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In the Time of Oil

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations..................................................................................ixAcknowledgments........................................................................................xiNotes on Names and Transliteration.....................................................................xv1 In the Dreamtime of Oil: Wealth and Development in an Anomalous Time.................................12 Now, the Police Only Drive: Remembering Rule and Disorder in Bahla...................................193 In the Eye of the Neighbor, There is Fire: Hazards and Histories of Sociality........................464 Circles of Knowledge: Religious Learning, Pious Pasts, and Alternative Sociality.....................825 Senses of Water: Nostalgia, Private Ownership, and Bodily Privacy....................................1156 Becoming Bahlawi: Race, Genealogy, and the Politics of Arabness......................................1347 Perhaps He Has a Son: Succession, Depletion, and the Uncertain Future................................164Notes..................................................................................................177Bibliography...........................................................................................215Index..................................................................................................235

Chapter One

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'tat!" "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'tat, as a "reawakening." They also called it "hard to believe" (sa'b al-tasdiq). 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...