Watching the not-so-peaceful transition of power here in the USA reminds me of our time in Arabia when the Sultan of Oman unexpectedly died. At the time of his death (January 2020), Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric was leading America into a war with Iran. Like the locals, Jeanne and I were keenly aware that Oman was only 20 miles across the Straights of Hormuz from Iran.
We were spending a month in Muscat, the capital of the country and location of the Sultan’s palaces. From our outsider’s perspective, Sultan Qaboos seemed to be well-loved in Oman. Bumper stickers everywhere proclaimed “My Sultan, My Hero.”
In his fifty-year reign, he’d brought the country from an undeveloped desert to one of the world’s most prosperous nations, wisely avoiding most of the geopolitical confrontations that regularly raged across the middle-east. He was pro-Western, usually pro-American, and he often played the role of the neutral middle-man in middle-eastern affairs. He’d used his immense oil-wealth to build the world’s biggest and most spectacular mosque, the world’s most technologically-advanced opera house, amazing national museums and a network of roads and public spaces like nothing I’ve ever seen. He owned the world’s biggest yacht, and when somebody else built a bigger one, he ordered an even bigger one built. He constructed himself an enormous palace that was part Salvador Dali and part Disneyland. Of course, as in any monarchy where the sovereign rules by decree and the freedom of speech doesn’t extend to criticizing the government, there were probably dark acts that nobody talked about. All in all, though, the sultan seemed to have been a mostly benevolent ruler.
One morning we woke to the news that the sultan had died. Everything—EVERYTHING–in the entire country shut down for a period of mourning. Thank goodness we’d gone to the grocery store the day before. When we drove by the palace the same day, tanks and troops were everywhere. People were wandering around Muscat as if in a daze. As visiting foreigners, it was fascinating (and a bit scary) to be in-country during this time, especially since he had never publicly announced a successor to the throne. The entire country clenched its collective butt-cheeks as the government tried to figure out what to do.
That’s when the situation took a turn to the bizarre. The sultan, it seemed, had a flair for melodrama. From the news, we learned that the Sultan had designated a successor decades earlier, but had hidden his choice to be the next ruler in a secret letter. There were supposedly two copies of this letter, one hidden in the north of the country, another in the south. If the royal court could not come to consensus, they were to seek out these letters, open them, and the person named within would be the new king.
Seriously, I am not making this up. Sounds like the tagline for one of those 1990’s princess fairy-tale movies, doesn’t it? Something you watch on Netflix on a rainy Sunday while laying on the couch, right? From the palace, courtiers were immediately dispatched to the north and to the south to find the secret letters, which I understand they then delivered to the palace in Muscat under heavy guard. The entire country waited in baited breath. The sultan had no biological heirs. Who would he pick?
Frankly, Jeanne and I were a little disappointed when the letters revealed that the sultan’s cousin, another ultra-rich oil magnate, would be the new sovereign. In the movie version it would’ve gone to some young man or woman, a commoner with previously-unknown royal ancestry. An orphan that lived on a farm in Alabama or Kansas, maybe. Imagine the scene: some dude in bejeweled robe would show up at the screen door with the royal scepter and Uncle Bubba would at first run him off with a shotgun, then later realize it was the real deal.
Anyway, none of that happened. The transition from old king to new was peaceful and orderly. At the same time, Donald Trump’s ambitions in Iran were quickly being derailed by COVID, maybe the only positive outcome of the virus. It could have gone badly. Jeanne and I might have been trapped in a country where rioters stormed the government in a violent coup attempt. Thankfully, that didn’t happen in Oman. We would have to come back to the USA and wait a year for that particular nightmare to come true.
