Letters from Arabia E-Book

Stephen Bennett

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 308

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Arabia is a land of cardamom-flavoured coffee and camel trains, frankincense and fanatics, pirates and pearl fishers, a land where slights are sometimes forgiven but never forgotten and where friendships last forever. Letters from Arabia explores these subjects and more by taking one word from each of the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet as a chapter heading. Each chapter weaves its way through the colourful and complex history of Arabia, illustrating the origins of words used in everyday conversation and providing a Western perspective with the author's account of periods of his life and career spent on Arabian soil. Letters from Arabia is a welcome addition to anyone with even a passing interest in the Middle East and an invaluable addition to any traveller's library.

Leseprobe

Imprint

All rights of distribution, also through movies, radio and television, photomechanical reproduction, sound carrier, electronic medium and reprinting in excerpts are reserved.

© 2024 novum publishing

ISBN print edition:978-3-99146-879-0

ISBN e-book:978-3-99146-880-6

Editor:Charlotte Middleton

Cover photo: Stephen Bennett

Cover design, layout & typesetting: novum publishing

Images:Stephen Bennett

www.novum-publishing.co.uk

Dedication

For Annie

Introduction

The Arabic Language

I lived in Egypt and Jordan as a child, was witness to the first Palestinian uprising and sat on King Hussein of Jordan’s knee. I came early to love the rugged beauty of the terrain and the courtesy of its people, feelings which were nurtured during brief encounters in my Royal Naval career in the early seventies and mid-eighties and reinforced during an extended period between two Gulf Wars working for admirals, three British and one an Arab Prince whom I later served as a civilian. This book aims to provide a flavour of a land and people that I came to love – a land of cardamom-flavoured coffee and camel trains, frankincense and fanatics, pirates and pearl fishers, a land where slights are sometimes forgiven but never forgotten and where friendships last forever.

Arabic is spoken in various dialects and variations throughout the Arabian Peninsula and its close neighbours and much more widely by the Islamic world in general. It is the language of the Holy Quran. Many of its words have entered our own language, such as ‘admiral’ (amir al-bahr– ‘prince of the sea’) whereas others we think of as Arabic, such as ‘oasis’, come from other languages, in that case Greek. To confuse matters further, ‘Arabic’ numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) come originally from India, and numerals used in Arabia today are Persian (see Chapter 27).

Each chapter in this book uses one word from the Arabic twenty-eight-letter alphabet to adumbrate the fascinating world of Arabia as I experienced it in different guises. In Chapter 24, for example, we see that the word ‘minaret’ comes from the Arabic name for a lighthouse (min’ara) – a place of fire. But before we embark on this journey through the Arabic world, a few words about its script might be helpful.

Arabic script, which is written right to left with no capitals, comprises twenty-eight letters, one special sign and a few supplementary characters. Many Arabic words include a glottal stop. This is indicated by an apostrophe in the transliterated words shown in italic in these pages. Unlike English, it is strictly phonetic. Its alphabet includes some sounds unfamiliar to Western ears, for example the big aspirated ‘HA’ of the sixth letterhaa’(as inbahr – sea) unlike the softer sound of its cousin, the twenty-sixth letter, also confusingly calledhaa’.

Each of the twenty-eight letters is written in three forms depending on whether it comes at the start or end of a word or between the two. Although it is cursive, i.e. ‘joined up’, there are six letters which cannot be joined to a letter which follows. An example is in the word for ‘ministry’ –wizaara –ﻭﺯﺍﺭﺓ, in which neither (reading right to left) thewaaw,zaa’,‘alif,raa’nortaa’ maboota(a supplementary character used at the end of many Arabic words) can be joined to those which follow.

There is no indefinite article in Arabic, but all nouns and associated adjectives (which come after the noun) are preceded by the definitive article ‘alor‘l(joined to the noun in transliteration by a hyphen). So the Red Sea in Arabic would be‘al-bahr‘l-‘ahmar(the sea the red). If a definitive article proceeds words beginning with the fourteen so-called ‘sun letters’, the ‘al’ sound glides beautifully into the letter which follows it. So sun – –al-shams – is pronouncedash-shams. This gives Arabic, for all its guttural sounds, a mellifluous quality.

