Authors: Wilfred Thesiger
Late in the afternoon a servant announced that lunch was ready, and we went into the fort. We passed through a wicket into a porch where armed men were sitting on a low earthen bench. A few months earlier they had been at war. They stood up as we came in. Beyond the porch was a sandy courtyard in which there was a tame gazelle and a bull camel that was rutting and dangerous. Zayid showed us into a large bare room on the left of the porch, lit by two small windows at ground-level opening on the yard. Our saddle-bags had been brought in, and carpets laid on the earthen floor. Zayid fed with us – a large meal of meat and rice, with side dishes of dates and curds, and bowls of sour milk.
I stayed with Zayid for nearly a month.
In the mornings, after we had breakfasted on tea and bread, a servant would come in and tell us that the Sheikh was ‘sitting’. We would go out and join him. Sometimes Zayid would be on the bench in the porch, but more often under a tree outside the fort. He would call for coffee and we would sit there chatting till lunch-time, though we were frequently interrupted. Visitors would arrive, Bedu from the Sands or from Saudi Arabia, tribesmen from Oman, or perhaps a messenger from Shakhbut in Abu Dhabi. Everyone rose as they approached, and then Zayid would invite them to be seated and listen to their news. As they approached I tried to guess where they came from, noting the way they wore their clothes and saddled their camels. Sometimes they were Rashid or Awamir, and then, sitting beside my companions, they asked news of their kinsmen in the south. They were different from the Bani Yas and Manasir who comprised most of Zayid’s retainers, hardier and more refined.
Perhaps an Arab would get up from the circle, sit down immediately in front of Zayid, hit the ground a wallop with his stick to attract attention, and interrupting us as we spoke together, would say: ‘Now Zayid, what about those camels which were taken from me?’ Zayid, who might be in the middle of a sentence, would stop and listen to the man’s complaint. Most of the complaints were about camels. Frequently the complainant averred that some notorious outlaw, who might well be sitting with us, had taken his animals. Zayid had many of these outlaws in his entourage, since it suited him better to have them with him than in some rival sheikh’s fort. Bin Ghabaisha, who sat beside me with his rifle between his knees – he was never parted from it – was soon to be numbered among them. I watched him listening with interest as each case was heard. Both sides argued noisily and with frequent interruptions, as was their wont. Zayid had no desire to offend the outlaw, nor to lose his reputation for justice. It was a proof of his skill that he usually satisfied both sides by his judgement.
I remember on one occasion a woman had run away from her husband, and her brothers were anxious that he should divorce her. The husband said that he would only do so if
her family returned the full bride-price. This, they argued, was unfair as she had lived with him for years. Zayid consulted some of the greybeards who sat with us, and declared that the family should return half the bride-price. On another occasion a Manasir had shot his sister; we had heard the shot while we were sitting in our room. We soon learnt that she had been seduced by one of Zayid’s Bani Yas retainers. Everyone, except my Rashid, thought that her brother had done right. Bin Kabina said to me, ‘Poor little girl! It was a brutal thing to kill her.’ Next day Zayid sentenced the man who had seduced her to be flogged.
Visiting Bedu would come up and ask for a present before they left, many of them having apparently come for no other purpose. I was interested to see that they were as importunate to Zayid as they were to me. I recalled that some of the Rashid on the southern coast thought it worth while to ride fourteen hundred miles to Riyadh and back in the expectation of getting something from Ibn Saud. A year later bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha went to Muscat from Buraimi in the middle of the summer. Their camels were already worn out, and I had hoped that they would rest them against my return. In Muscat they each collected ten shillings from the Sultan. It is true that they had hoped to lift some camels on the way back to Buraimi but by then they were too well known and the alarm was out; even so, they did not seem to think that their five-hundred-mile journey had been in vain.
