{"id":14481,"date":"2017-10-03T01:27:39","date_gmt":"2017-10-03T05:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/?p=14481"},"modified":"2021-04-19T11:28:14","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T16:28:14","slug":"a-sultans-arabia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/blog\/a-sultans-arabia-qatar\/","title":{"rendered":"A Sultan’s Arabia – Qatar"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Sultan’s Arabia – Qatar<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Muscat, Oman.\u00a0 If you want to see an ultra-rich Arab sheikdom with exotically designed skyscrapers, the world\u2019s most upscale shopping malls featuring indoor streams plied by Venetian gondolas, or fantastically expensive on-the-water condo developments where everyone drives a Ferrari or Rolls \u2013 all in the middle of a featurelessly flat desert wasteland \u2013\u00a0 you go to Qatar.<\/p>\n

But if you want a more genuine Arabia of Sultan\u2019s palaces, of forts and castles perched on rocky crags, of traditional villages tucked away in mountain fastnesses, of rock pools and grottoes gushing with spring water hidden in secret valleys, a place out of Arabian Nights rather than one of garish ostentatiousness \u2013 then you come here to Oman.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Qatar is where Saudi women go shopping.<\/p>\n

Dressed in black cloth burqas that cover everything but their eyes \u2013 most of them wear gloves to cover their hands \u2013 they spend fortunes on the world\u2019s most expensive\u00a0haute couture\u00a0fashion which they get to wear only for each other at women-only parties, or confined at home strictly for their husbands.\u00a0 In malls like this:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

They shop for clothes like this:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Dressed like this:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Qatar is a thumb-like peninsula sticking into the Persian Gulf so wasteland-worthless it was inhabited only by wandering nomad Bedouin tribes for eons and nominally claimed by the Ottoman Turks who ignored it.\u00a0 Then the Brits showed up in the 1860s laying a telegraph cable along the floor of the Persian Gulf for communication with British India.<\/p>\n

They made friends with the strongest Bedouin tribe, the Al-Thani, who were happy to rule Qatar as a “protectorate” from the Turks and the Al-Khalifa tribe in Bahrain.\u00a0 Yet the place continued to be a totally impoverished backwater until oil and gas were discovered 100 years later in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

After independence from Britain in 1971, an oil and gas boom took off that has not slowed down.\u00a0 Today, Qatar has the second-highest\u00a0per capita GDP\u00a0in the world, $127,000 per Qatari. This wealth is reflected in the capital Doha skyline:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Yet with the wealth comes sterility and inauthenticity in Qatar \u2013 so it is a welcome relief to leave Qatar for Oman.<\/p>\n

4,000 years ago, the Sumerians (in present-day southern Iraq) called the place\u00a0Magun\u00a0or place of copper, for the copper mines they had near Suhar (see map above).\u00a0 The Greeks and Romans called it\u00a0Omana, evidently “settled place” as opposed to wandering nomads from the local dialect of Suhar.<\/p>\n

As Suhar became a coastal hub of trade, it was settled by Mesopotamians, Greeks, Indians, Arabian Bedouins, and especially Persians, who dominated the whole area until folks from the interior of Arabia showed up demanding they accept a newly-invented religion called “Islam” \u2013 which means “submission” in Arabic.<\/p>\n

One thing the Omanis had going for them was a barrier between them and the Arabs \u2013 a vast and labyrinthine complex of mountains, instead of a flat desert.\u00a0 They also knew they didn\u2019t want some Arab horde swarming in to force their Islam upon them at sword-point.\u00a0 So they told the Arabs, okay, we\u2019ll accept your beliefs but on our own terms, we\u2019ll interpret them in our own way.\u00a0 You can leave us alone now.<\/p>\n

Thus arose a form of Islam unique to Oman, Al-Ibadhiyah or Ibadism, which remains today as Oman\u2019s state religion.\u00a0 It\u2019s named after one of its early formulators, Abdullah ibn Ibadah (fl. 700 AD).<\/p>\n

