Abstract
The recent explosion of mass protest movements in the Middle East has reminded the Western public that the Arab world harbours its own political projects. Abdel Razzak Takriti’s book documents an earlier upsurge of revolutionary activity in this region, a historical episode that was sparingly reported in the West at the time, and that has been fictionalised since as a terrorist backdrop to SAS heroics.
The guerrilla struggle in Dhufar, a mountainous, remote region in the south-west of Oman on the Arabian peninsula, followed the defeat of British colonial control in North Yemen in 1962, and then in South Yemen, where an armed campaign forced Britain to pull out in November 1967. In Oman, British control fronted by the Sultan was largely confined to a few coastal enclaves, and the country’s interior was under the control of the Imam, the paramount force astride a tribal system that exacted a surplus mainly through slavery and sharecropping. The first detailed research of the revolution that began sweeping through the Gulf states region from the early 1960s was carried out by Fawwaz Trabulsi and Fred Halliday. Out of this, Halliday published Arabia Without the Sultans in 1974, a book that stands apart from much of the subsequent literature in English by virtue of its sympathetic portrayal of the guerrilla movements. For an understanding of the contemporary Arabian peninsula, Takriti’s analysis will now become the key reference. His analysis of the connections between the internal dynamics of the Dhufari revolution and the ideological and political cross-currents that defined anti-imperialist politics in the Arab world sets an example for how to examine political movements.
British officials, having overseen an ignominious retreat from Aden, knew that the Omani state had to demonstrate some economic development if it was to survive. The Sultan, Said bin Taimur, accustomed to the indulgence of his imperial masters, stonewalled development plans. Even as his coffers were swelling with the revenue from the oil concession to Shell, he clung to the conservative imperial vision that feared social change corroding the traditional bonds. In 1970, British officials engineered a palace coup, replacing him with his son, a similarly inept but more pliable character.
One of the consequences of the armed struggle, Takriti notes, was to integrate Dhufaris into an Arab national identity and into the regional anti-colonial struggle. Unemployed Dhufaris went in search of jobs in one of the military forces of the region or in the ports and oil refineries of Kuwait, settling in migrant communities drawn from all corners of the Arab world. In such a milieu, but particularly among its more educated stratum, the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN) that had been formed in the late 1940s gradually emerged as the main forum of political education, inspiring many young Dhufaris to join the revolution on their return. Ideological shifts in MAN were to reverberate widely, and to influence the trajectory of the Dhufari movement.
In the Dhufari mobilisation against the Anglo-Sultanic rule, Takriti identifies different currents: tribalist, Dhufarist and republican. When the Dhufar Liberation Movement (DLF) launched its armed struggle in 1965, the main internal tension was between the supporters of ‘Dhufar for the Dhufahris’, which viewed Oman as the colonial power; and those who embraced Nasserism, arguing that the Dhufari revolution was part of a wider struggle to liberate the Arabian peninsula from British imperialism and the dynastic rulers. The revolutionaries attracted runaway slaves to their ranks, and found popular support among the herdsmen and peasants in the mountains where they set up base areas, sourcing their weapons from South Yemen. In response, the British-equipped and -officered Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF) bombed and laid siege to the rebel areas, applying classic counterinsurgency tactics. The initiative in the DLF passed to the Nasserites, but only until the cataclysmic impact of Egypt’s military defeat in 1967. It was MAN that served as the intellectual seedbed for the DLF’s subsequent radicalisation. For Arab revolutionaries, both Nasserism and the Soviet style Marxism-Leninism had revealed their limitations. At the same time, new prospects were opened by the NLF’s triumph in South Yemen, and by China’s left turn during the Cultural Revolution. The ensuing leftward trend in MAN and among Dhufari revolutionaries was reflected in the DLF’s reconstituting itself, in 1968, as the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf (PFLOAG).
Takriti vividly evokes the radical social orientation of PFLOAG in relation to women’s oppression by profiling two women activists who joined the revolutionary movement. Some of the changes in gender relations in the liberated areas, such as the complete cancellation of dowry payments and equality in inheritance, had to be scaled back in the face of conservative opposition, but there were some impressive achievements nonetheless. Polygamy and female genital mutilation were forbidden, and education was made compulsory for girls. By contrast, the class transformation that occurred is less clearly depicted. Perhaps the liberation struggle was defeated too soon for the Front, and consequently for later studies, to have the information to evaluate the social impact of the abolition of slavery, the suppression of sheikhs, the breaking down of tribal barriers, sedentarisation, the collectivisation of some land, and the formation of rural cooperatives. In any case, the SAF’s military attacks made it difficult for the revolution to consolidate these social changes, and the British succeeded in rekindling tribal divisions and recruiting disillusioned Dhufari fighters.
The internal weaknesses of the revolution might have been overcome but for the formidable military forces launched against it in which Iran and Jordan joined Britain. The international support network for south Arabia’s revolutionaries proved less solid than the ties binding British imperial interests to its reactionary regional allies, but the heroes in this war turn out to have been those who dared to imagine a post-imperial order. Takriti’s study will not let British officialdom and SAS propagandists have the last word.