Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Oman was unstable for long periods because although its official borders extend only around two hundred miles inland, such borders have been largely meaningless. In fact, its desert hinterland has extended much deeper, stretching into today’s Saudi Arabia and beyond. After the population of present-day Saudi Arabia itself, Oman was likely the first region in the Arab world whose people converted to Islam. But because Oman was located on the fringes of the Arabian desert, by the Indian Ocean, it became a refuge for dissidents, notably the Ibadis, the followers of Abd Allah bin Ibad, a seventh-century Kharijite teacher from Basra.

  The Kharijites (from an Arab word meaning “to go out”) repudiated the religiously impure nature of the Islamic world’s first dynasty, that of the Damascus-based Omayyad caliphs, who relied on conquered non-Muslims for their administration. The Kharijites, who championed jihad against their enemies—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—represented the “most extreme form of tribal independence,” writes the scholar Bernard Lewis: “they refused to accept any authority not deriving from their own freely given and always revocable consent.”4 The Kharijite Ibadis of Oman rejected the hereditary Omayyad caliphs in favor of democratically elected imams. And yet these Ibadis were less fanatical than other Kharijites: they forbade the killing of other Muslims and were tolerant of non-Ibadis.5 Oman became a breeding ground for Ibadi missionaries, particularly after the collapse of the Omayyad caliphate in A.D. 750. However, the problem was that although Ibadi Islam united the interior of Oman by giving it a sectarian identity, it divided it in another sense; the democratic nature of the Ibadi imamate led to many bloody disputes. Rent by genealogy and political-religious factions, Oman’s two hundred–odd tribes fought continually among themselves in the desert, even as the coast prospered from Indian Ocean trade.

  Thus, while goods piled up at the harbors, the tribes in the interior suffered incursions from the desert farther to the north.6 Iran, the great power across the Gulf, took advantage of this weakness and instability, intervening to arrange truces between the tribes.* In 1749, Ahmad bin Sa‘id Al Bu Sa‘id, the progenitor of the present Omani dynasty, united the warring factions and was hence able to expel the Persians. But thereafter Oman went into a decline. In 1829, Sultan Sa‘id bin Sultan left Muscat itself for his empire to the south across the Indian Ocean in Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa, which the Omanis had gradually established over the years owing to the swiftness and reliability of the monsoon winds. Subsequent British domination of Omani affairs played on the feebleness of Oman’s coastal rulers who, while able to govern Zanzibar two thousand miles away—as well as plant their flag at the East African ports of Lamu and Mombasa, and at points deep in the African interior—were unable to withstand tribal attacks from their own close-by desert.

  And there were other problems for Oman. The British Royal Navy enforced the abolition of the slave trade, the profitable East African part of which had been controlled by Oman.* The age of steam would make Omani sailing vessels, collectively known to Europeans as dhows, partially obsolete.† And the opening of the Suez Canal shortened the distance from Europe to India, undermining the importance of Muscat and other Omani harbors as Indian Ocean transshipment points.

  Then, in 1913, the clerics and tribal leaders of the interior launched an uprising against Muscat, determined to restore an Ibadi imamate that would better represent the Islamic values of the desert. With British help, the coastal sultanate in 1915 beat back an assault by the three thousand desert tribesmen. Negotiations dragged on, with fighting on and off. There was an economic blockage of the interior. Ultimately, in 1920 the two sides signed a treaty whereby the sultan and the imam agreed not to interfere in each other’s affairs, in effect rendering Muscat and Oman—the coast and the interior—two separate countries. Peace reigned for thirty-five years, until the lure of oil deposits in the interior led to new battles between the forces of the sultan and the imam, in which Saudi Arabia backed the tribes in the desert and Great Britain the sultan on the coast.7 Though the British-backed Sultan Sa‘id bin Taymur eventually prevailed, it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. A separatist rebellion broke out in Dhofar in the 1960s, and was hijacked by Marxist radicals. This occurred just as the sultan withdrew from politics, keeping the country isolated from the outside world and shunning development. The old divides between coast and interior, sultanate and imamate, thus persisted. In effect, into the latter half of the twentieth century, Oman was less a state than a geographical expression.

