The chief bedu tribes of the area when oil was first found were Awamir, Manasir, Afar and Bani Yas, who numbered at most some 15,000 individuals, and ruled, or at least roamed, a barren region of several thousand square miles. Today some 10,000 of these home-grown Arabs hold sway in the city of Abu Dhabi alongside more than a quarter of a million foreigners and an untallied number of mostly Asian labourers building ever more grotesque skyscrapers around an eight-lane traffic-jammed Corniche highway.
These urbanized bedu whose grandfathers were fiercely proud of their hard desert lives will often, in today’s busy Gulf cities, shout, ‘You stupid bedu’ as abuse at careless drivers.
That greatest of all European desert travellers, Wilfred Thesiger, once wrote of the bedu of Arabia that, ‘in the 7th century, avaricious, predatory and for the first time working together, they swept out of Arabia as an unstoppable Islamic wave craving for plunder and united by a burning faith.’ Arabic, their tongue, is now spoken by over 250 million people, and one-fifth of the world’s population professes Islam.
The President of the UAE at the time of my first visit was Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi. His grandfather, Zayed the Great, ruled Abu Dhabi until 1909 when his son, Sultan, took over for four years until his assassination. Sultan’s brother lasted as ruler for two years until he was murdered, and then Zayed’s elder brother Shakhbut became Sheikh.
At that point family assassinations went out of fashion and Shakhbut appointed Zayed as his main representative.
Oil was found in the Emirates in the 1950s, and the Oasis of Buraimi, a fertile zone on the UAE-Omani border which consisted of eight separate tribal villages with varying allegiances to Abu Dhabi, to Oman and to Saudi Arabia, became the geographical nerve centre of the political tussles which followed.
In such a volatile atmosphere the discovery of oil was bound to cause trouble, and the main protagonists were the American oil company ARAMCO, backed by the Saudis, and the British IPC, predecessor of BP, backed by Abu Dhabi and Oman.
At one point an armed confrontation between a Saudi-American group and a British-officered Omani force was narrowly avoided.
As Abu Dhabi’s ruler when the oil money first poured into his coffers, Shakhbut behaved very much as did my Omani boss in 1968 – with financial parsimony and economic caution, which translated into no new hospitals, schools or infrastructure. This did not please the people of Abu Dhabi back then nor the Omanis in my time with them.
The British reacted by staging a peaceful coup. Shakhbut was gracefully retired to Buraimi, and his more adventurous brother Zayed was appointed Sheikh in his place.
Zayed quickly doled out free housing, hospital treatment, schooling, livestock subsidies and salaries for thousands of immigrants to provide menial labour.
A few months before my mission to Dubai, the British government suddenly announced its intention to abrogate all its historical Treaties with the Trucial States and to ‘withdraw’ from the region. This spurred Zayed, as leading personality in the Gulf States, to found a federation of self-protection and mutual benefit to fill the vacuum caused by the precipitous British withdrawal.
Our visit coincided with complex negotiations between Zayed, Sheikh Rashid of Dubai and the rulers of the other Emirates. Three years later Zayed was to be voted President of the newly formed UAE, a position he retained until his death in 2004 when he was succeeded by his son, Khalifa. At the time of his death he was estimated to have a personal fortune of US$20 billion.
Today the Emirates own one-tenth of the world’s known oil reserves and represent the non-fundamentalist face of Islam, despite or because of being the birthplace of that religion. As I write, their air force is part of the coalition to bomb and destroy the forces of Islamic State.
Nonetheless, back in the 1950s the oil access arguments rumbling on about Buraimi had led to bitter relations between Washington and Whitehall, which worsened when the Suez Crisis resulted in an open Anglo-American rift. At the 1956 meeting of the United Nations, the Australian ambassador stated, ‘I was greatly distressed by the atmosphere at the UN . . . the almost physical cleavage between the UK and US was one of the most distressing things I have ever experienced.’