Arabic words are formed from the three-letter stem, the radicals, which maintain their order in the word. For example the three radicalshaa’,raa’andmeemcan be found in the very similar wordsharem(sanctuary – a sacred inviable space) andharam(forbidden). The opposite of haram ishalal(lawful), not to be confused withhalaal(new moon), which starts with the softerhaa’letter.

There is no ‘p – pee’ or ‘v – vee’ in Arabic, so‘Pepsi’ becomes ‘Bebsi’ and ‘very’ becomes ‘ferry’. My first name, Steve, caused some confusion initially and my surname sounded like the Arabic for ‘girl’. So to avoid being called ‘stiff bint’, I modified its pronunciation thereafter to Stef’n Beneet!

Some of the information I have encountered in preparing this book is conflicting, but therein lies the delight of jigsaw puzzles. I hope that my betters will point out glaring errors and turn up the missing pieces.

‘The Rough Parallelogram’ of Arabia (land borders are approximate)

Chapter 1

‘alif

‘aa’raab

Bedouin

My father, Lieutenant Colonel John Bennett MBE Royal Engineers, was posted to the Arab Legion in 1955. His boss, the commander of the Arab Legion since 1939 and King Hussein’s miliary advisor, was Lieutenant General Sir John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pasha as he was known – Pasha being the title accorded to miliary leaders in the Ottoman Empire1). My father never liked Glubb much, rather overbearing and stiff, he thought. King Hussein shared this view, and Glubb was asked to leave the following year but not before my father had supervised the construction of the lowest bridge in the world, four hundred metres below sea level, across the River Jordan. When he went to brief King Hussein, I was scooped up by the King to sit on the royal knee. I was six. This was my second introduction to the Arab world, having lived in the Canal Zone with my sister and twin brother, Andrew, since late 1950.

The Author with his twin brother and sister in Jordan 1956

It might have been my last introduction had not a burly army ‘Sapper’ intervened to prevent Andy from dragging me into the Red Sea atal-‘Ain al-Sokhna, fifty-five kilometres south of Suez, a place I would return to thirty-three years later as a Royal Naval Lieutenant Commander during OPERATION HARLING (Chapter 15). I understandably became fascinated by the peoples who lived and had lived in this ‘rough parallelogram’ of land (as T. E. Lawrence described it) almost as large as India, the centre ofish-sharq al-awsat (sharq – East;wast –middle) – The Middle East.

C. M. Doughty, in his lyricalArabia Deserta, said of it, ‘Here is a dead land, whence, if a man die not, he shall bring home nothing but a perpetual weariness in his bones.’ I could not disagree more. I brought home silver daggers unearthed from the deep recesses of theis-suq(market) in the desert border town of Sinaw in Oman, and pots hot from the kilns at Bahla, the ancient capital of Oman, dominated by a huge citadel protected by a crumbling twelve-kilometre-long wall. The character of those who have occupied this land is not always easy to emulate or quantify. The same person who pushes past you in a queue for free food will, when returning, suddenly recognise you, seize you by the hand and, smiling broadly, lead you to share his feast. It is this complex and contrasting character which we examine in this chapter.

South of the Fertile Crescent down the western and southern sides of the peninsula, from Syria (which the early Arabs calledsham) to the Hadhramaut in Eastern Yemen, ran a series of well-watered mountainous regions which were able to support considerable populations. Because of its fertile nature, the Romans called it ‘Arabia Felix’– the fortunate land. Pliny thought it fortunate because it was the source of ‘the heaps of odours (frankincense) that are piled up in honour of the dead.’ (See Chapter 23.) But it was regular rainfall, rather than frankincense, which made this the Lucky Land. Rain falling for centuries on the western limestone mountains drained northwards and eastwards to disappear into the desolate wastes to recharge vast subterranean aquifers of fossil water, thousands of years old.

