Like most writers, I’m intoxicated by stories, and when I first learned about the all-but-unknown country of Oman—once a major maritime power in the Indian Ocean—and its involvement in the East African slave trade, I was hungry to discover more. That “more” soon catapulted me into an extraordinary world filled with romance, beauty, violence, cruelty, and larger-than-life characters I had never heard of before. I was eager to share that world with others and so wrote this book. I am also the author of two other books about the Middle East and am deeply interested in writing about the region’s people, history, and culture, rather than its politics.
I wrote
The Sultan's Shadow: One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West
In this lyrical novel, winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize (the first novel in Arabic to do so), the Omani writer Altharthi captures the rich complexity of a country caught between the past and the future.
Her characters embody various aspects of Oman’s history—its slave trade, its maritime prowess, its close-knit village life, its rapid modern development—while at the same time debunking Western stereotypes about Arab women, society, and culture.
I visited Oman in early 2023 and everywhere I went, I saw Alharthi’s novel brought to life. Time and memory, religion and magic, poetry and proverbs—all swirl hypnotically together in this book, brilliantly translated by Marilyn Booth.
This winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is “an innovative reimagining of the family saga . . . Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets" (The New York Times Book Review).
In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.
In 1955 famed travel writer Jan Morris (then James) accompanied Sultan Said bin Taimur on the first crossing of Oman by motorcar.
They start in the southern region of Dhofar, travel north through desert and mountains, and end in the capital of Muscat. The Oman that Morris describes—one of powerful tribes and enslaved Africans—is no more, and his descriptions are at times tinged with racism.
Nonetheless, they are extraordinary: “…there was a loud insistent blare of the Sultan’s horn. The trucks leapt away like dogs from the leash…” This book made me yearn for the romance (but not the cruelties) of that bygone era while also bringing into focus the extraordinary changes that occurred under Taimur’s successor, Sultan Qaboos, who successfully brought Oman into the modern era.
In 1955 the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, southeast of Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Sea, was a truly medieval Islamic State, shuttered against all progress under the aegis of its traditionalist and autocratic ruler. But it was also nearly the end of an imperial line, for in those days the British Government was still powerful in Arabia. Rumors of subversion and the intrigues of foreign powers mingled with the unsettling smell of oil to propel the sultan on a royal progress across the desert hinterland. It was an historic journey--the first crossing of the Omani desert by motorcar. Jan…
In this scholarly yet quite readable deep dive into Oman’s history, Wilkinson, an Oxford professor and former oil executive, explores the country’s two traditions: its closed, isolated, tribal interior, which until the 1950s was governed by an elected Iman of Ibadi Islam; and its more secular, multiethnic coastal region, which operated as a major maritime power for over 1,000 years.
I was especially interested to learn about the disastrous effects of Western interference in the region—which still reverberate today—and rival oil companies’ battles with traditional Omani leaders to gain control of the country’s oil reserves.
At the core of this book is an attempt to explain a conflict in Oman in the 1950s and 1960s between two claimants to authority: the Imam of the Ibadi sect in the interior and the Sultan with his capital at Muscat on the coast. The crisis, precipitated by two rival oil companies, acquired wider dimensions because the Sultan was supported by the British, whilst the Imam was eventually backed by Saudi Arabia. In his analysis of the roots of this conflict John Wilkinson traces the themes of regional identity, tribal organization and political authority over some 1200 years of…
In 1979 anthropologist Eickelman, together with her husband and 19-month-old daughter, took up residency in Hamra, a small village on the edge of the Jabal al-Akhdar mountains in Oman’s interior.
Here she befriended the village women, witnessed their daily lives and traditions, and learned about how they were coping with the modernization rapidly overtaking their society. The women she describes are self-confident, reserved, thoughtful, and polite—much like the women I met while traveling in Oman.
Eickelman’s book is a valuable record of a disappearing world.
Before 1970 Oman was one of teh more isolated countries on the Arab peninsula. The growth of the oil economy during the seventies, however, has brought rapid change to the small towns and villages that make up the country.
In Women and Community in Oman Chritine Eickelman captures the tone and feel of this desert culture on the verge of substantial, and probably irreversible, change. During 1979 and 1980 she lived in Hamra, an oasis of 2,500 persons and the capital of the Abriyin tribe. Situated on the western edge of the Jabal al-Akhdar region of inner Oman, this was…
In this, one of the few general history books about modern Oman, Jones and Ridout give a comprehensive overview of the country’s last two centuries.
Though scholarly and somewhat dry in tone, it provides solid background information on the country’s politics, economy, religion, and culture. I found the sections on Ibadism (the branch of Islam practiced in Oman and almost nowhere else), Dhofar (where a rebellion occurred in 1963–1976), and Sultan Qaboos, who ruled the country for fifty years (1970–2020), to be especially helpful for understanding Oman.
The ideal introduction to the history of modern Oman from the eighteenth century to the present, this book combines the most recent scholarship on Omani history with insights drawn from a close analysis of the politics and international relations of contemporary Oman. Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout offer a distinctive new approach to Omani history, building on postcolonial thought and integrating the study of politics and culture. The book addresses key topics including Oman's historical cosmopolitanism, the distinctive role of Omani Islam in the country's social and political life, Oman's role in the global economy of the nineteenth century, insurrection…
A story virtually unknown in the West, about two of the Middle East's most compelling characters—Oman's Sultan Said and his rebellious daughter Princess Salme—comes to life in Bird’s compelling narrative. The sultan ruled from the island of Zanzibar, once the clove-producing capital of the world, where he and his sons, together with Arab merchants and African chieftains, escalated the East African slave trade to unprecedented levels. Princess Salme fled from her father's harem to elope with a German businessman and write the first-known published autobiography of an Arab woman.
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
