by Arnold Rampersad
Oxford, 1986
468 pp. $22.95
by Fred Howard
Knopf, 1987
446 pp. $24.95
by Robert S. Desowitz
Norton, 1987
270 pp. $16.95
By Johanna Menzel Meskill. Prince-
ton, 1987. 375 pp. $12.50
By Michael Harris Goodman.
Shambhala, 1987. 364 pp. $15.95
By Rudolf Wittkower.
Norton, 1987. 223 pp. $14.95
i children celebrating National Day (November 18). Omanis have rarely
failed to charm foreign guests. Writing in 1982, Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan noted their "delicate style of grace, tact, and humility, the quietness and control in manner and speech, the calm and gentle integrity that distinguish them, be they girls or boys, women or men."
WQ NEW YEAR'S 1987
48
Oman
- When Oman's English-educated Sultan Qabus visited the White
House in April 1983, President Reagan genia...
's Musandam Peninsula, a fissured mass of black rock. Deep fiords cut into the land, their sheer sides rising out of the water as high as 5,000 feet. Largely devoid of shrubs or trees, the peninsula's interior consists of rows of wind-worn ridges, interrupted only by jagged peaks.
Sovereignty over the Musandam, barren as it may be, has made Oman a nation of paramount importance. On a clear day, the peninsu- la's Shihuh tribesmen, herding goats near their stone huts, can gaze across the Strait of...
"The people of Muscat seemed to me to be the cleanest, neatest, best-dressed, and most gentlemanly of all the Arabs that I had ever yet seen," recalled J. S. Buckingham, a British traveler, after a visit in 1816.
Buckingham's observations are pre- served in historian J. B. Kelly's Britain and the Persian Gulf (Oxford, 1968), a survey of British involvement in the region from 1795 to 1880. As Kelly makes clear, Britain's ever-growing commercial and political interests in the Gulf ensured t...