In addition to a plethora of doctrinal differences separating them from Sunnis and Shias, Ibadists elect their Imams in communal debates and reject the concept of Jihad, or forcing\u00a0kafirs, unbelievers, to believe as they.\u00a0 Live and let live Islam, we might call it.<\/p>\n

It was suited to a cosmopolitan, ethnically-mixed trading society, so they were pretty much left alone to carry on their commerce with the lands around them for the next 800 years until some newcomers showed up.<\/p>\n

On July 8, 1497, four ships departed Lisbon, Portugal, commanded by Vasco da Gama (1460-1524) \u2013 and on May 20, 1498, landed at Calicut on the Malabar Coast of southwestern India, the first ocean crossing from Europe around Africa\u2019s Cape of Good Hope to India in history.<\/p>\n

(Note:\u00a0 Calicut, now ridiculously renamed Kozhikode, is not to be confused with Calcutta, a city built by the British in northeastern India, and now renamed only slightly less ridiculously Kolkata.)<\/p>\n

Having pioneered the sea route to India and the spice riches of the East, the Portuguese were determined to keep it for themselves.\u00a0 To secure this end, King Manuel I tasked his military genius, Afonso de Albuquerque (1453-1515) to create a Portuguese Colonial Empire in the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n

Albuquerque\u2019s strategy was to establish forts that would control access to the Indian Ocean via the Atlantic, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf.\u00a0 In 1507, he placed forts along the Mozambique coast and at Mombassa in Africa, secured control of the island of Socotra near the entrance to the Red Sea, seized the city of Muscat and gained the submission of Sohar in Oman, then captured the Persian island of Hormuz in the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf.<\/p>\n

This, plus the creation of a Portuguese colonial headquarters at Goa on the west Indian coast, infuriated all the powers that thought they should control the region.\u00a0 A massive fleet of over 100 warships was assembled by the Raja of Calicut, the Sultan of Gujarat, the Ottoman Turks and the Sultan of Egypt, plus the Venetians \u2013 for the Portuguese had ended the monopoly Venice enjoyed for spices from the East.<\/p>\n

On February 2, 1509, this huge war fleet was met by 18 Portuguese men \u2018o war commanded by Francisco de Almeida off the spice trading center of Diu (on the Gujarat Peninsula north of Bombay) \u2013 and got wiped out.<\/p>\n

The Battle of Diu marked the end of Ottoman Turk encroachments into India and the establishment of European colonization in the East.\u00a0 Afonso de Albuquerque was made Governor of Portuguese India, and Oman was to be a Portuguese colony for 143 years.<\/p>\n

Then came the Brits.\u00a0 The Portuguese lost their spice trade monopoly with their defeat by the ships of the newly-formed British East India Company at the Battle of Swally (ironically just a few miles east of Diu) in 1612.<\/p>\n

As the Brits developed ever-larger trade with India, they became annoyed with Portuguese control of nearby Oman.\u00a0 So in 1646, they made a deal to support the powerful Al-Yaribi tribe in Muscat.\u00a0 This enabled the Yaribis, under Imam Sultan bin Saif al-Yaribi, to revolt and expel the Portuguese from Muscat and all Oman.\u00a0 Then the Brits went back to India and left the Omanis alone.<\/p>\n

With captured Portuguese warships and money from trading with the Brits in India, the Yaribis went on a colonial binge of their own.\u00a0 They gained control of the Baluchi Coast from the Persians, and established a colonial capital at Gwadar (now in Pakistan), and began taking over the southern Arabian coast and the east coast of Africa.<\/p>\n

In 1698, they kicked the Portuguese out of Zanzibar, who had controlled it for almost 200 years and now retreated to their colony of Mozambique.<\/p>\n

Zanzibar (Stone Town in Arabic, an island off the coast of present-day Tanzania) became the center of the Omani slave trade, which made the Omanis immensely wealthy and enabled them to expand their empire.<\/p>\n

