In the Time of Oil
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In the Time of Oil

Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town

Mandana Limbert

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In the Time of Oil

Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town

Mandana Limbert

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About This Book

Before the discovery of oil in the late 1960s, Oman was one of the poorest countries in the world, with only six kilometers of paved roads and one hospital. By the late 1970s, all that had changed as Oman used its new oil wealth to build a modern infrastructure. In the Time of Oil describes how people in Bahla, an oasis town in the interior of Oman, experienced this dramatic transformation following the discovery of oil, and how they now grapple with the prospect of this resource's future depletion.

Focusing on shifting structures of governance and new forms of sociality as well as on the changes brought by mass schooling, piped water, and the fracturing of close ties with East Africa, Mandana Limbert shows how personal memories and local histories produce divergent notions about proper social conduct, piety, and gendered religiosity. With close attention to the subtleties of everyday life and the details of archival documents, poetry, and local histories, Limbert provides a rich historical ethnography of oil development, piety, and social life on the Arabian Peninsula.

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Year
2010
ISBN
9780804774604

1

In the Dreamtime of Oil

Wealth and Development in an Anomalous Time


THERE WAS A FURIOUS KNOCK at the door of my room one afternoon. I had been in Bahla, the beautiful walled oasis town in the interior region (al-Dakhiliya) of the Sultanate of Oman for just two months, but I already knew that this was highly unusual. I threw on the headscarf that my hosts had asked me to wear while I lived in their home and cautiously opened the door. To my surprise, it was one of my landlord’s grown sons. We were both suddenly uncomfortable; until then only my landlady or the young children of the family had come to my door, mostly to let me know that a meal was ready, that visitors had come, or to ask whether I would like to join my landlady as she went to a neighbor’s house for a coffee gathering. After an awkward pause, Majid suddenly announced: “Come quickly, there has been a coup d’état!” “What?” I asked, even more surprised. “Yes, a change in government, come downstairs. It’s on television,” he said urgently. We ran downstairs and joined the rest of the family as they stood silently and solemnly in front of the large television perched on the bookcase of the otherwise furniture-less family room. Indeed, the usual afternoon cartoon programming on Omani national television had been interrupted and a stern-faced newswoman was declaring that the government was about to make an important announcement. But soon it became clear that there had been no coup; rather, the government was issuing a constitution.
I could not stop thinking about Majid’s actions. Why had he expected or assumed that there would be a coup? What had motivated him to leave his home in one of the new suburbs of Bahla, jump in his car, and speed over rutted dirt roads to his father’s house in the interior of the walled town? There had been no sign of high-level political instability and the Sultan remained, despite some whispered discontent here and there, immensely popular. And, yet, Majid was convinced that the interruption that day of state-run television could mean only one thing: a coup.
Several months later, I gained a better understanding of the anxieties that had motivated Majid’s actions from an unlikely source. A popular Omani soap opera (halqa) aired on state-run television. The soap opera seemed to transfix the nation, as it did Bahla. Every evening, after dinner and after the evening prayers, my host family and I would sit on the floor of their family room and watch the program. Whereas the television often served as a source of background noise rather than the focus of the family’s or guests’ social activities, during the airing of this program, as on the day the constitution was proclaimed, it commanded everyone’s undivided attention. Even the ubiquitous tray of coffee and dates, or, my favorite, an evening round of diluted fresh milk mixed with thyme and finely crushed red peppers, would wait until the program was over. The plot of the soap opera was simple, even pat. But, it clearly drew on, tapped into, and encapsulated people’s deep-seated anxieties about Oman’s unexpected oil wealth, the massive infrastructural, bureaucratic, and social transformations that this wealth produced, and the anticipation of its equally sudden decline.
The elevator in a building where a wealthy businessman works breaks down one day as he enters it. The elevator falls several floors, and the man inside is seriously injured. He is rushed to a hospital and for several days remains in a coma while we, the viewers of the soap opera, follow the turmoil of his family as they grapple with the prospect of losing him, with tensions over his estate, and with anxiety over a lost briefcase full of money that mysteriously disappeared from the elevator during the accident. Several days later, the man awakes from the coma. He has made a complete recovery but for one thing: he cannot remember anything that has happened in the previous thirty years. In the episodes that follow, viewers share in the businessman’s awe at the incredible buildings and infrastructure that have become modern Oman: highways, luxury cars, “modern” (non-Qur’anic) schools, the gold doors of a bank, enormous new mosques. Everything is a shock to this man, who has just woken up and cannot believe that what he sees is real.
As the soap opera made explicit, Bahlawis also described Oman’s dramatic and sudden transformation from isolation and poverty since 1970, the year Sultan Qaboos bin Sa‘id al-Bu Sa‘id ousted his father in a palace coup d’état, as a “reawakening.” They also called it “hard to believe” (ṣa‘b al-taṣdīq). Are all the changes since oil began to be commercially exported in 1967 and since Qaboos bin Sa‘id al-Bu Sa‘id became Sultan real? Or is it a dream? Will all the apparent wealth and infrastructural glamour disappear, like the briefcase, just as mysteriously and suddenly as it appeared? After all, Oman’s oil supplies are, as the state continually reminds its citizens, limited. Indeed, could the entire structure of everyday life, including the government, suddenly change again as well? By anticipating a coup and pre-empting the future, Majid had merely drawn a lesson from the past and linked Oman’s political fate to that of its oil. And, by standing at that crucial moment shoulder-to-shoulder with his father, a man distinctly of an older generation, Majid was affirming his relationship to locality and to the past of interior Oman.
Over the year and a half between 1996 and 1997 that I spent in Bahla participating in everyday neighborly life, I came to see that Oman’s post-1970 era of political stability, oil wealth, prosperity, and modernity—no matter how tenuous, unevenly distributed, or experienced as successful or failed—was also often understood as anomalous. It was thought of as a time “in between” times of political instability and poverty, of the past and quite possibly of the future too. This book explores how Bahlawis inhabited and understood Oman’s dramatic oil-produced transformations. It examines how the past was evoked, experienced, and managed in the present, and how the present was haunted by the future.1 The book focuses on key institutions, infrastructures, and social practices that Bahlawis described to me as having changed since the early 1970s: the systems of governance and order in Bahla, the availability of leisure time and women’s practices of sociality, the implementation of mass state schooling, the introduction of piped water, and, finally, the breaking of connections with East Africa. Tensions about sociality and community more broadly, I argue, were products not only of displeasure with current social and economic conditions, but also of contested understandings of the past and uncertain expectations of the future.
Citizens, development policies, and states often produce and assume multiple and at times contradictory temporalities, sometimes tied to the exploitation of natural resources, often linked to shifts in rule, and, of course, frequently presumed to follow teleologies of progress and modernization. However, while most states, and especially authoritarian ones, presume to hold the keys to a deferred utopian future (Eiss 2002), other states and their development discourses seem to encourage mysteries, miracles, surprises, and deferred dystopias. This is the case of Oman. In part because the state has encouraged such discourses, many Omanis also wonder if they might “wake up” one day only to discover that the years of prosperity since the 1970 coup have been a dream.