Towards the rising sun lay great expanses of waterless desert including the vast sands ofar-rubh’ al-khali – the Empty Quarter – wherein lay the fabled‘ubar – the so-called ‘Atlantis of the Sands’. The Empty Quarter’s tamarisk-bush fringe fluctuates with unpredictable rainfall, but its heart is virtually waterless and totally silent, one of the few places on earth where no birds sing. The Empty Quarter (Arabs simply call itar-rimal – the Sands) was crossed by Bertram Thomas and John Philby in the early 1930s and most famously by Wilfred Thesiger in the three years before I was born. His eyes still twinkled at the memory of those journeys when I lunched with him in Dubai in the late nineties.

Yemnmeans ‘good luck, prosperity’ in Arabic. The concept of auspicious good fortune and happiness in Arabic is always associated with the right-hand side (Chapter 28), the left (yassar) side with being small and easy. The Arabs, for whom the rising sun in the east was their reference point, not the European Pole Star, named the lucky well-watered land on their right- hand sideyameen, hence Yemen.

From the fifteenth century BCE onwards, the population of Yemen grew steadily, and weaker tribes were forced eastwards towards the edge of the desert, where settled agriculture became impossible. Progressively they were pushed into the desert itself, where hardy tribes developed a precarious living breeding goats and camels. They became nomadic, exploiting what scarce resources there were. The al-‘aa’raab2, or Bedouin (plural of the Arabbedu), were born. In time their tribes gained control over 6.5 million hectares of grazing territories (d’ar) and their wells (biir), which they guarded fiercely, as anyone who has seen David Lean’sLawrence of Arabiawill be able to testify. Before oil revenues made them less significant, tribald’arwould contract, expand or move depending on the availability of ground water or grass generated from sporadic and unpredictable rain patterns and by the necessity to escape from rival stronger and greedier tribes. Insults by such tribes could not be tolerated and were avenged by vendetta. If a tribal member was murdered by another tribe, then any member of the offending tribe had to die in compensation. This non-specific eye-for-an-eye retribution gained acceptance in a world without any form of political law enforcement.

In very dry years, tribes were forced to move into thed’arof friendly neighbouring tribes, which led to an overlap in grazing areas. To minimise conflict over this essential resource, tribes were bound together in loose confederations (suff). The fact that a tribe might be in more than one confederation added a cohesive structure tobedulife known as ‘asabiyya’, or ‘group spirit’. This allowed a tribe to cross thed’arof other tribes in the same confederation when necessary, for example during the annual journey to local trading centres, where herded animals were exchanged for cooking utensils, weapons and those other commodities which the desert could not supply. What property there was and responsibility for its protection belonged to the male members of the tribe and was bequeathed from father to eldest son.

At the heart of this territory, so Lawrence wrote, was an archipelago of watered and populous oases called Kasim and Aridh, ‘where lay the true centre of Arabia, the preserve of its native spirit, and its most conscious individuality. The desert lapped round and kept it pure of contact.’ ‘Oasis’ and ‘Bedouin’ are English words. Arabs name the formerwaha. Herdsmen and warriors speak of themselves as eitherbaduoral-‘aa’raab – the inhabitants of the wastelands (badia). They do not consider settled Arabs as being in their class, referring to them witheringly asfellahin(peasants or farmers) orhadari(urbanites). The ‘settled ones’, those who created and tended the gardens and terraces, the irrigation systems and the water cisterns, were considered to be inferior – a resource to be exploited. Thewali(local governor) of Salalah told Wilfred Thesiger in 1945 not to trust the settled men from the mountains – ‘They are treacherous and thievish; altogether without honour.’ One of my heroes, Captain Haines, Indian Navy, noted in the mid-nineteenth century that town-bred Arabs were ‘timorous, indolent and much addicted to the use of tobacco’. By contrast, the Byzantine people found theirbeduneighbours a significant irritation and were said to have imported, then loosed, lions from Africa to harry them!