Zayid, as Shakhbut’s representative, controlled six of the villages in Buraimi. The other two acknowledged the Sultan of Muscat as their nominal overlord, as did the tribes who lived in and around the mountains northwards from Ibri to the Musandam peninsula, although in fact this area was independent tribal territory. Ibri itself and the interior of Oman to the south of this town was ruled by the Imam. His authority was strong in the mountains and in all the towns, but was weak among the large and powerful Bedu tribes of the Dura and Wahiba who live on the steppes bordering on the Sands. Ibn Saud had undisputed control over the Murra beyond the Sabkhat Mutti, and his officials sometimes collected taxes
from the Bedu who lived in Dhafara. But recently they had been driven out of Liwa by the Bani Yas, who acknowledged Sakhbut as their overlord. It was eighty years since Saudi forces, known in those days as Wahabis, had occupied the Buraimi. Now the only Saudis here were a few merchants engaged chiefly in the slave-trade, which still flourished in the two villages not controlled by Zayid.
Each of the Trucial Sheikhs had a band of armed retainers recruited from the tribes, but only Shakhbut had any authority among the tribes themselves, and he maintained this authority by diplomacy, not by force. There was no regular force anywhere on the Trucial Coast nor in Buraimi which could be used to support the authority of the Sheikhs. The Trucial Oman Scouts had not yet been raised, and although the R.A.F. had an aerodrome at Sharja it was only a staging-post on the route to India.
Zayid was often busy during these days helping Bird with his interminable discussions with tribal sheikhs from the surrounding country. Bird used to come over to Muwaiqih in his car – Zayid also had a car and these were the only two nearer than Dibai on the coast. Bird was friendly but suspicious, wondering if I was working for some rival company. I kept away from him when visiting tribesmen were about. Anyway, I was averse to all oil companies, dreading the changes and disintegration of society which they inevitably caused.
The Iraq Petroleum Company had signed agreements with the Sultan of Muscat and with the Trucial Sheikhs, covering the area round Buraimi, and Bird was now trying to persuade the tribes to accept these agreements. It was not easy, since Zayid had not authority south of Buraimi, and the Sultan, whose authority there was at this time purely nominal, had no effective representative in the area. Each sheikh, excited by avarice, was noisily asserting his independence, while each of his tribesmen fancied that he could get special terms for himself by refusing to acknowledge any authority other than his own. None of this helped my chances of getting into Oman, which seemed slight enough at the best of times.
The interior of Oman had remained one of the least known
of the inhabited places of the East, even less well-known than Tibet. It was first visited by Wellsted in 1835, and he was followed two years later by the French botanist Aucher Eloy. Colonel Miles made two long journeys through the country in 1876 and 1885, while he was British Consul in Muscat, and in 1901 Sir Percy Cox travelled southward from Buraimi to Nazwa and then on to Muscat.
Oman is largely inhabited by the Ibadhis, a sect of the Kharijites who separated themselves from the rest of Islam at the time of Ali, the fourth Caliph, and have been noted ever since for their condemnation of others. The Ibadhis have always maintained that their Imam or religious leader should be elected. The Al bu Said dynasty which ruled Oman from 1744, and to which the present Sultan of Muscat belongs, succeeded, however, in establishing an hereditary succession, but its neglect of the elective principle had always been resented by its subjects. The growth of Omani sea power between 1784 and 1856, overseas conquests, of which Zanzibar was the most important, and especially the removal of the capital from Rustaq to Muscat on the coast, weakened the hold of the Al bu Said rulers over the interior of the country, while foreign treaties and outside interference added to the fanatical resentment of the tribesmen. In 1913 the tribes, both Ghafari and Hanawi, rebelled and elected Salim bin Rashid al Kharusi as their Imam. The Sultan of Muscat rapidly lost all control over the interior and by 1915 the Imam was threatening Muscat. His forces, however, suffered a serious defeat when-they attacked a British force outside Matrah. The Imam was murdered in 1920 and Muhammad bin Abdullah al Khalili was then elected. In the same year the treaty of Sib was signed between the Sultan and the Omani sheikhs, not between the Sultan and the Imam. By this treaty the Sultan agreed not to interfere in the internal affairs of Oman.
The present Imam, Muhammad bin Abdullah, was now an old man, a fanatical reactionary and bitterly hostile to the Sultan and to all Europeans. The interior of Oman was consequently more difficult for a European to penetrate in 1948 than it had been when Wellsted went there more than a hundred years before; for both Wellsted and his three successors
had travelled under the protection of Sultans of Muscat who were recognized by the tribes in the interior.
