 to continue to deny women the right to vote. In neighboring Saudi Arabia, women may not even drive.

Oman is also the only Persian Gulf country to have a Basic Law, or constitution, that guarantees inalienable rights to its citizens. And in the interview, Kaboos said he was about to institute the region’s first independent judiciary, charged with guarding those rights, after years of careful preparation.

The sultan says he is moving to transform the Consultative Council into a full-fledged parliament. Until now, he has retained the right to appoint the members from a pool of candidates approved by voters. But in the interview, he said he plans to give up that prerogative and allow direct elections next year.

Aside from his late mother and a small circle of friends, including a coterie of British ex-officers from his army days, the sultan has been alone in his work. He married only briefly, a union that produced no heir, but he insists that his lack of progeny is no problem for the country of institutions that he is building.

When he dies, according to the Basic Law, his relatives will gather to appoint a successor. And if they can’t decide, he has left a few names in an envelope as suggestions.

Disarmingly handsome as a youth, with deep brown eyes and long, wavy black hair, Kaboos has aged into a white-bearded silver fox. To welcome his guests for the two-hour interview, he stood alone outside his red-brocade tent in the desert, dressed in a white robe with a purple sash and wearing a purple-and-white turban--and at his waist, a kunjar, Oman’s iconic bent silver dagger.

Working to Keep the Bond With His Subjects

Each year, before National Day, the sultan’s birthday, Kaboos has made a habit of touring the country with his ministers, camping for a few days in each region and meeting with the people.

Although Kaboos’ family has ruled Oman for the last 250 years, for much of that time its grip on the interior was tenuous at best, and the aim of the tour is in part to sustain and strengthen the bonds that exist between the sultan and the population, particularly the various tribal chieftains.

This time, the entourage, which included trucks, tents, servants, government officials, military officers and the palace guards, was spread out over 10 acres of desert near Nizwa. About half a mile away, families of ordinary Omanis with their Toyota Hilux pickup trucks waited on blankets or under the sparse shade of thorn trees for the sultan to wander over and talk with them.

Kaboos explained that he never permits television to cover these encounters because “if there are cameras, I feel as though I am acting, and I don’t like acting at all. I like to be absolutely honest with my people.”

“It has not been easy, oh no, I’ll tell you that,” he remarked about his years in power--especially the first decade, when he was putting the country in order while fighting a Marxist-inspired insurrection in the south. But he said he feels able to relax more now that the foundations for the future have been laid.

“It is an art,” he said of running a country well. “Either you’ve got the touch to do it or you don’t.”

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Oasis of Progress

Size: 119,500 square miles

Population (1998): 2.3 million, including 1.7 million Omanis

Official language: Arabic (English widely used)

Religion: Overwhelmingly Muslim

Life expectancy: 71.6 years

Oil production: 800,000 barrels a day

Oil reserves: 5.6 billion barrels

*Source: Omani Ministry of Information