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Authors: Robert D. Kaplan

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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 and 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.

Yet this benign spirit, a product of the trade and other civilizational contacts of the medieval Islamic centuries—strangely reaching fruition in the twenty-first century in the person of Sultan Qabus himself—does not, of course, prevent the ocean from becoming a zone of conflict and competition among great powers, for whom the importance of Oman must only grow.

Although Oman’s influence declined with the age of steam, it is now recovering with newly enlarged container ports. From the blank desert of Dhofar a mass of gargantuan gantry cranes are visible from miles away, at the port of Salalah. Salalah, whose downtown, with its large outdoor markets and eateries exudes the sweaty African-like intimacy of nearby Yemeni towns across the border, is becoming a major global transshipment center for A. P. Moller-Maersk, one of the largest container terminal firms in the world.
*
A similar expansion has occurred at Sohar, at the other end of Oman, Sohar was home to Sindbad the Sailor and Ahmad ibn Majid; now Sohar constitutes one of the world’s largest port development projects, as well as maritime and industrial hubs, with investments of more than $12 billion. Sohar is able to handle containerships with fifty-nine-foot drafts, and boasts petrochemical, metals, and logistics complexes.

A look at the map shows why all this is happening. The oil hub of the world, the Persian Gulf, is increasingly crowded and dangerous. Not only a possible war between the United States and Iran threatens it, but also a
plethora of terrorist scenarios that could involve one or a number of containerships or oil tankers. Moreover, with the rise of India and China, the Gulf is not just a lifeline to the West, but to the East as well. If the Gulf were ever closed to shipping, the ports close by, connected to it by railways and oil pipelines, would therefore become ever more vital—ports like Oman’s Sohar, which sits just outside the Strait of Hormuz. Oman, a beacon of stability, is being configured as the Gulf countries’ alternative link to the outer world. Though twenty-first-century Dubai may be the true successor to nineteenth-century Aden—the great coaling station of the British Empire in the Indian Ocean—Dubai, inside the Gulf, is geographically vulnerable. And because going to Dubai involves a detour for transoceanic container shipping, it is more of an air transshipment hub than a sea one.
10
Meanwhile, Salalah in Dhofar has the added advantage of being near the midpoint of the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, almost equidistant between the Indian Subcontinent and the Red Sea: the perfect transshipment point both in antiquity and in the twenty-first century. Unlike Dubai, no geographical detour is involved for shipping routes, and consequently Salalah—with its repair, bunkering, warehousing, and freight station facilities—services more than fifteen hundred vessels per year, with consistent double-digit growth for port revenues over the past decade. Railways and pipelines culminating at massive port complexes have finally conquered the anarchy of the desert, leaving the sea—itself conquered from time immemorial by the monsoon winds—as the final victor.

*
Nevertheless, we must be careful, since this interrelationship between geography and politics is never that cut-and-dried, and is full of contradictions. Actually, it can be a very fluid dynamic, particularly when great cataclysms occur. Just as conditions at sea occasionally can affect the desert interior, the reverse has been true. For example, in the thirteenth century, a sea route linked Canton in China with Basra in Iraq, from where goods were transshipped to Baghdad, and from there portered overland westward to the Mediterranean. Indeed, Basra functioned as Baghdad’s port, giving the great medieval city of the Abbasid caliphs access to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, and hence to the entire East. But in 1258 the Mongols, coming out of the desert, sacked Abbasid Baghdad and security broke down throughout Iraq. The result was that the sea route up the Persian Gulf became unfavorable, and Indian Ocean trade routes shifted from the Persian Gulf by Oman to the Red Sea by Yemen. Engseng Ho, Harvard University professor of anthropology, presentation for a conference on “Port City States of the Indian Ocean,” Harvard University and the Dubai Initiative, Feb. 9–10, 2008.

*
The Nizam of Hyderabad, in south-central India, recruited his bodyguards exclusively from among Hadhrami tribesmen. I have written extensively about Yemen elsewhere—see Robert D. Kaplan,
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground
(New York: Random House, 2005), ch. 1, and Robert D. Kaplan, “A Tale of Two Colonies,”
The Atlantic
, April 2003.

*
In fact, Persian influence in Oman goes back to antiquity.
The falaj
irrigation system—a system of tunnels, small dams, and storage tanks—was brought to Oman by Persian settlers in the seventh century
B.C
., as part of the expansion of the Achaemenid Empire.

*
It should be said that on the whole, the Omani slavers were not nearly as cruel as their European counterparts. Rather than enforce a living death upon the poor Africans they captured, they often integrated them into their families, clothed them, and provided them with wives, according to the laws of Islam.


