The Indian Ocean strategic system has been described by Vice Admiral John Morgan, former deputy chief of naval operations, as like the New York City taxicab system, where there is no central dispatcher—no United Nations or NATO—and maritime security is driven by market forces; coalitions will appear where shipping lanes need to be protected, just as more taxis show up in the theater district before and after performances.
No one nation dominates, even as the U.S. Navy is still quietly the reigning hegemon of the seas. As one Australian commodore told me: imagine a world of decentralized, network-centric sea basing, supplied by the United States, with different alliances for different scenarios; whereby frigates and destroyers of various nations can “plug and play” into these sea bases that often resemble oil rigs, spread out from the Horn of Africa to the Indonesian archipelago.
The U.S. military, with its sheer size and ability to deploy rapidly, will still be indispensable, even as the United States itself plays a more modest political role, and other, once-poor nations rise up and leverage one another. After all, this is a world where raw materials from Indonesia are manufactured into component parts in Vietnam and supplied with software from Singapore, financed by the United Arab Emirates: a process dependent on safe sea-lanes that are defended by the U.S. and various naval coalitions. The Indian Ocean may not have a unitary focus, like the Soviet threat to the Atlantic, or the challenge of a rising China in the Pacific, but it certainly does constitute a scale model of a global system.
And yet within this microcosm of a radically interconnected global system, ironically nationalism will still flourish. “No one in Asia wants to pool sovereignty,” writes Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian. “Asia’s politicians have come up through hard schools and amid hard neighbors. They appreciate hard power; the U.S. position is much stronger in Asia than anywhere else in the world.”24
In other words, do not confuse this world with the one of the United Nations, which in any case is partly an old construct with France having a seat on the Security Council but not India. India, Japan, the United States, and Australia sent ships steaming to tsunami-afflicted zones in Indonesia and Sri Lanka in December 2004 without initial reference to the U.N.25 Overlapping configurations of pipelines and land and sea routes will lead more to Metternichean balance-of-power politics than to Kantian post-nationalism. A non-Western world of astonishing interdependence and yet ferociously guarded sovereignty, with militaries growing alongside economies, is being tensely woven in the Greater Indian Ocean. Writes Martin Walker, senior director of A. T. Kearney’s Global Business Policy Council:
The combination of Middle Eastern energy and finance with African raw materials and untapped food potential and Indian and Chinese goods, services, investments and markets looks to be more than just a mutually rewarding triple partnership. Wealth follows trade, and with wealth comes the means to purchase influence and power. Just as the great powers of Europe emerged first around the Mediterranean Sea until the greater trade across the Atlantic and then across the Pacific produced new and richer and more powerful states, so the prospects are strong that the Indian Ocean powers will develop influence and ambition in their turn.26
And so this ocean is once again at the heart of the world, just as it was in antique and medieval times. To consider that history, and to explore the ocean part by part, let us begin with Oman.
* The Persian Gulf is responsible for 57 percent of the world’s crude oil reserves.
† In January 2004 the China Petrochemical Corporation signed a contract with Saudi Arabia for the exploration and production of natural gas in a nearly 15,000-square-mile area of the Empty Quarter, in the south. As air pollution becomes an increasingly serious problem in China because of the burning of dirty fossil fuels, China will turn to cleaner natural gas. Geoffrey Kemp, “The East Moves West,” National Interest, Summer 2006. In any case, China’s oil consumption is growing seven times faster than that of the U.S. Mohan Malik, “Energy Flows and Maritime Rivalries in the Indian Ocean Region” (Honolulu: Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2008).