The Sultanate of Oman and the Miracle of the Renaissance

The success that has been achieved in Oman during the years of the renaissance amounts to a miracle. It is the achievement of the leader, and his people guided by the wisdom and determination of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said.
Introduction, Royal Speeches of H.M. Sultan Qaboos bin Said, 1970-1995
Located on the southeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, Oman lies between Saudi Arabia to its west, Yemen to its south, the United Arab Emirates to its northwest, and the Arabian Sea to its east.
Today, this territory is known as the Sultanate of Oman, but it only came to be known as such after the 1970 coup d’état that brought Sultan Qaboos bin Sa‘id al-Bu Sa‘id to power.2 Until the mid-1950s, what is now known as the “interior region” (al-Dakhiliya), where the town of Bahla is located, was a quasi-independent theocratic state, the Imamate of Oman, based on Ibadi doctrine, a third branch of Islam after Sunnism and Shi’ism.3 The coastal regions, in contrast, were collectively known as the Sultanate of Muscat.4 In the 1950s, when Sultan Sa‘id bin Taymur al-Bu Sa‘id (r. 1932–1970), with support from the British military, gained control of Imamate villages and towns in the interior, including Bahla, the newly unified territory came to be known as the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman.5 Then, in 1970, when Sultan Qaboos bin Sa‘id al-Bu Sa‘id overthrew his father, Sultan Sa‘id bin Taymur, in a nearly bloodless coup d’état, the name of the unified territory changed again, this time to the Sultanate of Oman.6
Despite the change in name suggesting a fully unified state, the sense that the historic Imamate territory is unique and distinct from the coast continues to have significant social and political import. Indeed, various modes of the state’s self-representation (such as textbooks, monuments, and national histories) have encouraged the view that the interior region is unique for being the site of the nation’s special religious heritage, solidifying for those in al-Dakhiliya and beyond a sense that theocratic traditions remain particularly important there. Many elderly people I knew in Bahla even continued to refer to the interior region of al-Dakhiliya as Oman and to the coastal region surrounding the capital as Muscat.
The name of the territory is by no means the only thing that changed in the years immediately following the 1970 coup d’état. The infrastructural transformation in the first decade after the coup was especially dramatic. The new state constructed schools, hospitals, roads, and a modern state bureaucracy, first in the capital area and then in the outlying regions.7 According to commonly cited statistics, while in 1970 there were three “Western” (that is, non-Qur’anic) schools in Oman, by 1980 there were 363 such schools; while in 1970 there was one hospital, by 1980 there were 28; and while in 1970 there were six kilometers of asphalt roads, by 1980 there were 12,000.8 Within ten years, Oman went from being one of the most isolated states in the world (in league with Albania, Nepal, or North Korea at various moments in the twentieth century) to being an internationally recognized and economically interconnected petro-state. By 1980, Oman ceased to be described by most European and American journalists or visitors as “medieval,” where such amenities as radios and sunglasses were banned, where the “state” was comprised primarily of individual advisors rather than a bureaucracy, and where basic modern infrastructure was all but nonexistent. All that had changed.
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Figure 1.1 Map of Oman
The time from Sultan Qaboos’s coup d’état in July 1970 to the present is officially known as the al-nahḍa,9 translated into English as “renaissance” or “awakening.” The use of the notion of al-nahḍa to mark a shift in history is not original to the Qaboos era or to Oman.10 Influenced by Salafiya movements elsewhere in the Middle East,11 the notion of an “awakening” was also deployed in the nineteenth century by Ibadis in Oman, as well as in North Africa and Zanzibar (Hoffman 2004; Wilkinson 1987: 152–153). The Ibadi awakening of the nineteenth century, however, unlike that of the late twentieth century, was specifically one of religious revival aimed at synthesizing and explaining features of Ibadism for both Ibadis and non-Ibadis (Wilkinson 1987).12 And, while in other places in the Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century eras referred to as al-nahḍa tend to be associated with literary and intellectual revival, the contemporary Omani renaissance tends to be linked to industriousness, cosmopolitanism, piety, and seriousness of purpose, an association that nicely overlaps with development discourses that emphasize private enterprise and hard work.