The Buraimi Oasis oil dispute that originated such a dangerous political divide was eventually settled between the Saudis and the Omani/UAE rulers by a border agreement in 1991. It is worth remembering that the Buraimi confrontation of the 1950s between the Saudis and the US oil interests on one side and the Omani/Abu Dhabi/UK coalition on the other fortunately saved Buraimi from Saudi clutches. If Buraimi had fallen to the Saudis, many of the oil fields in Abu Dhabi and Oman (and most, if not all, their territory) would probably belong to Saudi Arabia today.
Back in 1968 our three Land Rovers left the Wadi Jizzi and the Omani Mountains before we came to the gravel deserts of the Trucial Oman, and we entered the two Omani villages of the Buraimi Oasis to much friendly waving from the villagers. Some ten miles away beyond the fertile, prosperous Trucial villages of the oasis, I could see the dark outline of Jebel Hafeet, 5,000 feet high and reminding me of Table Mountain and my childhood. For centuries the people of the Oasis have buried their kin in the foothills of Hafeet, and local mystics, seeking cool air to help achieve inspiration, have climbed to the high ramparts. This struck me as paradoxical, since the higher you climb, the closer you are to the sun.
But warmth in the air, I distantly recalled from geography lessons, is caused by solar rays energizing atomic gases which then clash, and each little collision gives off heat. Therefore, since there are fewer atoms in thinner air, there are less collisions and less resulting heat. So the mystics were right after all.
Leaving the men at a tea-house in the south-western Trucial village of Al Ain, I drove to the Hafeet foothills intending to summit the feature and get cool. But time ran out and I only made it halfway.
I sat on a rock, swigged water and ate dates. I did not feel cool, just less hot. Below me the gravel deserts were in places coloured with strips of red dune. I oriented my map and could clearly see why this oasis had long proved key to control of south-east Arabia. Through it passed all the main trade routes, including the Jizzi road to Nizwa and thence Muscat. Water was in abundance after great distances of waterless desert and, in the heyday of the slave trade, Buraimi sat astride the ‘long road of suffering’ for the hundreds of thousands of black slaves snatched from their African homes and bound for servitude to Saudi masters.
We spent one night in the Buraimi village of Al Ain, having crossed over the invisible Omani border and meeting no Trucial guard or checkpoint, but the dust tracks that we had so far followed switched suddenly to Trucial tarmac with street lights and roadside shops. Our host was the commandant of a miniature fortress, whitewashed and crenellated as though transported from some Foreign Legion Saharan outpost. He was a major from a British regiment and most of his soldiers turned out to be Dhofari mountain-men. This was disturbing and I asked him if I should keep my men away from them.
He waved his hand. ‘Don’t bother. My sergeant will sort them out. We are on neutral ground. But,’ he smiled, ‘I’m glad I won’t be fighting in Dhofar since, in my opinion, each of our Dhofaris is worth ten of your Omani soldiers.’
When I told him of my mission to stop TOS-employed Dhofaris taking their weapons home on leave, he simply said, ‘Good luck,’ and shrugged.
The journey from Buraimi to Dubai was flat and boring, and the British officer, who I will refrain even now from naming, was clearly determined to the point of rudeness to ignore my colonel’s request. Since I had no other authority to approach, we left Dubai and headed back through the desert, which seemed even hotter than before. It is worth noting that no building in Dubai was, at the time, more than three storeys high.
Abdullah told me that he always found the traditional dishdash (one piece cotton dress from neck to ankles) less effective against heat than a simple undervest and loose pantaloons. In great heat the choice between discarding my shemagh headcl
oth which trapped the heat and sweat, or wearing it as protection from direct solar bombardment was never an easy one.
We halted in the middle of a deserted plain some miles west of Buraimi to change a half-shaft and, squatting a few hundred yards away from the Land Rovers to relieve myself, I ran some sand through my hands. It was hot and as dry as a bone. How, I wondered, did oases ever establish themselves in such lifeless ground where, if any water exists, it is many metres down.
I studied a desert animal book written by David Attenborough which explained how the air everywhere is full of invisible particles which, if only they can land somewhere suitable, will plant the germs of life. The vast majority of such particles will rot or be eaten by insects, but one or two out of many millions will survive to germinate on some invisible fungus, and a green shoot will appear with the slightest provision of moisture after years of drought.