PART II
CHAPTER TWO
OMAN IS EVERYWHERE
The southern shore of the Arabian Peninsula is a near wasteland of igneous colors, with humbling plains and soaring, knife-edged formations of dolomite, limestone, and shale. Broad, empty beaches go on in all their undefiled grandeur for hundreds of miles. The hand of man seems truly absent. The sea, though mesmerizing, has no features to stimulate historical memory, so the vivid turquoise water suggests little beyond a tropical latitude. But the winds tell a story. The monsoon winds throughout the Indian Ocean generally north of the equator are as predictable as clockwork, blowing northeast to southwest and north to south, then reversing themselves at regular six-month intervals in April and October, making it possible since antiquity for sailing ships to cover great distances relatively quickly, with the certainty, perhaps after a long sojourn, of returning home almost as fast.*
Of course, it was not always that simple. Whereas the northeast monsoon, in the words of the Australian master mariner and unwearying Indian Ocean traveler Alan Villiers, “is as gracious, as clear, and as balmy as a permanent trade … the southwest is a season of much bad weather.” So it was occasionally necessary in parts of the ocean for sailing ships to use the northeast monsoon for their passage in both directions. But the Arab, Persian, and Indian dhows* could well manage this, with their huge lateen rigs lying as close as 55 to 60 degrees in the direction of the soft northeast headwind—sailing right into it, in other words.† This is almost as good as a modern yacht and a considerable technical achievement. The importance of it was that India’s southwestern Malabar coast could be reached from southern Arabia by sailing a straight-line course, even if it did involve the discomfort of what seamen call “sailing to weather.”
Despite the occasional ferocity of the southwest wind, the discovery of the monsoonal system, which so easily favored trip planning, nevertheless liberated navigators from sailing too often against the elements.1 So the Indian Ocean did not—at least to the same degree as other large bodies of water—have to wait until the age of steam to unite it. From a sailor’s point of view the wholesale shift in wind direction twice a year over such a large area is fairly unique. Elsewhere, the winds shift in strength and somewhat in direction with the seasons, but not to the degree of the Indian Ocean monsoons. The other major ocean breezes, the northeast and southeast trades in the tropics and the westerlies in the middle latitudes, remain throughout the year, as do the doldrums around the equator.
Thus, it may have been here off the coast of southern Arabia, with its clear starlit nights, plentiful stores of fish, and virtual absence of rivers, where the art of open-water sailing developed.2 Both East Africa and India were remarkably close in terms of sailing time. Indeed, the winds have allowed the Indian Ocean from the Horn of Africa four thousand miles across to the Indonesian archipelago—and all the barren stretches of desert and seaboard in between—to be for much of history a small, intimate community.
And that means, it was early on a world of trade.
I was in the region of Oman known as Dhofar, near the Yemeni border, almost in the middle of the southern shore of Arabia. It is an abstract canvas of ocean and rock, an utter desert in the dry winter months save for the hardy frankincense tree erupting in solitude out of the ground. I cut into the bark of one, picked off the resin, and inhaled the interior of the Eastern Orthodox Church. But long before the emergence of Christianity, burning frankincense (lubban in Arabic) was used to freshen family clothes, bless people, keep insects at bay, and treat many ills. Lumps of the resin were added to drinking water to invigorate the body, especially the kidneys; it was thought to kill disease by activating the immune system and warding off evil spirits. Frankincense sweetened every funeral pyre in the ancient world and was used to embalm pharaohs. This resin was found inside the tomb of Tutankhamen in Luxor, and we know it was stored in special roo
ms under priestly guard in the Hebrew temple at Jerusalem.
Intrinsic to the Roman, Egyptian, Persian, and Syrian lifestyles, frankincense was to antiquity what oil is to the modern age: the basis for economic existence, and for shipping routes. Dhofar and nearby Yemen exported three thousand tons of the resin annually to the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean.3 Sailing ship after ship laden with frankincense, aided by the sure and steady monsoon winds, traveled southwestward toward the entrance to the Red Sea, en route to Egypt and Rome, and eastward to Persia and India. Months later, when the winds shifted, the ships returned to Dhofari and Yemeni ports, loaded now with ivory and ostrich feathers from Africa, and diamonds, sapphires, lapis lazuli, and pepper from India. Tribal maritime kingdoms in southern and southwestern Arabia—Sabaean, Hadhramauti, Himyarite—grew rich from their individual strips of this incense highway. Until about 100 B.C. the fulcrum of trade between East and West was here, in this seeming wasteland in southern Arabia. Arabs, Greeks, Persians, Africans, and others mingled to do business amid this halfway house of transshipment in the days before direct sailings between Egypt and India.4
The summer monsoon from the south, known locally as the khareef, brings rain that will turn these now desolate hillsides of western Oman where I stood a miraculous jungly green. But an even wetter climate in antiquity allowed for more fresh water and thus an urban civilization, culturally sophisticated because of the oceanic traffic. Driving along the shore, I found a stone hut where an Arab in a flowing dishdasha and embroidered cap brewed me tea in Indian masala style, with milk, spices, and a heavy dose of sugar. Earlier, in a small restaurant, I had coconut mixed with curry powder and the local soup flavored with chili peppers and soy sauce—again the mundane influences of India and China here in Arabia, for I was closer by sail to the mouth of the Indus than to the mouth of the Euphrates.