But how did Oman awake? By what cause and to what effect? Oman’s late twentieth-century renaissance, its literal rebirth or awakening from the “coma” of its recent past, is often officially said to have been spurred, as indicated in the introduction to the Royal Speeches, almost miraculously, by Sultan Qaboos. The magic of the Omani state is manifest not simply in the production of wealth without the labor required to extract oil from the earth (as in Fernando Coronil’s description of Venezuela [1997]), but also in that wealth seems to have been produced almost without oil itself. The “anti-politics of development discourse” (J. Ferguson 1990) in Oman functions by emphasizing the miraculous rule of the Sultan and a reawakened spirit of industriousness as well as by de-emphasizing the history of oil and oil-related war in the creation of the unified state.
Downplaying the role of oil in the most recent “renaissance” belies its centrality in the establishment of modern Oman.13 Indeed, the unified state that is now known as Oman experienced three wars between the mid-1950s and 1970s, all of which were instigated by oil exploration. These determined the territorial boundaries of the contemporary state and shaped the nature of the new political regime.14 The first war (1952–1954) was a border conflict with Saudi Arabia over the oasis town of Bureimi. Whereas Saudi Arabia was supported by the American oil company Aramco, the Sultanate of Muscat (in alliance with the Emirate of Abu Dhabi) drew support from Britain. Despite well-known, deep theological tensions between Ibadis and Wahhabis (the particular approach to Islam propagated by the Saudi state), Saudi Arabia was able to motivate Imamate subjects, including those from Bahla, to fight against the Sultanate in this conflict.
The second war (1954–1959) affected Bahla most directly, pitting the coastal Sultanate against the Imamate territories as the Sultan and oil companies aimed to gain access to potential oil fields in what is now al-Dakhiliya. Many Bahlawis fought in support of the Imamate against the British-backed army of the Sultan, which had been sent to “protect” oil exploration teams. When the fighting abated after 1955 and then shifted to a guerilla war in the Jebel Akhdar mountains in 1957, many Bahlawis joined that movement as well.15 British planes bombed the Bahla fort in 1957 as Imamate forces had retaken the town before moving to the mountains. Guerilla fighting continued until 1959, when the Imamate was finally defeated.
The third war began in 1963 as a Marxist rebellion in the southern Dhofar region (touched off by the assassination of the guard of a British oil engineer) but by 1970 had spread north to the more established oil regions. It was during this conflict, on July 23, 1970, that a young Qaboos bin Sa‘id al-Bu Sa‘id overthrew his father as Sultan of Muscat and Oman.16 The war officially ended in 1975 with the defeat of the insurgency.
Downplaying oil as a source of the modern Omani state’s establishment also produces a paradox. While oil is conspicuously, though not surprisingly, tangential to narratives about the founding and development of the nation, oil (and, in particular a preoccupation with its limits) is central to expectations of Oman’s future. Over and over during my time in Oman, people would tell me that the country had twenty years of oil reserves remaining, a time frame, as I illustrate in Chapter 7, that the official press has also projected. Such projections have been made since the early 1970s, but crucially, the horizon of the exhaustion of the country’s oil supply keeps extending into the future. Even the US Department of Energy in 2005 predicted that Oman had about twenty years of oil remaining (US Energy Information Administration 2005).
To be sure, the uncertainty surrounding Oman’s future is shaped not only by national proclamations about limited oil supplies, but also by concern about rule. It is generally presumed that Sultan Qaboos has no heir, although, as I also discuss in Chapter 7, rumors about mysterious sons persist. After a nearly fatal car accident in 1995, discussions about possible successors became particularly urgent. It was in the following year that the state issued its constitution, which directly addressed the question of succession. Rather than quelling uncertainty, however, the constitution spawned additional questions and mysteries. Although the document declares that the Sultan has selected a successor, his name is written and sealed in a secret envelope to be opened only upon His Majesty’s demise.
Questions about Oman’s future, furthermore, are inflected...

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