Wind-blown organisms such as these have travelled to and from the world’s greatest deserts, founding oases when rare conditions are just right. The aerial journey carrying them from place to place may have lasted for many months and spanned hundreds of miles.
Some mushroom fungi when ripe can release 100 million fertile spores within an hour, and they can produce in their lifetime up to 16,000 million which shoot into the air in puffs of vapour. Just one of these may, months later, find an acceptably damp landing ground, however apparently inhospitable, on which to procreate. However, if only a brief shower has produced such seemingly suitable conditions and is followed by a long period of drought, the fate of this ‘lucky’ spore’s seeds will be quickly sealed. So some very clever plants have even planned ahead for such an eventuality by coating their seeds with a cunning chemical inhibitor which prevents speedy germination. Only if sufficient rain continues to saturate their landing zone will the inhibitor be washed off, thus enabling the seed to germinate.
Once back in the Wadi Jizzi, we left all traces of desert behind us, passing into the central mountains of Oman by way of the great cleft which divides them and allows traffic between Buraimi and Muscat through the Samail Gap.
Back in Bidbid we left one vehicle for much-needed repairs and four of the men for ‘compassionate leave’ (including Ali Nasser whose grandmother had contracted some form of pox).
With two vehicles and nine men we then drove from Muscat north-west along the coast road to Sohar, the traditional home of Sinbad the Sailor. Although the town looked nothing special to me, the famous Arab geographer, Istakhri, described it in the tenth century as ‘the most populous and wealthy town in Oman’, nor was there ‘in all the land of Islam a city more rich in fine buildings.’
Legend has it that Sinbad, a hero of The Thousand and One Nights, was the son of a rich Sohar merchant who squandered his inheritance and set out on his great voyage of heroic exploits to become known the world over to generations of thrilled children.
Further north the track deteriorated and the gap between the ocean to our right and the mountains to our left became ever narrower. We had entered Oman’s most northerly province, known as the Mussundam (the Anvil). Even for Oman these mountains were impressively rugged. The tribesmen who lived in this apparently uninhabitable land were the Shihu, some 10,000 of them, who spoke their own unique Zaara and Kumzari languages and carried short-helved iron axes and tiny wooden shields the size of frisbees.
Abdullah, ever a fount of local knowledge, assured me that the Shihu lived in caves, ate mainly raw fish, buried their dead under the floors of their home cave, and worshipped the twin spirits of Rock and Sea. At length the mountain sides dropped straight into the sea. The inlets which cut into these cliffs formed deep fjords in which lived inbred families of Shihu fishermen.
The narrow straits between the Mussundam and the coast of Pakistan form the Gulf of Oman, tapering north into the Straits of Hormuz, a stretch of ocean noted, even in the annals of early Greek mariners, as lethal due to sudden vicious squalls.
A cruel form of fraud was, at the time of our patrol, still being practised by people-pirates from the Baluchi coast south of the Persian border. An officer I had met in Dhofar was later posted to the coastal Mussundam town of Khasab and he told me of a starving group of 230 unemployed Indians from Kerala, south of Delhi, who had each paid their life savings to the captain of a Baluchi dhow with the promise that they would be landed in the Gulf where work was plentiful and their future wealth would be assured.
Instead, after a short but rough trip across the Gulf, they were dropped off on an uninhabited stretch of the Mussundam coast to meet their ‘escort’, who never turned up. They somehow found a rare friendly Shihu who guided them to a waterhole and thence to a track which eventually took them to Khasab. They were a great deal luckier than countless other boatloads of pilgrims or unemployed Asians who were thus tricked every year, landed on some desolate sandbank by their captain who, pointing over to the nearest mountain, said, ‘Two miles yonder lies the great city of Muscat. God go with you.’ But beyond the mountain there was neither human habitation nor water to drink. Crazy with thirst they drank sea water, and then went mad before they died while wandering through the blasted heat of the gravel valleys.
Long before we reached the northern border between Oman and the Trucial State of Al Fujairah, we had mechanical trouble and turned around. The colonel had only told me to ‘show the flag’ as far north as proved practical, so the state of the tracks, the failure of our radio to contact Bidbid and the lack of any Automobile Association service clearly made turning back the sensible option.