This was particularly galling, given that around the turn of the nineteenth century, Oman was a sea power second only to Great Britain in the northern Arabian Sea. Richard Hall,
Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean and Its Invaders
(London: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 355.

*
In general, it seems that Oman lacks political freedom but largely respects human rights. The U.S. State Department’s 2008
Human Rights Report
on Oman notes that while the government is centralized in the sultan’s authority, “In October 2007 approximately 245,000 registered voters participated in generally free and fair elections” for the Majlis as-Shura. Similarly, rights of press, speech, assembly, and religion are restricted. However, basic human rights are largely respected. There were no reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government, no reports of politically motivated disappearances, and the government “generally observes” prohibitions on arbitrary arrests and detentions.

*
It is more commonly known as Maersk Sealand, a Danish firm.

CHAPTER FOUR
“LANDS OF INDIA”
 

M
uscat, Oman’s capital, is a series of whispering, fairy-tale bays. Jetties elbow their way out into the water that turns a hypnotic silver-blue at dusk. The white harborscapes composed of Mughal and Persian architecture, with green and gold domes, huddle against steep, jagged mountains the introspective color of gray. There are no modern buildings with ugly signage to destroy the spectacle. India feels very close, but nearby Dubai with its Disney-style globalization feels half a world away.

In the main bay out of which Muscat has grown, crawling up two rocky outcrops like the horned backs of reptiles, are the blotched walls of two Portuguese forts, Jalali and Mirani, constructed in 1587 and 1588, respectively, to strengthen the Portuguese hold on the Gulf against the Ottoman Turks. Together they flank Sultan Qabus’s Al Alam Palace. Dominating the harbor with their humbling symmetry, these two forts appear charged with meaning. They recall the bulwarks and “cyclopean” dimensions of Portuguese forts in Hormuz, Malacca, Macao, Mozambique, and particularly Diu, off northwestern India’s Kathiawar Peninsula in Gujarat.
1
With their three-foot-thick outer walls, curved battlements, circular towers and spiral stairways, cavernous rooms and mazes, they are pieces of superb architectural engineering that conjure up the whole fantastic story of the Portuguese. It is not only Oman whose shores are graced by Portuguese remains, but much of the entire Indian Ocean littoral.

——

 

 

The Indian Ocean began its modern history as a Portuguese imperial lake. Within two decades of Vasco da Gama’s voyage in 1498, the Portuguese came to dominate the most important sea routes and trading networks between East Africa and modern-day Indonesia.
2
This is not to say that the Portuguese were the first distant power to have a presence in the Indian Ocean—very far from it—only that they were the first to do something comprehensive with it.

In fact, Europe’s involvement with the Indian Ocean has a deep basis in antiquity. The ancient Greeks sailed as far south as Rhapta, located somewhere on the East African coast near Zanzibar. The Greeks were also familiar with Ceylon, of which Claudius Ptolemy gives a description in his
Geographia
, and they sailed up the Bay of Bengal into the mouth of the Ganges not far from present-day Kolkata (Calcutta).
3
In the first century
B.C
. the Greek navigator Hippalus plotted a direct route from the Red Sea to India by observing the workings of the monsoon winds, the knowledge of which he passed on to the Romans.
*

Every year, “about the time of the summer solstice,” writes Edward Gibbon, a Roman commercial fleet, aided by the monsoon, sailed from Egypt to India’s southwestern Malabar coast by way of Arabia, returning in winter, after the winds reversed, with a cargo rich in silks, precious stones, wood, ivory, exotic animals, and aromatics like frankincense.
4
Christianity may have been introduced to the Malabar coast (which Ptolemy describes) in late Roman times.
5
And along the farther-removed Coromandel coast in southeastern India, archeologists have found Roman amphora containers and coins.
6

Fifteen hundred years later, the Ottoman Turks had a presence on the Red Sea in Yemen and on the Persian Gulf at Basra in Iraq. By seizing Yemen they were able to close the Red Sea to the rival Portuguese. The Turks launched raids against the Portuguese as far afield as East Africa. Yet their attempts to solidify a strong presence in Arabia in and around the Persian Gulf and to establish one in India ultimately came to naught,
even as they controlled northern Arabian Sea shipping routes for significant periods in the sixteenth century. It was the Portuguese who can claim credit for ultimately thwarting Muslim Turkish ambitions.
7
But though the Ottomans clearly recognized the importance of the Indian Ocean—indeed, they were obsessed with competing globally with the Portuguese—they were too much of a land-based empire to sustain operations in its tropical waters. Battling the Venetians in the Mediterranean and the Austrian Hapsburgs in central Europe, with their resources in Constantinople, so far from the Indian Ocean, they were limited. The Indian Ocean became in due course a sideshow for them.
8

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