I visited the crumbly ruins of Sumhuram, a wealthy Dhofari port at the heart of the frankincense trail, one of the wealthiest ports in the world between the fourth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. Inscriptions at the temple of Queen Hapshetsut in Luxor mention the Al Hojari variety of white frankincense from here, considered the best in the world, and mentioned by Marco Polo in his Travels.5 This frankincense was famous as far as China.
At one point the Chinese city of Quanzhou imported almost four hundred pounds of frankincense per year from Al-Baleed, another Dhofari seaside settlement near Sumhuram, whose city wall encloses the remains of more than fifty mosques from the medieval age. The ruins at Al-Baleed are more extensive than those at Sumhuram, allowing me to mentally reconstruct the great city that it was. A major settlement from as far back as 2000 B.C., Al-Baleed was visited by Marco Polo in 1285 and twice by the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, in 1329 and 1349, both of whom arrived and departed by sea. The Chinese admiral Zheng He sailed his “treasure ships” across the Indian Ocean to Al-Baleed in 1421 and again in 1431, where he was received with open arms.* Writing much earlier, in the late tenth century, the Jerusalem-born Arab geographer Al-Muqaddasi calls ports in Oman and Yemen the “vestibule” of China, even as the Red Sea was known as the Sea of China.6 Going in the other direction, Omanis from Dhofar and other regions of southern Arabia had been arriving in China since the middle of the eighth century A.D. In later centuries, a population of Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula would make the northwestern Sumatran port of Aceh, at the other end of the Indian Ocean in the distant East Indies, the “Gateway to Mecca.”7
It was, indeed, a small ocean.
“Oman is everywhere, in China, India, Singapore, Zanzibar,” Abdulrahman Al-Salimi, an Omani government official, told me over a welcoming ceremony in the capital of Muscat, featuring rose water, dates, sticky glutinous halwa, and bitter cardamom-scented coffee served out of a brass pot. He wore a white turban and dishdasha. The minister of religious endowments, whom I also met, wore a bejeweled dagger (khanjar) at the middle of his waist. This is a land of consciously reinforced tradition that is not insular; rather the reverse, such customs are linked to a seaborne national identity, forged over the millennia, of interacting with—not withdrawing from—the outside world. Oman is an example of how globalization at its best is built on vigorous localisms that can survive the onslaught of destructive commercial forces. What may appear medieval to the awestruck, first-time traveler actually fits well with the modern world.
The northeastward journey from Dhofar to Muscat takes twelve hours over an unceasingly flat, gravel- and lava-strewn desert bordering the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, parallel to the sea.* Throughout most of the past, such a journey would have been accomplished under sail. As seafarers, Omanis are in many ways the ultimate Arabs. So influential have they been throughout history that the Arabian Sea—the northwestern quarter of the Indian Ocean—was formerly known as the Sea of Oman. The legendary Sindbad the Sailor might have been an Omani from Sohar, though he was based out of Basra, in Iraq. Sindbad’s Homeric voyages of the eighth through the tenth century are another testament to the smallness of this great ocean, owing to the winds and the sailing skills of the medieval Arabs and Persians. The Kingdom of Mihraj in Sindbad’s first voyage has been likened to Borneo in the South China Sea; the monstrous bird of his second voyage has been compared to birds near Madagascar; the Island of Apes in the third voyage was considered by the twelfth-century Arab geographer Idrisi to be Socotra, between Yemen and Somalia; and the cannibal land of the fourth voyage has been thought to be the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, if not even farther-afield Sumatra.
