54FROM ENERGY POVERTY TO ENERGY EXTREMISMOmanis would be yanked into the modern age perhaps more quickly
than any population on earth, but development wouldn’t come as the
result of a popular uprising that overthrew the monarchy. The driving
force was oil wealth, combined with the impressive leadership feats of
Sultan Said’s only son, Qaboos.
Qaboos graduated from Britain’s Sandhurst military academy in the
early 1960s, served a year in the British infantry, and returned to Oman
in 1964. Sultan Said welcomed his son home by clapping him under
house arrest. Qaboos spent the next six years locked away in Sultan Said’s
palace with only his books and record collection for company. It gradu-
ally dawned on Said’s British minders that young Qaboos would make
a much better sultan. British officers helped the illustrious captive foment
the coup in July 1970 that finally deposed Sultan Said.^11 The old sultan,
wounded in the chaos of his own downfall, had to be airlifted out of the
country by the British. Humiliated, he lived out his final two years in
London’s Dorchester Hotel.
The daunting task of modernizing Oman got a big push in 1973, when
the Arab oil embargo tripled oil prices. Oman was producing 300,000
barrels per day, nearly all of it exported. The dynamic Sultan Qaboos
wielded the windfall to push his country through one of the most con-
centrated transformations in world history. Qaboos managed to defeat
or win over the communist rebels, educate and enrich his citizens, and
build a national infrastructure that transformed and extended lives to
developed- world levels in an astonishingly short period (see figure 4.1).
Today’s Oman is the most beautiful of the Gulf states, a Middle Eastern
Switzerland of aesthetic modern settlements harmonized to their sur-
roundings of date palm groves and ancient mountaintop fortresses.
How did Omanis respond to their newfound prosperity? According
to modernization theory, they should have risen up and disrupted the
political order. In fact, the opposite occurred. Prosperity in Oman rein-
vigorated the legitimacy of the Al Bu Said dynasty after the disastrous
reign of Sultan Said. Sultan Qaboos’s highly successful modernization
had reinforced autocratic institutions, not undermined them.
In Abu Dhabi, a similar story was unfolding. Sheikh Shakhbut bin
Sultan al- Nahyan maintained a comparable rule to Sultan Said, minus
the absurdities. After discovering oil in 1958, Shakhbut strove to block