Muscat and Oman : The End of an Era

For forty years, Sultan Said bin Taimur personally controlled everything that happened, deliberately cutting the nation off from the headlong development of the rest of the world. Fortunately for Oman this would change, and fortunately for us, we have a first-hand witness to this complex society before that watershed. Ian Skeet travelled across the vast sand deserts and arid highlands of Muscat and Oman in 1966-8, preparing the wary inhabitants for the coming of oil, visiting its isolated walled cities, fortified oasis communities and independent-minded Bedouin tribes. The sultan's motives may have been pure—to preserve his people from the sin of usury and the slavery of foreign debt—but Ian Skeet's portrait is a devastating study of the dead hand of autocracy.