Saturday, Nov 05, 2005

Fifty years ago Jan Morris became Oman's first tourist. Returning, she praises the benefits of modernity but is left pining for some of the simple pleasures of her earlier trip

Istood the other day at the gateway of a palace of Qaboos bin Said, Sultan of Oman, on the shore of the Arabian Sea.

From this very spot, just 50 years ago, I had set out as the guest of the Sultan's father and predecessor, Said bin Taimur, on a motor journey across his poor and roadless domain, from Salalah in the south to Muscat, his capital, in the north. It was a journey nobody had ever made before, because in those days this was one of the least accessible places on the face of the earth. The Sultan himself had never visited most of the country and he was off now to demonstrate his sovereignty over some dissident potentates of the interior.

Times have changed. Said bin Taimur was a delightful host andtravelling companion but a stubbornly traditionalist ruler, whose policies immured his people in truly medieval isolation. His son Qaboos, who deposed him in 1970 (with a little help from the British, old friends of the family), is a sophisticated progressive, and has opened the gates of Oman to the world. Besides, oil was discovered in his country 40 years ago, so that it, like him, is now enviably rich.

When I joined Said bin Taimur in 1955 I had spent the previous night in a tent, and we set off on our journey in a convoy of rattly American pickups attended by Bedouin guides, an imam or two, sundry sheikhs, lots of goats and scores of the Sultan's black servitors, who were subject to a hazy and generally easy-going form of semi-slavery. Bonfires were lit. Barefoot children gambolled. Wizened sages prostrated themselves. In great clouds of dust we swept through the mud-brick houses of Salalah and headed into the unknown.

This time round, I slept the night before departure at the Salalah Hilton, and we left along a fine paved road in an air-conditioned Toyota 4X4 with integral refrigerator. There were still those hereditary retainers about, though. Their lot, I am assured, is easier than ever, and their status harder than ever to define, but unless they are formally given their liberty they are still slaves of a kind: for the Sultanate of Oman is a modern Arab autocracy embedded in a jumbled past.

A benevolent autocracy, it seems, and evidently contented - an undemocratic Islamic welfare state. Oman has a tumultuous history of internecine warfare but seems remarkable now for a general sense of tolerant stability. Here in Oman it seems to me that democracy of the western kind is not much in demand. Why? I put the question to my Omani companion when we stopped for lunch at a service station ("24-Hour Souk", said a sign outside).

Munching his Omani-made potato chips, "hydrogen-packed for freshness", he merely gestured around him at the spotless cafe, the fine road streaking away across the wilderness outside, the cars and trucks scudding along it, the well-stocked all-night bazaar. "Was it like this 50 years ago?" he ironically inquired.

Of course everything is more comfortable now, more efficient, more prosperous, doubtless happier. As my companion suggested, democracy could hardly have done it better, for it is undoubtedly the inspiration of Qaboos himself, exerted through the mechanisms of absolute rule but supported in the Arab tradition by a majlis of counsellors, that has achieved these transformations.

His word is virtual law. His palaces are ubiquitous and luxurious. His picture is on the wall of that cafe in the wastelands. But his presence is, so people seem to agree, beneficent, and his rule just - al-hamdu lillah.

Yes, praise be to God, for if Omanis not a democracy, it is essentially a theocracy, in the sense of a state governed by God. Allah is its ultimate ruler. It probably could not resist the corrosions of the democratic system without this grand underlying principle.

Islam is no less omnipotent in Oman today than it was in 1955. Then our caravan halted meticulously at prayer-times, and Sultan, imams, Bedouin, slaves and all tumbled out into the sands to perform their ablutions and prostrate themselves towards Mecca. My old Sultan was rigidly dogmatic, forbidding alcohol, tobacco, even sun-glasses among the populace, and was suspicious of all foreign influences, including too much public education. His son is no such zealot. During the years of his rule prominent new mosques have sprung up in every Omani town and the growing educational system, for boys as for girls, technological as well as scholarly, is proudly Islamic.

And some of the benefits of modernity, apparent throughout Oman, really do feel God-given. After five or six days crossing the deserts back in 1955, the Sultan led us into the greener heart of Oman, which he had never seen before. This was the hotbed of opposition to his rule, which he was now hoping to suppress by the sheer majesty of his arrival, but I must say it did not seem to me a very menacing society, there among the palm groves, in the lee of the Omani mountains. The rebellious populace of Nizwa, the country's ancient capital, looked skinny, frail, elvish, half-blind with trachoma, the children like gnomes, the men staring at us with vacant eyes or mindlessly firing their antique rifles into the sky.

Look at them now, half a century later! Allah is great indeed! Stalwart, bright-eyed, the men in spotless white robes and colourful turbans, the woman often in veils of subtle seduction, the children tall and marvellously vivacious - it really is as though some miracle has occurred. It has happened, of course, because science has been allowed into Oman, but it has nothing to do with democracy.