Thebedulived by an ethical code –muruwah – which embodied not only a concept of manliness (courage, patience and fortitude) but a disregard of material wealth. Lawrence noted that ‘only by having nothing can luxury be enjoyed, and long may it remain, however if luxury is taken away, what of it!’ Glubb cautioned that although the Arab was regarded as being fickle, turbulent and insubordinate, he ‘possesses another quality more rarely appreciated – that of total loyalty to a respected leader, a shaykh figure, whose hand they had shaken and whose word was law.’

In the Arabic mind, peace and the exercise of justice are inextricably linked. The three radicals which form the verbsalaha – to make peace with – are thesame which convey the sense of being good, virtuous, competent and trustworthy, not to be confused withsalaam – peace, as inas-salaamu alaykum – peace be upon you, the universal greeting throughout Arabia. Every meeting, even though not the first of the day, starts with a handshake. One observer noticed that when shaking hands with abedu, he did not make contact with the ‘horny calloused palm’ of a labourer but ‘skin as soft as silk’. It is also the case that the longer the handshake, the more one has found favour.

Fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun in hisMuqaddimawrote of thebeduthat ‘fortitude has become a character quality of theirs, and courage their nature. Because of their savagery they are the least willing of nations to subordinate themselves to each other, as they are rude, proud, ambitious and eager to be leaders, their individual aspirations rarely coincide.’ They consider themselves to be manly (muruah) and elegant in manner (zarf) and proud that they were tempered in the fire of the desert, whose ways Lawrence wrote, ‘were hard even for those brought up in them’, but, according to him, whose ‘cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.’ The poorest of them, whom Doughty called ‘light-bodied, black-skinned and hungry-looking wretches’ had all the arrogance of the aristocrat, calling themselves‘aseel – of noble origin; thoroughbred. Another observer noted that the impoverishedbedu‘gentleman of leisure’ lived entirely in the present, unconcerned about the future. ‘When time is not a dimension, it is a state of mind’. Thesiger, one of those Europeans who understoodbedumentality perfectly wrote, ‘Their life is at all times desperately hard, and they are merciless critics of those who fall short in patience, good humour, generosity, loyalty or courage.’ He saw that for them ‘the danger lay not in the hardship of their lives, but the boredom and frustration they would feel when they renounced it’.

Thebedulived exclusively in black camel- or goat-hair tents (bayt ash-sha’ar – house of hair), raised camels or goats as their only livestock, conducted no manual labour and married only amongst themselves. They loved epic one-hundred-line poetry, mostly, so Glubb tells us, dealing with war, glory, women and wine. These were recited by tribal bards (rawi) or remembrancers, and the collection of poems which recounted tribal history came to be known as thediwanof a tribe, a word which subsequently came to mean a place of meeting and discussion, fitted with cushions or long seats – the derivation of our word ‘divan’.

Within their camps, they were, and are, great boasters and terrific snobs. Thesiger noted that whoever lives with the bedu ‘must acceptbeduconventions and conform tobedustandards.’ They ‘argued endlessly, shouting in loud voices’ and ‘being garrulous by nature … reminisce endlessly.’ It has been my experience that while a dignified calm is maintained during discussions of technical matters, these outwardly tranquil men dissolve into arguments or gales of raucous laughter when matters become personal, such as the division of spoils, perceptions of injustice, matters of minor protocol or dress code, or the relative beauty of a camel, racehorse or 4WD (four-wheel drive vehicle). Use of the latter is not always as careful as it might be, however, as any observer of a road traffic accident in Arabia can vouch for. Crowds will converge on the damaged vehicle, not from any sense of mawkish curiosity but to be the first to remove the occupants and, heedless of blood on brand-new upholstery, drive the injured to hospital. This strict sense of chivalry has always existed. When the more moderate Crusaders encountered this code, they exported it back to Europe, where unlike in most of Arabia, it has in my experience withered considerably.