At the Omani Empire\u2019s peak under Said bin Sultan (1797-1856), the capital of the empire and seat of the sultanate was moved from Muscat to Zanzibar because the slave trade was so enormously lucrative.<\/p>\n

Here is the Omani Empire at its fullest.\u00a0 The dashed red\/white lines are sea trade routes, black lines\/arrows are slaver routes to capture black slaves from the interior:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

After the death of Said bin Sultan in 1856, the Brits, now moving into East Africa, decided to put an end to the slave trade.\u00a0 The Omani Empire was broken up, the Sultanate moved back to Muscat, and, in 1873, the Sultan forced to sign a declaration abolishing slavery.\u00a0 The Oman economy collapsed and became dependent on British assistance.<\/p>\n

That support came in very handy when a collection of crazed Wahhabi fanatics from the Najd wasteland of central Arabia under Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (1876-1953) tried to seize the entire Arabian Peninsula after World War I.\u00a0 The Brits were able to prevent them from incorporating Oman into Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

Oman remained independent and was never a British colony \u2013 but it also was now a poor forgotten backwater ignored by the world.<\/p>\n

This retreat from the world was accelerated by Sultan Said bin Taimur (1910-1972), who had ruled Oman since 1932 as a pathological paranoid who refused any modern development for Oman whatever including electricity or telephones.\u00a0 He even retreated personally, leaving Muscat to live in a palace in Salalah, the capital of a remote region in southern Oman called Dhofar.<\/p>\n

Dhofar borders Yemen, where the Brits established a colony around the port of Aden in 1837.\u00a0 By the early 1960s, Aden was under assault by Marxist Yemeni guerrillas trained and armed by the Soviet Union and its prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt.\u00a0 The Brits gave up and pulled out of Yemen in 1967, the Soviet colony of the People\u2019s Republic of South Yemen was created, and its guerrilla leaders decided to take over Dhofar.<\/p>\n

The Red Chinese now stepped in and armed the Dhofar guerrillas \u2013 calling themselves the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf or PFLOAG \u2013 to the teeth with modern weaponry.\u00a0 The Sultan\u2019s Omani Army had weapons from the 19th\u00a0century.<\/p>\n

The Brits realized this was hopeless under a nutcase of a Sultan, so in July 1970 they arranged a bloodless coup and put his son, Qaboos bin Said, in power.\u00a0 Within hours of the coup, the elite commandos of the British SAS (Special Air Service) had arrived, and a seriously professional counter-insurgency was underway.<\/p>\n

Sultan Qaboos and the Brits realized they had a full-on war going and needed allies.\u00a0 Qaboos got help from the Shah of Iran who sent a brigade of troops, King Hussein of Jordan who sent commandos and fighter aircraft, and the British-trained Pakistan Army.\u00a0 Bogged down in Vietnam, we sent nothing.\u00a0 The Marxist-Maoist guerrillas were progressively wiped out until they were dead and gone by the end of 1975.<\/p>\n

Sultan Qaboos was well prepared for this, as a graduate of the British Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and having served in a British Army regiment.\u00a0 He was also well prepared, having travelled and studied all over the world, for transforming Oman from feudal medievalism into a modern and moderate Islamic nation.<\/p>\n

The transformation has been truly dramatic.\u00a0 Schools, highways, hospitals all over the country, a vibrant free press \u2013 albeit no criticizing the Sultan! \u2013 modern ports, close to a million barrels a day oil production, wonderful hotels with great good, great service, and yes, great beer.<\/p>\n

There is even an Oman Philharmonic Orchestra that expertly plays the classical music Sultan Qaboos loves.<\/p>\n

Ibadi Islam is a moderate, peaceful, hospitable Islam, which is reflected in the gracious friendliness of the Omani people.\u00a0 Everywhere I went I was greeted with a gentle smile.\u00a0 It is also reflected in the pro-West, pro-American foreign policy of Sultan Qaboos.\u00a0 Under him, Oman has become one of America\u2019s staunchest allies, if not the staunchest, in the Moslem world.<\/p>\n

