The death of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia turns the focus of succession speculation in Arabia to the Sultanate of Oman. Sultan Qaboos, the longest-serving ruler in the Middle East, has been in Germany for unspecified health reasons since last summer. While the Saudi succession was transparent, Oman’s is opaque.
Qaboos was born on Nov. 18, 1940, in Salalah, the capital of Oman’s western province of Dhofar, which borders on Yemen. He is the 14th-generation descendant of the founder of the Al Bu Sa’idi dynasty that created the sultanate in the 1600s after expelling the Portuguese from Muscat. He was educated in India and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, then spent a year with the British Army of the Rhine in Germany. When he returned home to Salalah, his father kept him isolated and under virtual house arrest in the palace. The father was notoriously averse to any modernization of the country.
Qaboos came to power in July 1970 in a coup orchestrated by British intelligence using army officers seconded to the Omani army. British officers took control of the palace, lightly wounded the sultan in a short gunfight and then Qaboos’ father was flown out of the country on a Royal Air Force jet, never to return. London was convinced regime change was essential because the country was in a civil war with a communist insurgency backed by the Soviets and their then proxy, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The country had only 10 kilometers (six miles) of modern roads, virtually no education or health infrastructure and seemed about to become the next Arab monarchy to collapse.
With British encouragement, Qaboos asked the Shah of Iran and King Hussein of Jordan for help. The Iranians sent a regiment of troops and the Jordanians sent advisers. The communist insurgency in Dhofar was defeated and many of its leaders defected to the new government. Qaboos modernized the country, established a parliament and created one of the most stable and well-governed countries in the Middle East. Oman had a miniature version of the Arab Spring in 2011, during which the Sultan ordered further reforms to answer calls for change, and demonstrations petered out. The majority of Oman’s 4 million residents have never known any ruler except Qaboos.
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