The majority of modern Arabs are very happy to discuss cultural differences. While courteously-delivered criticism from a trusted Western friend might be tolerated, a patronising or bullying attitude, or a show of impatience or anger, will lose its perpetrator any advantage previously gained. The easiest way to upset an Arab is to give any indication that his way of life is in any way inferior to Western practices. Other habits guaranteed to upset Arab hosts are a lack of effort to understand basic Arabic language, using the left hand to eat with, failure to remove shoes when entering a private house or an admiration of an Arab’s private belongings and showing the soles of one’s feet or shoes. The Arabs, a race which, according to Lawrence, ‘notice everything and forget nothing’, are likely to take offence at over-familiarity, immoderate dress or behaviour or any slight, whether intentional or not. The recipient, whose naturally courteous nature will disguise his true feelings, may not indicate that he has been slighted, but the slight will never be forgotten.

This complex, contradictory and timeless character is epitomised by two examples, the first from the mid-eighth century CE when eighty sheikhs of the rival Umayyad dynasty were invited to dine with an Abbasid general. After being welcomed, they were slaughtered where they sat! The second example (quoted in James Lunt’s biography of Glubb Pasha) is from the time just before the Arabian tribes rose in revolt against their Turkish masters. One of theshereefof Mecca’s sons, Feisal, was sent to review troops accompanied by the Turkish Generalissimo and his delegation. When the Arab chiefs came up to be presented, one whispered, ‘My Lord, shall we kill [the Turks] now?’ .

Feisal replied ‘No, they are our guests’!

Thebedurevered their domesticated companions, those destructive agents of desertification, the camel and the goat. The former provided milk and carried the desert raiders to less well-defended settlements on the desert perimeter. Sir Alex Kirkbride, Resident in Transjordan, noted that raiding was like gambling: ‘Like most variations of that amusement, it hardly ever enriched anyone and was a habit which people found most difficult to give up!’

These raids had other consequences. Unmaintained settlements crumbled as their ‘settled’ inhabitants retreated to better-defended towns. Over the rubble came inquisitive goats to uproot grass and shred the bark from trunks and branches. Thebedumoved on, leaving destabilised gardens and fatally damaged trees. The unchecked wind scattered the topsoil and drove in the sand. This constant battle between the desert and the sown has continued for millennia. When the oil has gone, fingers of sand will reclaim the four-lane ‘blacktop’ highways. The settled will retreat to their towns and oases. Thebeduwill repopulate the desert. It has always been so.

1 Glubb’s biography by General James Lunt is superbly told. Details of the bibliography for this book can be found at the back.

2 The second letter of that name is the hard-to-pronounce ayn, which has no real equivalent in English, as the sound is made at the back of the throat like a guttural ‘agh’.

Chapter 2

baa’

bahr

Sea

The restricted waters of the Strait (not Straits!) of Hormuz make the comparatively shallow Persian/Arabian Gulf (The Gulf) one of the hottest and saltiest seas on earth. It loses more water through evaporation than it gains from rain and wadi water flowing into it. The balance is sustained by deep, powerful tidal flows funnelling in from the Gulf of Oman in which are suspended annual blooms of orange plankton – Red Tide. The anti-clockwise flow round the Gulf eventually piles up in the western fiords and inlets (khawr) of the indented and island-fringed Musandam Peninsula, the northern extremity in Oman of thejebel al-hajar(Rocky Mountain) range. The word ‘Musandam’ is derived from the ancient Roman name for Eastern Arabia – Mazoon. Ptolemy called Cape MazoonAsabon Promontorium. We call it Ra’s Musandam. A narrow arc of crumbling limestone, the Sibi Isthmus, tethers the peninsula to the mainland. It seems almost too insubstantial for the purpose, particularly as Mean Sea Level is some half a metre higher on the Gulf side than the other.