I told Zayid of my plans and he promised to help me when I came back in the autumn. He warned me, however, to speak of them to no one else. I did not even tell my Rashid, for I had learnt that the most effective way to spread a story was to tell it to one or two Arabs under a pledge of secrecy. Zayid offered to send me down to the coast in his car, but I said I would go by camel. This would postpone a little longer my parting with my companions. He then said that he would lend me Ghazala, ‘the gazelle’, and this delighted me, for she was the most renowned camel in Oman, and may well have been the finest in all Arabia. Muhammad said to me, ‘Any Bedu would give much to say that he had ridden Ghazala.’
We left Muwaiqih on 1 May, accompanied by four of Zayid’s retainers, for we should pass through Bani Kitab territory and this tribe was at war with Rashid. We rode northwards along the edge of the Sands, parallel with the mountains. It was attractive country. Many watercourses ran down from the foothills and ended in the Sands. They were filled with
ghaf
and acacias which gave food to our camels, and to us shelter from the sun. Already the weather was hot. We dawdled along, for I was reluctant to arrive at Sharja. Bin Ghabaisha and I hunted wild ass, and shot two of them. They looked very different from the graceful, spirited animals I had seen in the Danakil country, and they were later identified as feral donkeys by the British Museum. They were difficult to skin, for our daggers were blunt. It was midday and the sun was very hot, there was no shade on the stony plain where we had found these donkeys, and we had no water with us.
While I had been at Muwaiqih I had hunted tahr on Jabal Hafit, camping for a week under the mountain with bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha and two of Zayid’s Arabs. The Arabian tahr had never previously been seen by a European, although they had been named from two skins bought in Muscat by Dr Jayakar in 1892. They resembled goats and had very thick short horns. It was exhausting work hunting them, for the mountains rose four thousand feet above our camp, and the slopes were everywhere steep and usually sheer, without water
or vegetation. The tahr fed at night round the foot of the mountain, but the only ones we saw were near the top. The Arabs shot two females and we picked up the skull of a male. We had made ourselves sandals from green hide, without which we could never have climbed these cruel limestone rocks.
We arrived at Sharja on 10 May. We skirted the aerodrome, passing piles of empty tins, broken bottles, coils of rusting wire, and fluttering bits of paper. A generator thumped in the distance, and a jeep roared down a track, leaving a stink of petrol fumes behind it. We approached a small Arab town on an open beach; it was as drab and tumble-down as Abu Dhabi, but infinitely more squalid, for it was littered with discarded rubbish which had been mass-produced elsewhere. To me the sun-blistered skeleton of a car seemed infinitely more horrible than the carcass of a camel which we passed a little farther on.
I stayed with Noel Jackson, the Political Officer on the Trucial Coast, and in the peaceful comfort of his rooms forgot for a while the resentment which I had felt that morning. Later he took me round to the R.A.F. mess. Listening to their talk while a wireless blared in a corner and the barman served drinks, I realized that these officers could have as little understanding of Bedu life as bin Kabina or bin Ghabaisha had of theirs. I could now move without effort from one world to the other as easily as I could change my clothes, but I appreciated that I was in danger of belonging to neither. When I was among my own people, a shadowy figure was always at my side watching them with critical, intolerant eyes.
I said good-bye to my companions at Sharja, hoping to be with them again in four months’ time. I then went to Dibai and stayed with Edward Henderson. We had been together in Syria during the war. He was now working for the Iraq Petroleum Company, making preparations for the development which was expected there, but of which there was mercifully as yet no sign. He lived in a large Arab house overlooking the creek which divided the town, the largest on the Trucial Coast with about twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Many native craft were anchored in the creek or were careened on the mud along the waterfront. There were
booms
from Kuwait,
sambuks
from Sur,
jaulbauts
, and even a large
stately
baghila
with a high carved stern on which I could make out the Christian monogram IHS on one of the embossed panels. This work must have been copied originally from some Portuguese galleon. I wondered how many times it had been copied since, exactly to the last scroll and flourish. Commander Alan Villiers, who had sailed in a
boom
from Zanzibar to Kuwait, believed that there were only two or three of these
baghilas
still in existence. To the English all these vessels were dhows, a name no longer remembered by the Arabs. Once, however, dhows were the warships of this coast, carrying as many as four hundred men and forty to fifty guns. Miles saw the last of them at Bahrain, ‘painted with two tiers of ports’.