Another great Omani seafarer, Ahmad ibn Majid, might have navigated Vasco da Gama’s ship from Kenya to India in 1498 (more of him later).† The Omanis dominated the slave trade, and ran an empire along the Swahili coast in East Africa through the early nineteenth century. They held the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea in Baluchistan (southwestern Pakistan) until 1958. Indonesia has Omani communities, the forebears of which helped spread Islam into the Far East.
Likewise, you can find traces of all these places in Oman. The souks of Muscat are filled with a nineteenth-century Hindu community from Rajasthan and Hyderabad. The styles of women’s dresses and the embroidered caps of the men bear influences from Zanzibar and Baluchistan. Music and dance are Zanzibari in character. Chinese porcelain is ubiquitous. The bakers are Yemeni and Iranian. Many of the businessmen are Gujaratis from northwestern India. The shields and coats of armor of Omani soldiers of old demonstrate the influence of India and of the Zulus from South Africa. Loan words from all these places influence Omani Arabic, and many Omanis speak Arabic with a Swahili accent. Globalization happened in Oman and the rest of the Indian Ocean in antiquity and in the early medieval era long before it did in other places, leading to an extraordinary level of sophistication.
The Arabs are known in the West as a desert people, susceptible to the extremities of thought to which deserts give rise. But they have also been a great seafaring race, as the frankincense trade and the historical experience of Oman demonstrate, the very harbingers of cosmopolitanism, who have been sailing these waters for thousands of years before Vasco da Gama. When looking at the entire period of Islamic expansion, “one fact stands out,” writes the Dutch-American scholar André Wink in his encyclopedical series, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, “the growth and development of a world economy in and around the Indian Ocean—with India at its centre and the Middle East and China as its two dynamic poles—was effected by continued economic, social and cultural integration into ever … more complex patterns under the aegis of Islam.”8
The “Saracens,” as the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder referred to the Arabs a century ago, “created a great empire by availing themselves of the two mobilities permitted by their land—that of the horse and camel on the one hand, and that of the ship on the other. At different times their fleets controlled both the Mediterranean as far as Spain, and the Indian Ocean to the Malay Islands.”9 The trapezoidal geography of the Arabian peninsula favored this development. Long
coastlines bound Arabia on three sides: from the Gulf of Suez all the way down the Red Sea to the Strait of Bab el Mandeb (“The Gate of Tears”), then northeastward for 1250 miles to the Gulf of Oman, along what was in earlier eras the most fertile, populous parts of the peninsula (Yemen, the Hadhramaut, and Dhofar); and finally back north up the Persian Gulf to the Shatt el Arab in Iraq. The Shatt el Arab led to the Tigris, and hence to Baghdad, so during the Abbasid Caliphate, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, until the Mongol devastation, Baghdad was connected via the Indian Ocean to China, since for much of history communications were often more easily accomplished by sea than across inhospitable deserts.
Moreover, commerce in Arabia was encouraged by the nearby shores of Africa to the west and the Iranian plateau to the east, for in the enclosed, protected waters of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, constant seafaring brought the Arabs into intimate contact with two antique urban civilizations—those of Egypt and Persia. The Persians, in particular, originally dominated the long-distance sailing trade with the East. In the sixth century B.C., Darius I “ordered a reconnaissance of the seas from Suez to the Indus,” for there was much sea traffic between the Achaemenid dynasty in Persia and the equally thriving Mauryan dynasty in India.10 Later, during the Sassanid dynasty in Persia, just prior to the coming of Islam, it is likely that Persian ships were in Chinese ports. In fact, the Persians, who under the Sassanids were a major Indian Ocean power, appear in Chinese documents throughout the late seventh and eighth centuries as owners of ships at Canton.11 By this time, under the Arab-Persian cultural unity effected by the eclectic medieval Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, Arab and Persian sailings across the Indian Ocean from Africa to the Far East became nearly indistinguishable, falling under the general rubric of Muslim trade and exploration.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 3