There have been a number of schemes, some of them hairbrained, to cut through the isthmus or to insert a huge lock and join the two bodies of water on either side of it together, but common sense has so far prevailed. This region is home to countless seabirds and perhaps a few black leopards. It is also home to the equally exoticash-shibuhorkumzarahtribe, who speak a complex dialect of negatives, a mixture of Arabic, Farsi and European, in which the imperative ‘open’ the door means ‘shut it’. I sat with ashibuhshaykh once to try and dissuade him from servicing the outboard motors of the skiffs which plied the contraband cigarette trade across the strait to Iran, but his demeanour indicted clearly that I should ‘shut it’ too!

On the eastern side of the isthmus lies the deep, sheltered and astonishingly beautiful fiord ofkhawr al-habalayn. On the other,khawr khasaibiopens into the supposed pirate lair ofkhawr ash-shams(the inlet of the sun). This was named the Elphinstone Inlet by British hydrographic specialists sent to survey it in the nineteenth century to determine its suitability as a station on the Britain-to-India telegraph line. A century and a half later, another and far less experienced naval surveyor, Sub-Lieutenant Bennett, shaped the course ofHMS Beagletowards an island (jazira) which lies just off it to the north-east. ‘Peninsula’ isshiba jazirah(almost an island), hence the name of the Al Jazirah TV news channel based on the Qatar Peninsula.

Viewed from the south, the cliffs ofjazirat musandamresemble closely the head of a vast sleeping lion, giving the passage its name –fakk al-assad – the Lion’s Jaw. Through these jaws run ferocious tidal flows generated by that half-metre drop in sea level. It is said that early mariners feared the passage and sent model boats ahead of them laden with sweets to propitiate the spirits (jinn) which spooked the sea into steep-sided waves and overfalls. The spirits were kind.Beaglesailed through the channel and rounded the long finger ofraas shuraytah(raas – head) into the sheltered waters ofkhawr al-quwayy, later the home of the Royal Navy of Oman’s naval basejazirat umm al-ghanam, or Goat Island. With the late afternoon sun lifting a curtain of shadows over the limestone cliffs,Beagle’s anchor rattled down, sending rust flakes and cormorants flying. Next morning at dawn, a party of eight led by my mentor, Commander Richard Campbell, twenty years later my captain during the Falklands War, started the long, hot climb to the summit ofjebel shams, the peak which dominates the peninsula. The task in those pre-satellite navigation days was to conduct geodetic observations, just as our predecessors had one hundred and fifty years earlier. A similar peak in the south of Oman,jebel kinkeri, was climbed in 1835 by Lieutenant Jardine, Indian Navy, ‘an officer whom no trifling difficulties could deter from accomplishing the wishes of his superior’ (Captain Haines). He managed the extremely difficult ascent with his theodolite strapped to his back ‘only by great perseverance’. I know how he felt!

We reached the peak at noon, and looking westwards, my binoculars tracked a huge pod of dolphins rippling down the coast towards a region known since antiquity asas-sirr. This coastal strip tapers as it meets the western side of theal-hajarmountains, and at its northern end lies a creek which has long been used as a refuge and rallying point for Arabs and their invaders. The Persians called the region, in what is now the UAE, Julfara and its capital Julfar. Since the expulsion of the Persian garrison in 1744, it has been known as Ra’s al-Khaimah. The low-lying south-eastern coastal area from Ra’s al-Khaimah ancient Dilmun was known to the Arabs asal-bahrayn. ‘ayn’ implies two of something, as in the famous World War Two battle at El-Alamayn (two flags). Sobahrayn(Bahrain) means ‘two seas’ (Chapter 14).

To the east, I scanned across the tanker-filled strait to mainland Iran, searching for the summit of a conspicuous mountain seventy-five kilometres or forty nautical miles (NM) away, while endlessly to the south, the mountain peaks of theru’us al-jibalfaded in darkening purple ranks towards the Emirate of Fujairah. I returned to this coast some quarter of a century later when Omani hydrographic specialists, now armed with the latest satellite-based systems, were conducting the definitive survey of the area, and again five years after the millennium when maritime developments created the need for more aids to navigation (Chapter 24). On each occasion I had been struck by the history of this maritime gateway, one of the world’s greatest waterways, the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas requirements is transported and which Alexander the Great’s Cretan admiral Nearchus had sailed through as he passed into the Gulf via Cape Mazoon.

