This monograph deserves top points just for its informativeness. It goes without saying that Oman is a peripheral part of the Arab world, despite commanding considerable strategic importance at the gateway to the Strait of Hormuz. As such, I did not have any background knowledge of Oman when I turned to Takriti's text, other than knowing a little something about Ibadism - the dominant religious sect of Omani elites - and that Zanzibar was previously an Omani possession. Nevertheless, I was able to follow Takriti's text quite easily and I feel that the text gives one a very good sketch of Oman's history in the twentieth century.
It may sound incongruous, then, to say that this book is ultimately about the British. The British seized Zanzibar and Oman in the latter half of the nineteenth century, severing the former from the control of Muscat, and installing pliable native rulers in both regions as a means of indirect imperial rule. In Oman proper, the Sultan of Muscat came to rely on British patronage to the extent that he eventually became a marionette of the British Foreign Office. With British support, the Sultan drained power from tribal sheikhs and became increasingly absolute in his rule. Takriti claims that this absolutism was completely exogenous to Oman's history, which previously had a more dispersed system of rule called the Imamate, which centred on a balance of power between sultans and sheikhs in the interest of the community at large; it was, Takriti would have us believe, a system predicated on rejecting absolutism, or "Jababira" as the Omanis called absolutism. Takriti's idea here is intriguing, but I wonder how much of his juxtaposition of pre-colonial Omani power distribution with its post-colonial counterpart is based on a romanticization of pre-colonial Omani history. I say this in part because Takriti only devotes a couple of paragraphs to sketch the pre-colonial regime in Oman - hardly enough for us to get a clear picture of what it was really like, and certainly not based on very compelling evidence.
Takriti goes on to show how the British-controlled Sultan of Oman's increasing absolutism and disengagement from the people of Oman prompted discontentment, especially in the southernmost province of the Sultanate's realm, Dhufar. This sparsely-populated mountainous region, which is subject to annual monsoons (hence, the namesake of the book), was not always part of Oman, but the adventurist Sultan of Muscat annexed the region in the late nineteenth century after British prompting, in order to quell potential threats to Oman's southern flank stemming from the region, and in order to secure the region's resources. What would prove to be the Sultan's heavy-handed and oppressive rule of the region eventually engendered revolutionary opposition movements, which are one of the main foci of Takriri's analysis. These came to a head in the 1950s and 1960s, and this is where things get interesting. The revolutionary movements coalesced, essentially, in the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf (PFLOAG). As Takriti expounds, this was essentially a communist organization, heavily influenced by Maoism, and drawing from an Internationalist base of support. Its presence in Oman posed a threat, not only to the Sultanate, but to the oil industry in the interior of the country. The epicentre of PFLOAG's rebellion was in the intractable terrain of Dhufar, a region in which the rebels could hide even from superior Anglo-Sultanate forces and wage a protracted armed struggle against Muscat.
The presence of PFLOAG as a resilient and persistent threat on Oman's southern doorstep, and the Sultan's ineptitude in quelling it, would draw the British into ever increasing interference in Muscat's affairs, eventually culminating in a British-initiated palace coup that overthrew the Sultan, Said bin Taimur, and replaced him with his son, Qaboos, in 1970. Takriti probes an impressive array of British backchannel diplomatic correspondence to demonstrate that the British Foreign Office was the real power behind the throne in Oman. After the successful coup of 1970, the British would go on to help Qaboos succeed where his father had failed - not by becoming an absolute ruler (his father had been that), but completing the trappings of a developed, absolutist STATE, complete with a legitimating narrative of the Sultanate's primordial claim to absolute power based on royal succession. The reality, Takriti contends, is that absolutism was a relatively recent development.
I think there are really two interesting points that stand out in this narrative. First, the main Dhufar revolutionary movement (PFLOAG) was not Islamist or Wahhabi or in any way religious; it was communist. Second, it is amazing to see how much imperial control Great Britain had in some parts of the world as late as 1970! So often I think people are inclined to see Britain's retreat from empire after the Second World War as the point when the curtain falls. As Takriti demonstrates, the lingering influence of Britain's imperialism endured and remained potent.
Takriti's text is not without its faults. I think on some level the book is too Anglocentric and Anglophobic. Certainly, the British were very influential in Oman's affairs. Nevertheless, I feel like the Omanis are treated by Takriti as basically passive, pliable instruments, and I'm sure the reality was far different from that kind of image. Also, I did not get a clear sense from Takriti's book as to why the British invested Oman with such supreme importance - even going so far as to stage a coup to protect its interests there. What really were those interests? Takriti hints at the importance of oil extraction, particularly for the Shell oil company, which is a British corporation. But was this the only reason? Some elaboration on this point would be helpful.