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OMAN Oman, Culture, and Diplomacy, by Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Rideout. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 296 pages. $95.
Reviewed by Calvin H. Allen, Jr.
Jeremy Jones, a senior research associate at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and Nicholas Rideout, a reader in Theatre and Performance Studies at Queen Mary University, whose previous work focused on democratic development in Oman, turn their attention to Omani foreign relations. Drawing on a wide range of secondary sources, archives of the Omani Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and interviews with ministry officials (although only Secretary General Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Al Bu Sa'id is mentioned by name), they argue that the practice of diplomacy in Oman has developed from a history of cosmopolitanism combined with characteristics inherent in Omani culture.
Part I (chapters 1 and 2) examines the historical and cultural characteristics that shape Omani diplomacy, focusing on the country's cultural diversity as well as its interaction with its Indian Ocean neighbors and aspects of everyday life, such as tolerance and non-sectarianism, politeness as social virtue, preponderance of settled, urban centers dependent on the falaj irrigation system, and the shura (consultation) system that all combined to create a "cosmopolitan" culture of diplomacy. Part II (chapters 3-7) provides...