The control of this strait and that of its western cousin at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, thebab al-mandeb(babmeans ‘gateway’) has never ceased in importance, but control must generally be exercised at sea by mariners with the means to do so. Those ashore can be frustratingly constrained as General Uqbah bin Nafi found in the seventh century CE. In 682, Bin Nafi led what Glubb termed a 1,500-milebedusuper-raid along the North African coast. He rode triumphantly into the Atlantic surf and brandishing his sword cried out, ‘allahu akbar! If my course were not stopped by this sea, I would ride on to the unknown kingdoms of the West.’

The sea passage from the head of the Gulf, through the strait, into the Gulf of Oman and beyond has been sailed by mariners for millennia, not all of them strictly historic. The opening to‘The First Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman’in Sir Richard Burton’s nineteenth-century unexpurgated translation ofalf laylah wa laylah–The Thousand Nights and One Night’is, ‘So, taking heart, I bought me goods, merchandise and all needed for a voyage, and impatient to be at sea, I embarked, with a company of merchants, on board a ship bound for Bassorah.’ Sindbad (meaning ‘a traveller to Sindh’ – a province of what is now Pakistan) allegedly made seven voyages in all. On one, in Burton’s translation, he encountered ‘a fish like a cow which bringeth forth its young and suckleth them like human beings, and of its skin bucklers are made’. Sea-grass (hashish) eating dugongs (‘arus al-bahr – ‘brides of the sea’) are found in large numbers both in the Gulf and theghubbat hashish(Bay of Grass) near the island of Masirah.

On his second voyage he landed on ‘a certain island [where] dwelleth a huge bird, called the “roc” which feedeth its young on elephants’. It is most likely that Arab mariners returning from East Africa had seen theAepyornis, orelephant bird, on Madagascar. This voyage started at Bassorah (Basra), where Sindbad found a ‘fine tall ship, newly builded, with gear unused and fitted ready for sea. I bought her and hired a master and crew, over whom I set certain of my slaves as inspectors. After reciting thefatihah[the first chapter of the Quran], we set sail over Allah’s pool in all joy and cheer, promising ourselves a prosperous voyage and much profit’. Allah’s pool (the Gulf) was the first of the Arab ‘Seven Seas’, which they then calledbahr faris(Persian Sea). Unlike Sindbad, few if any Arabs refer to it by its formal geographical title ‘the Persian Gulf’ today.

A similar voyage was made in the mid-eighth century CE from the Gulf of Oman to an island which the Arabs calledsarandib(Sri Lanka). This is the derivation of our word ‘serendipity’ – an unplanned fortunate discovery. They were delighted to find that it ‘containeth many kinds of rubies and other minerals, and spice trees of all sorts’, before they sailed onwards through the Malacca Strait tokhanfu(Canton). This journey was re-created by ‘The Sohar Ship’, built at Sur by Oman’s Ministry of National Heritage and Culture in the late 1970s and sailed from Muscat to Canton in 1980 by a team led by Tim Severin. The vessel subsequently formed the centrepiece of a roundabout outside the Al-Bustan Palace Hotel in Musqat –bustanmeaning a grove or garden.