This is a marvelous place and I can hardly wait to come back here again.\u00a0 And probably soon \u2013 for there is a question mark hanging over Oman.<\/p>\n

Sultan Qaboos runs an absolute monarchy.\u00a0 There is such a personality cult around him that Oman has no independence day \u2013 instead, the Oman National Holiday is the Sultan\u2019s birthday, November 18.\u00a0 And he has no children, no heir, no successor to the throne.\u00a0 (The worst-kept secret in Oman is that he is a homosexual who keeps a harem of his strikingly handsome and young Royal Palace guards \u2013 which is okay in an Islamic country as long as you keep it hidden and never admitted.)<\/p>\n

Qaboos turns 77 next month.\u00a0 He may last another 10 years, and I hope he does for Oman\u2019s sake.\u00a0 But a lot of Omanis are getting nervous, and are crossing their fingers over his relatives (the “Ruling Family Council”) picking someone okay to be his successor.<\/p>\n

Keep your fingers crossed for Oman \u2013 and come here if you ever get the chance.\u00a0 One enticement:\u00a0\u00a0Cond\u00e9 Nast Traveler\u00a0magazine lists\u00a0The Chedi<\/a>\u00a0in Muscat as the Number One spa hotel in the entire world.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s only one of Muscat\u2019s fabulous hotels.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the pool at the Shangri-La:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Other enticements.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the old Portuguese fort lit up at night above the Muscat waterfront:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The Sultan\u2019s Palace:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The Wadi Shab where you can swim in total seclusion:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The mountain castle of Rustaq:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

And the fort of Nakhal<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\n

All you have to do is walk through this gate and into a Sultan\u2019s Arabia:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\n

How to pronounce “Qatar” \u2013 derived from the Roman name for it, Qatara \u2013 is a challenge.\u00a0 You hear it as “guitar,” “cutter,” “gutter,” “kah-tar,” and “kah-tar.”\u00a0 Either the first one or the last seem preferable.<\/p>\n

The largest city of New Mexico is not named for him, but for Francisco Fernandez de la Cueva, the 8th Duke of Alburqueque, who as Viceroy of New Spain, founded the Villa de Alburqueque in 1660.\u00a0 Note the missing \u2018r\u2019 in the American spelling of the city.\u00a0 Even though Afonso\u2019s name is also missing the \u2018r,\u2019 his ancestors originated in the Duke\u2019s town of Albuquerque in the Extremadura of Spain just a couple of miles from the border with Portugal.\u00a0 The meaning is from the Arabic Abu al-Qurk, “father of cork oak.”<\/p>\n

Enjoy this podcast from The Expat Money Show<\/a> – JohnnyFD<\/a> who talks about moving from the USA and living in Bali and Thailand.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Visit our bookstore to purchase it today! While visiting our bookstore, you may be interested in<\/b> Escape To The United Arab Emirates<\/b>, an amazing book about everything UAE.<\/b><\/p>\n

\n

Are you looking for a comprehensive guide for Dubai? or moving to the UAE? Make sure to check out<\/b> Escape To The United Arab Emirates<\/b>, you’ll love it!<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Sultan’s Arabia – Qatar Muscat, Oman.\u00a0 If you want to see an ultra-rich Arab sheikdom with exotically designed skyscrapers, the world\u2019s most upscale shopping malls featuring indoor streams plied by Venetian gondolas, or fantastically expensive on-the-water condo developments where everyone drives a Ferrari or Rolls \u2013 all in the middle of a featurelessly flat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":366,"featured_media":14496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[71,127,366,380,442,451],"yst_prominent_words":[10630,29969,23262,3776,8890,20948,11435,20946,23263,23261,3744,23264,16797,23265,10450,18593,23260],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/jpeg-68.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14481"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/366"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14481"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44662,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14481\/revisions\/44662"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14481"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=14481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}