Fifty years ago it was said that these parts of Oman were less known to the outside world than the fastnesses of inner Tibet. I remember the ancient villages we passed through as tumbledown conglomerates of mud houses surrounding neglected mosques and crumbled strongpoints - a fort or watch-tower in every village. Drinking-water came from immemorial water-channels running out of the mountains, in which children bathed and women did their washing. Until our own arrival virtually nobody had set eyes upon a motor vehicle.

I say "virtually" because while we were at Nizwa the Sultan's most vehement enemy, Suleiman bin Himyar, appeared disconcertingly out of the mountains, to offer his submission, in an American convertible with a bodyguard riding shotgun on the boot. Today there are traffic jams in Nizwa sometimes, parking can be a bit of a problem, and people drive down from Muscat for weekends at the Nizwa Golden Tulip Hotel. The murky old souks I recall are spanking white now, there is an extravagant soccer stadium, and above all the great central fort, the most historic site in Oman, has been lovingly restored to glory.

The village people, though, have largely abandoned their picturesque old mud homes, along with their diseases and discomforts, moving into white new houses on the outskirts and leaving their ancestral homesteads to disintegrate beneath the blazing sun. In many a hamlet I remember as populous from my first journey, I now stumble through collapsing alleyways littered still, as with archeological relics, with the rusted pots and pans of - well, of 1955 perhaps. They are all empty, all silent, and for me it is like picking a way through an old dream.

My Sultan, all those years ago, was travelling to portentous purposes - to secure the unity of his domains, and to establish a route across them. But I went along just for the ride, so I suppose I can claim to be Oman's first tourist.

There have been many since, and are sure to be countless more. In 1955 I glimpsed not a single outsider, and indeed for several days saw not a living soul outside our caravan, except for camels, the occasional gazelle and a distant horned creature alleged to be an oryx. This wildness of landscape is becoming a tourist attraction. Already package groups are taken into the empty desert to camp for a night or two under the stars. In the mountains of the north 4X4s full of foreigners crawl through canyons and picnic at oases, while at posh new hotels hundreds of tourists are already sun-bathing or splashing into Oman's green and azure seas.

Tourism mutates nearly everything it touches, and Sultan Qaboos has only to look over his border to Dubai to see what happens to an Arab sheikhdom in thrall to it - brilliant, exciting, rich, engagingly vulgar and repellently materialist. But like the canny rulers of Dubai, he knows that oil revenues will run out one day, and tourism offers an obvious substitute. Already they are planning to build in Oman another of those artificial tourist cities, in the Dubai style, to be called Al Madina Al Zarqa, Blue City, along with waterfront resorts, designed to include, so its developers threaten, an aquarium.

Nothing, however, is one-dimensional in Oman. Behind all the progress lurk sad and brutal memories. The universal charm of the country may well obscure, for all I know, more complex emotions. Muscat itself left me this time with nigglingly equivocal responses.

On my previous visit, the core of it was the walled old city, where my friend Said bin Taimur lived in a modest palace by the sea, guarded by two old Portuguese castles, and having as the closest and most influential of neighbours the British Consulate-General. The city gates were closed at dusk, one had to carry a lantern at night, there were no cars, the streets were a mesh of towering ancient houses and altogether it was a little marvel of medieval suggestion.

Today the old city has been more or less demolished. Sultan Qaboos has built himself yet another enormous palace by the water, the British Embassy has been relocated elsewhere, and the whole area within the walls is a mass of white government offices, with a brand-new mosque and a motorway along the water. It is not exactly ugly (except perhaps the palace). But like the rest of the city outside the walls, which is now enormous, extending far along the coast and joining up with neighbouring settlements too - like all of Muscat, 2005, in fact - it has a sort of calculated, fizz-less monotony to it.

Most of the city's myriad new buildings are designed to be recognisably Omani, and some are very handsome. There are strict planning rules and no high-rise buildings unless you count the terrific new national mosque, named for the Sultan Qaboos and crowned by a spectacularly tall minaret. This is no Dubai, all skyscrapers and glitz. But there is a sameness to the decorous symmetry of the place, white building after white building, far along the brand-new highways (speed cameras everywhere) between the mountains and the sea. All the seduction now comes not from Muscat's structures, but from its people.

I love and admire Oman anyway, but I found myself, as I pottered around Muscat this time, looking always for the old in the midst of the new, pining for simplicities among the mobile phones, the ATMs, the speed cameras, the McDonald's and the gleaming new boulevards. I suspect Omanis sometimes pine for them too, but this is a highly intelligent, highly realist Islamic Sultanate, and it knows better than any impertinent foreigner how best to interpret its past and arrange its future. Dousing the lantern of nostalgia, I returned to my superbly hedonist hotel, called for room service and ordered instead, out of another culture, a consolatory dry Martini.

Jan Morris is the author of more than 40 books, including most recently 'A Writer's World', a compendium of her reportage and travel writing. Her book, 'Sultan in Oman', first printed in1957, is published by Sickle Moon/Eland Publishing

By JAN MORRIS