The seas surrounding the ‘Island of Arabia’, as the Portuguese adventurer Alfonso de Albuquerque called it (Chapter 10), contain fishery, mineral and petrochemical resources, which have been increasingly used to meet the needs of mankind. From the seventeenth century onwards, coastal states recognised that resources within their waters should be theirs alone to exploit. They claimed a belt of water three NM wide, which they would defend if necessary, that being the maximum effective range of the cannon mounted in their coastal defences. All the seas beyond that three-mile limit were called ‘international waters – free to all nations and belonging to none’. After World War Two, coastal states claimed increasingly wider offshore zones from 12 to 200 NM in which hydrocarbon resources particularly could be exploited for the national interest. This brought them into contention with neighbouring states. As early as the mid-1950s, the United Nations recognised that international agreement should be reached to standardise these claims, but it took almost thirty years to achieve that aim when The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was finalised in 1982. It is known as UNCLOS 82 and became international law twelve years later. This set common limits for coastal states of 12 NM for their territorial seas and 200 NM for an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in which offshore resources could be legally exploited. Waters beyond the 200 NM limit were called the ‘High Seas’, themselves subject to a new UN treaty which started its journey to ratification in 2023.

UNCLOS also set out rules for adjacent coastal states to delimitate their common maritime borders out to 12 NM, based on the principle of equidistance from points on their low water lines, and for opposite states to establish the boundaries of their EEZ where the distance between them was less than 400 NM. I was involved in two of these maritime boundary negotiations in the last decade of the twentieth century. One was the demarcation between the EEZs of Oman and Pakistan. In the ocean depths between these proud maritime nations, home to sperm whales, green turtles and yellowfin tuna, lies a subterranean mountain range, the Owen Fracture Zone, which divides the Arabian Sea from the Indian Ocean. An optimistic Omani scheme to lay an oil pipeline to India across this active fault line between two continental plates to India proved, unsurprisingly, to be both too expensive and impracticable. The other negotiation was with Oman’s westerly neighbour, Yemen.

Yemen became a united country in 1970 after almost thirty years of civil unrest between Saudi-allied North Yemen and Communist South Yemen. The historical border between the two states had always been a distinctive giant grey square boulder with a central crack in it called, predicably ‘Split Rock’. It rests on a ledge at the foot of a mountain escarpment near the border village of Sarfayt some 60 NM west of Salalah. The land border agreement between Yemen and Oman had been fixed. The penultimate act before the EEZ limit was agreed was to delimitate the maritime border out to 12 NM, and this required an expert from Oman (in this case me) and his Yemeni counterpart, or at least that was the theory.

I waited with my driver at the newly-opened border post between the two countries three hours ahead of the local low water of a spring tide, when the rocks at the foot of the cliff on which our observations depended would be uncovered. I bore my letter of authorisation, a hand-held GPS receiver, two large-scale maps, sheaves of high-quality aerial photographs and a camera. Split Rock was just three kilometres to the south, accessed by a newly graded but very steep track whose sweeping curves cascaded seawards. We needed to be there one hour before low water. We waited. And waited. With just an hour to spare, from the rapidly opening door of an ancient, rusty and dust-covered Toyota Landcruiser bearing broken Yemeni plates sprang a worried-looking youth clutching his letter and nothing else. He had only recently joined the Hadhramaut regional office of the land survey department of the appropriate ministry and had been told the day before to get to the border, where he would be briefed by an Omani officer. He was not expecting a six-foot-four Englishman wearing camouflage uniform bearing the three gold stripes of amuqaddam bahry(Commander) on his shoulder.

He need not have worried. We shared sufficient Arabic and English for him to understand the task in hand, he in his far-from-pristinedishdasharobe and me, by then in equally grubby trousers, sat on the edge of Split Rock, legs dangling above the waves a hundred metres below. With our aerial photographs in hand, we decided which rock was whose before ringing them on the images with magic markers. He was happy and so was I. Never has a border negotiation been so delightful or an initially nervous young surveyor been so relaxed. As we shared tiny cups ofkahwa(coffee) back at the border post, he told me he came from Shibam, famed for its towering thirty-metre-high close-packed buildings, which Freya Stark noted rose out of the surrounding plain as if ‘a cliff had wandered into the middle of a valley’. Before he clambered back into his Toyota with his annotated map and photographs safe in the leather wallet I had provided, he kissed me on both cheeks and told me he would never forget me. I am sure he has, but I will never forget him.

Chapter 3

taa’

t’areekh

History