  The road to true statehood began only in July 1970 when, with the assistance of the British, the reactionary Sultan Sa‘id was overthrown by his son Qabus in a nearly bloodless coup: there was a brief gun battle and the old sultan was wounded in the foot before being dispatched to exile in London. The twenty-nine-year-old Qabus offered a general amnesty to the Dhofari tribesmen. He built wells, roads, and bridges in their desert region. Tribal guerrillas who surrendered were retrained by the British and turned into an irregular unit of the country’s armed forces.8 The new sultan also began an intensive campaign of meetings to win over both his extended family and his tribe, in addition to the Dhofaris, to his rule. It was a classic, counterinsurgency strategy-of-sorts, and over time it worked. By 1975, the insurgency in the desert was over and Oman was poised for development as a modern state.

  Indeed, quelling anarchy means starting with clans and tribes, and building upward from those granular elements, just as Qabus did. In the desert particularly, it is all about the tribes. Historically, both Marxist and liberal intellectuals, in their efforts to remake societies after Soviet and Western models, have tragically underestimated these traditional loyal ties existing below the level of the state. A realist like Saint Augustine, in his City of God, understood that tribes, based on the narrow bonds of kinship and ethnicity rather than on any universalist longing, may not constitute the highest good; but by contributing to social cohesion, tribes nevertheless constitute a good in and of themselves. Qabus intuited this, and cobbled together a nation out of disparate tribal elements—plagued by the division between sea and desert—through the inspirational power of medieval tradition.

  Sultan Qabus fashioned a neo-medieval system that comprised elements of democracy, built as it was on regular consultation with tribal elders, so even as he maintained absolute power, few decisions were arbitrary. This approach restored the link between the former imamate of the interior and the sultanate of the coast that had been rent for so much of history. Qabus was also sly. In the 1970s the dishdasha, the long traditional white shirtdress worn by men throughout the country, was going out of style in favor of Western polyester dress, when he more or less made the dishdasha mandatory. This step, together with the celebration of traditional architecture, honored rudiments of cultural unity throughout the coast and desert that assisted nation building.

  There really is no ruler in the Middle East quite like Sultan Qabus. Today he is a slim septuagenarian who is unmarried and lives alone, almost as a recluse. There is a studied remoteness about him. He plays the lute and the organ and loves Western classical music, which he also composes. (He has started the Middle East’s only classical symphony orchestra made up of indigenous musicians.) He has institutionalized his rule through the building of well-functioning ministries, advanced the status of women, built schools throughout the interior, worked to protect the environment, and outlawed hunting. One Western expert of the Arab world said that in private audiences, the sultan, a Sandhurst graduate, is the “best-informed, most thoughtful, most well read and articulate leader—in both Arabic and English—in the Middle East; he is the only one in the region you can truly call a Renaissance man,” the personification of the cosmopolitanism that has accompanied Indian Ocean societies.

  One former high-ranking American official observed that there is a breadth of strategic thinking to Sultan Qabus that is comparable to Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. Indeed, the world has been fortunate over the decades to have two such enlightened and capable rulers governing at
the two most critical choke points of the Indian Ocean, by the Strait of Hormuz in the west and the Strait of Malacca in the east. It is almost as if, like Lee’s Singapore, Sultan Qabus’s Oman is too small a country for the talents of such a leader. Sultan Qabus, it is said, can discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in detail from both points of view, has worked hard to cultivate a good working relationship with the Iranians even as he has provided the United States with a military access agreement that helped rid Afghanistan of the Soviets and Kuwait of the Iraqi army, and later allowed for as many as twenty thousand American troops to temporarily stage in Oman prior to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In 1979 his was the only Arab state to recognize Anwar al-Sadat’s peace agreement with Israel. Given that the deep-draft parts of the Strait of Hormuz that are essential for oil tankers are entirely in Omani territory—making Oman’s own strategic interests identical to those of the outside world—Sultan Qabus would seem to be, with all his talents, the perfect go-between for the Americans and Iranians, and, for that matter, between the Americans and the Arabs in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet the sultan, in keeping with his quasi-reclusive style, has shunned the role, retreating to his books and music like an elderly Victorian gentleman, for whom courting publicity would be a sign of weak character.

