THE PAGE TURNS

Fast Facts

• Named for: Umān/Oman the “settled ones” in Arabic.
• Capital: Muscat
• Long/Lat: 23.2N/ 58.2 E or 8200 mi, 12 hrs East of Castro Valley
• Population: 5.4 million or 81 CVs, but has more than doubled in 20 years.
• Size: 121,000 sq mi or 900 CVs, not so small
• Avg temp in April: 93 F/34 C phew!
• Median household income: ~$50,000 annual
• Ethnicity: Arab (Baluchi), Indian, African. Much of the growth is expats/immigration.
• Main industries: Oil & trade

Oman curves around the eastern corner of the Arabian peninsula, which is why it has long been both strategic and often powerful. It’s not a particularly small country, but it’s the only country that begins with an “O” so it was going to earn a spot.

The country borders a key waterway in the news at the moment: the Strait of Hormuz. If it wasn’t for You Know Who’s War, we’d be oblivious to anything named Hormuz. Oman is just south of Iran, and maps that show the Persian Gulf emptying into the Arabian Sea show how much that straight (at the “point” below) is a chokepoint.

While settlements go back into the B.C.E. era, the earliest development in Oman happened during the spread of the Islamic Empire, which moved from Mecca around the peninsula and into Persia as well as west across North Africa. However, where Oman really came into its own was during the 17th and 18th centuries, as it created a maritime and trading empire across the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.

If you remember a little about the Age of Exploration, the Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian city-states were sailing all around the Mediterranean and beyond to find waterways to get to the great spice and trading empires of India, China, and so on. While Portugal was a small country, their advances in navigation and savvy political power helped them so much that one point the Pope carved the Atlantic Ocean in half, giving the east to the Portuguese and the west to the Spanish. (Spanish=New World/Portugal and Dutch=Old World).

In 1692, Saif bin Sultan of the Yaruba dynasty in Oman captured Zanzibar. That’s one of those wikipedia facts, but we can translate it. It’s the Age of Enlightenment, so science and technology is enhancing seafaring, economies in Europe are booming, and colonization is happening everywhere. Countries that have those new advances–gunpowder and muskets–are taking over those without them, and slavery is starting to expand rapidly, as the Haves want to populate their plantations with Have Nots. Zanzibar is down the south-east African coast, so if a Sultan of Oman was able to fend off the Portuguese and other colonists, it means he could control the trade going in and out of Africa, Arabia, and India. Spices or slaves. That would be a big hairy deal.

The British were also going into India, and they made sort of a trade/non-aggression pact with Oman against other rivals from Persia, the French, or the Dutch. Apparently, the Africans and Indians of the area didn’t have much to say about it. Ultimately, British influence grew strong enough that they controlled leaders on the throne in Muscat, until Oman was another British “possession.” Oman control from Muscat kept it feudal, relying on slavery until 1970 (!), when Sultan Qaboos bin Said deposed his father.

Qaboos lasted until 2020, when he finally died and his cousin Haithim bin Tariq became the new monarch, one of the few remaining sultans still in the world. A sultan is an absolute monarch, but under the rules established by Islam. During the Islamic Empire, there were sometimes caliphs and sometimes sultans. A caliph was a ruler in both a political and religious sense, something like the Holy Roman Emperor. A sultan is not a religious leader, but a leader following religious rules, which themselves can have political and economic implications. A king, in comparison, would not be tied to a specific religious system.

While Oman might have turned itself briefly into a backwater in the early 20th century, the rise of the price of oil pumped new life into its economy. Today 71% of its revenue comes from oil and gas reserves (which must mean their economy also rides a roller-coaster), and its influx of immigrants are expanding its economy and cultural attitudes.

There is one more unique product that comes from Oman among a handful of countries in the area. As I wrote about it once before: “Did you remember the one about Chinese and Egyptian astrologers taking African bark scrapings into the alleyway behind the Marriott, where the illegal aliens, who were on their way to the tax collectors, stopped to have a baby? …”

Also known as “Adoration of the Magi.”

Oman along with nearby Somalia, Ethiopia, and Yemen are the place where you can still find frankincense. It’s still valuable although not perhaps big enough to finance a trading empire. For that today, you have to dig underground.