Sultans of Slow

British military advisers and an American medical missionary couple, Donald and Eloise Bosch from Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, were in many respects the old sultan’s only contact with the wider world. In the late 1980s, I met the Bosches in the seaside villa that the present sultan built for them after he moved them out of their home in the village razed to make way for the Bustan Palace.

Donald Bosch talked about the old ruler with genuine sympathy. “His major problem was that the country was very poor. He did some very good things. He gave power to the mission to develop a tuberculosis hospital and a leprosarium.” The old sultan did not rule out oil exploration, and eventually he encouraged it. He began the construction of a major hospital. “But as time went on I think he developed an honest conviction that too much of the Western world could have a negative impact on the overall society in this country.” Already in those days there were cautionary examples up and down the gulf, and now there are more.

But why had Sultan Said banned sunglasses? “You know, I think he wanted to be able to see peoples’ eyes,” said Bosch. The old sultan’s window into their soul was lost when their eyes were hidden behind green glass. And the flashlights at night? Because they were too easily turned on and off, while a lantern identifies the person who carries it. Sure, it all seems silly, but as Bosch said, “when the tide is coming in and you’ve developed a policy where you’re going to slow the incoming tide, it leads you to take actions that in retrospect seem foolish, like building barriers of sand.”

By the 1960s, part of Oman was facing a communist-backed rebellion. The British wanted to make sure the Arabian Peninsula and the strategic Strait of Hormuz were secure for oil and commerce, and they were getting nervous.

The old sultan only had one son, Qaboos, born in 1944, and when he was a teenager Sultan Said was persuaded the boy should know something more of the world. A Maj. Leslie Chauncy, personal adviser to the sultan, took the boy on what was later described in one history of Oman as “a slow, round-the-world trip that took a whole year.” Later Qaboos went to Sandhurst to be trained as British officers were trained.

In a picture book called “Old Oman,” available in Muscat’s hotels, there is a photograph of Qaboos in 1963 just after he finished his military training. He has a neatly trimmed mustache, in the style that modern, educated Arabs affected in those days. He is wearing steel-rimmed dark glasses.