  He grants few interviews. His public appearances are modest in number. He is not in the newspapers cutting ribbons every day like other dictators, nor are photos of him present to an obscene degree as has been the case with dictators such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq or even Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. There is no cult of personality per se surrounding Sultan Qabus. Instead, there is an unreal, Stepford-like quality to contemporary Oman. There is very little military or other force to be seen in the country, in contrast to the security guards and concrete Jersey and Texas barriers that guard entrances to hotels and other buildings in Saudi Arabia. Almost every adult here is in native dress, smiles, and talks altogether positively of the ruler, though only when asked; and when asked about democracy or freedom, says, as an Omani friend told me, “What is this freedom that you talk about that we don’t have?” And given the demonstration that the United States has provided in Iraq, with all its attendant violence, you cannot blame the Omanis their incredulousness at the question.*

  Indeed, Americans have had a tendency to interpret democracy too legalistically, strictly in terms of laws and elections. They put perhaps too much stress in the act of voting itself, an interpretation of democracy which can inhibit American power rather than project it. In some societies, particularly in the Middle East, democracy is a matter of informal consultation between ruler and ruled, rather than an official process. Where would America’s position in the Middle East be without the likes of the monarchs of Oman, Jordan, and Morocco, not to mention other nondemocratic rulers who nonetheless fight anti-Western extremists? The future of American power necessitates an understanding of other people’s historical experiences, not just its own. Americans believe, because of their own generally happy history, in a “unity of goodness,” that all good things flow from the same source, such as democracy, economic development, or social reform.9 But Oman shows that something Americans believe is a bad thing—absolute monarchy—can produce good results.

  Oman demonstrates that whereas in the West democracy is an end in itself, in the Middle East the goal is justice through religious and tribal authority, which comes together in the person of the sultan. There is also the realization that, thank God we’re not Saudi Arabia, with its unappealing and repressive monarchical style; thank God we’re not Yemen, with its Wild West, partially democratic tribal anarchy; and thank God we’re still a real place, unlike Dubai.

  Oman’s serenity is curiously aided by its Ibadi form of Islam, which is neither Sunni nor Shiite (and is also practiced in pockets of North and East Africa). Although the Ibadis, because of their democratic-cum-anarchic tendencies, fell into discord in previous eras, Ibadism, like a many-sided jewel, can also stress conciliation, the avoidance of conflict, and the importance of saving face. There is a calming, Buddhist aspect to Ibadism. It represents the opposite of jihadism. Here the few dissidents have been co-opted and work for the government. Ibadism is another factor, like the dishdashas, the distinctive turbans, bejeweled daggers, and architecture that help construct national unity.

  Moderate amounts of oil and new discoveries of natural gas have also helped provide for Oman’s political and social tranquillity. The sultan has leveraged this by conservative fiscal planning, whereby budgets are calculated according to oil prices much lower than the world rate, providing for extreme surpluses. He himself lives in a style below that of many an American CEO. There is a small-scale elegance to his palaces, and no fleets of limousines and jetliners accompany top Omani officials. The excesses of other oil-rich Gulf states are absent here.

  The sultan’s very tact, evinced by the modest style of his rule, and his shyness in cutting a larger figure on the international stage—almost in the minimalist manner of Scandinavian prime ministers, and in direct contrast to bombastic rulers like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez—may attest to the vulnerability he feels. Oman’s eerie perfection may work precisely because it does not attract attention within the region.

  Yet the sultan now faces a vaguer threat to his regime: acceleration of change that threatens to end Oman’s relative isolation. Half the population is under twenty-one, and increasingly more young people are dressing in Western clothes and wearing baseball caps. Because of higher insurance rates for shipping inside the Persian Gulf, and the threat to oil supplies in the narrow Strait of Hormuz, more transport links are being developed between Dubai and Omani ports beyond the strait, so the brash Dubai model of development is spreading more quickly in Oman. And while the Dubai model is often criticized within the region for going too far in the direction of westernization, it is also, like globalization itself, insidiously appealing. Partly to create jobs for all these young people and partly to diversify the economy, the sultanate is now being forced to move in the direction of mass tourism, filling up the unspoiled coast with holiday villages for Europeans that will, in turn, affect Oman’s carefully preserved traditional culture.