Back in medieval times, the city of Hormuz on the Persian coast enjoyed undisputed command of the wealthy Gulf commerce until the conquest of Persia by Islam.
In 1271 Marco Polo recorded with admiration the busy trade in spices, pearls, racing horses, elephant ‘teeth’ and cloths of gold on Hormuz. But he also complained of the intense heat and the scorching wind, even though he was not there in midsummer.
The Portuguese in 1497 sent four ships from Lisbon on a voyage of discovery which was to have a dire effect on all the lands about Hormuz, including Oman. The commander of this small flotilla was an unknown sea captain called Vasco da Gama who was sent by the King to follow up the voyage ten years before of Bartholomew Dias, the first to round the then-named Cape of Tempests at the southern tip of Africa. Da Gama carried on north up the east coast past Mozambique and, obtaining a local pilot in Malindi who knew the way across the Indian Ocean to Calicut, took all four ships there in only twenty-three days.
Da Gama had noted on his way up the East African coast that the Omanis occupied many settlements along the coastline, each self-governing and dealing in slaves. The Portuguese did not endear themselves to the Arabs, nor to the Africans.
An entry in a contemporary record describes an encounter between da Gama and two Arabs captured in Mozambique:
The captain-major [da Gama] questioned two Moors [from Mozambique] whom we had on board, by dropping boiling oil upon their skin, so that they might confess any treachery intended against us. They said that orders had been given to capture us as soon as we entered the port, and thus avenge what we had done at Mozambique. And when the torture was being applied a second time, one of the Moors, although his hands were tied, threw himself into the sea, while the other did so during the morning watch . . . After the malice and treachery planned by these dogs had been discovered, we remained on Wednesday and Thursday [11 and 12 April] . . . That same day [14 April] at sunset, we cast anchor off a place called Milinde, which is thirty leagues from Mombasa.
After the success of this first reconnaissance voyage, da Gama, now feted in Portugal, was sent back to India in 1502 with twenty-five ships. On reaching the Indian coast he boarded an unarmed ship taking two hundred pilgrims to Mecca. Da Gama hated all Muslims. He immediately had fifty of the women and children baptized. The rest were locked into the hold of their ship, which da Gama then set on fire. He then ordered his men to capture and plunder sixteen other boats of various sizes, which they did. A
record of da Gama’s Second Voyage states:
Then the captain-major [da Gama] commanded them to cut off the hands and ears and noses of all the crews, and put all of them into one of the small vessels, into which he ordered them to put the friar, also without ears, or nose, or hands, which he ordered to be strung around his neck [after this man had been given safe conduct], with a palm-leaf for the King, on which he told him to have a curry made to eat of what his friar brought him. When all the Indians had been thus executed, he ordered their feet to be tied together, as they had no hands with which to untie them: and in order that they should not untie them with their teeth, he ordered them to strike upon their teeth with staves, and they knocked them down their throats; and they were thus put on board heaped up upon the top of each other, mixed up with the blood which streamed from them; and he [da Gama] ordered mats and dry leaves to be spread over them, and the sails to be set for the shore, and the vessel set on fire: and there were more than eight hundred Moors; and the small vessel with the friar, with all the hands and ears, was also sent on shore under sail, without being fired. In the midst of all this butchery, there came toward the Portuguese vessels of Moors of Coromandel, natives of the country, who saw the executions which were being carried out – for they [the Portuguese] hung up some men by the feet in the vessels which were sent ashore, and when thus hung up the captain-major ordered the cross-bow men to shoot arrows into them, that the people on shore might see it.
On another occasion da Gama ordered that both lips of a Brahmin, an envoy from the city of Calicut, be cut off so that all his teeth showed, and he ordered the ears of a dog that was on board the ship to be cut off and he had them fastened and sewn on with many stitches on the Brahmin instead of his own.
It is easy to confuse Calicut (originally Kozhikode) with Calcutta (now Kolkata) which is the capital city of West Bengal and the main commercial centre of East India. (Only Mumbai and Delhi have a higher GDP.) Although my paternal grandfather Eustace spent his active life largely in South Africa and the Caribbean, my maternal grandfather Percy spent his as a financial maestro in Calcutta.
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