  This wrenching change will transpire as the sultan, rumored to have diabetes, enters his seventies with no heirs to the throne. The hope is that the family and wider tribal elite, through a series of shura (councils), can agree on a qualified candidate. No one in Oman is suggesting a national election, even as the process by which a new sultan is chosen will be inherently consultative and therefore democratic. Oman does not fit easily within the strictures of Washington, D.C., policy debates, whose backdrop is the power of individuals in mass democracies. Yet democracy cannot be dismissed out of hand. The extreme centralization of authority that characterizes Oman works well only in the hands of a vigorous and enlightened leader. But what happens if—or when—power shifts to a less vigorous or enlightened one? Then such extreme centralization can signal disaster. Nondemocratic countries like Oman often evince efficiency when things are going well, but when problems arise in such systems the population, especially if it is young, can become quite restive. While I stayed here as a guest of the government and, like all the Middle East specialists I knew, was impressed with the achievements of this relatively little known, benign ruler, I nevertheless worried about Oman. It was a bit too perfect. I was attentive to the stirrings of democracy in Iran and Burma, and the return of it in Bangladesh, and despite the Arab world’s dismal record in this regard, I felt that continued economic progress would ultimately initiate freer societies everywhere. Information technology and an emerging global culture demanded it. How would Oman react to the pressure in the years to come? The next few decades here might be less serene than the present.

  Though from the government’s point of view, as explained to me by the minister of religious endowments, Abdullah bin Mohammed al Salmi, the fundamental question is the relationship between tribal an
d state authority. Thus, by melding the Ibadi imamate of the desert to the coastal sultanate, his country is conducting a great, democratic experiment.

  Nothing symbolizes that marriage between local tradition and Indian Ocean worldliness so much as the Sultan Qabus Grand Mosque in Muscat, completed in 2001. In other countries with absolute rulers, such a project could easily have degenerated into a monument not to culture and religion, but to the oppressive power of the dictator, exuding not eclecticism but giganticism.

  I am thinking of the mosque of Saddam Hussein in the Mansour district of Baghdad and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s House of the Republic in Bucharest, both half completed at the time each ruler was toppled; architectural monstrosities both, that, in their inhuman dimensions, seemed to crush everything around them, and were, therefore, essentially fascist. The Qabus Mosque is different. Though it is truly large—the site covers 3281 feet by 2789 feet, with a main minaret almost 328 feet high—from every angle it is of manageable, intimate proportions, while at the same time exuding an elegant monumentality. To walk through the courtyards, along the arcades, and under the pointed sandstone archways so graceful that they have the lightness of swift pencil lines drawn on paper, is to take an aesthetic dream-journey from one end of the Islamic world to the other, from North Africa to the Indian Subcontinent, with a slight detour to Central Asia and with a heavy accent on the Iranian plateau. There are the sharp, soaring archways reminiscent of Iraq, the tiered and balconied minarets reminiscent of old Cairo, the dazzlingly intricate latticework and painted windows evocative of Iberia and the Maghreb, the carved wooden ceilings of Syria, ceramic tiles that recall mosques in both Uzbekistan and the Hejaz of western Saudi Arabia, the alternating white and dark gray stone arcades of Mamluk Egypt, the beige sandstone walls of India (from where the stones come), and, of course, the handwoven carpets and mosaic floral designs of Iran. Images of Greek Byzantium, Safavid Iran, and Mughal India flow together here, anchored by a dome with gold embossed fretwork that evokes the daring abstract modernism of the twenty-first-century Gulf itself. This is less a celebration of Oman than of Oman’s place in a cultural and artistic continuum stretching thousands of miles in either direction. Beauty and proportionality are the principal intents, rather than the legitimation of the ruler-builder, whose picture is rarely to be seen in the complex. Though it is a mosque and religious complex, the tone is clearly one of inclusion. The world is welcomed. It is the spirit of the ocean more than of the desert.