Letters from Dutchmen in Oman: Reflections across time
It seems wiser to read letters written by people who actually experienced individual Arab countries, rather than a single guide attempting to cover an entire region or culture at once
Published: 04:11 PM,Nov 13,2025 | EDITED : 08:11 PM,Nov 13,2025
Understanding Arabs was one of the hundreds of books my late father left behind when he passed earlier this year. To my surprise, I recently found it in a box among my parents’ belongings, which had travelled all the way from the Netherlands to our home in Oman. Having spent months at sea, those boxes may even have followed the opposite route of the Shabab Oman II, which sailed to Amsterdam last summer.
At first, I was relieved that the items carefully packed mostly by my husband, had safely arrived in Suhar from Amstelveen, the old Dutch town where my father had lived for decades. After all, centuries ago a ship of the same name had suddenly ended its journey as it wrecked off Oman’s southern coast, so I could not help but briefly fret about a possible jinx, though perhaps that was just me being a control freak.
Whatever the case, while unpacking these boxes, I found myself judging this Understanding Arabs book by its cover. I was unable to get past a title that suggested broad generalisations flattening distinctions, as if there were one single Arab culture to understand. “Arabs are fantastically diverse,” wrote Edward Said, the late Palestinian scholar and author of Orientalism.
Besides, given how long my father had been welcomed as a member of my extended Omani family and how often he had visited this beautiful country, I could not see why he would have needed a “guide” to understand Arabs in the first place.
Luckily, I also found letters containing personal recollections of life as a non-local in Oman during the 1980s and the late 1960s; the early days of the Renaissance and even before Sultan Qaboos bin Said's accession to the throne. They were written by two of my father’s old Dutch university friends of many decades, both of whom had once worked in this unique Arab country.
Their accounts of life in Oman excited me more than that Understanding Arabs guide. Like my late mother, I have always felt that understanding another culture is, if possible, something best experienced, and felt, and sensed individually, rather than learned from a book that attempts to explain the Arab world in its entirety.
In their letters, one of my dad’s friends wrote that tourism in Oman was minimal in 1982 and how he had admired Sultan Qaboos’s visionary leadership, even seeing him once drive past in a 4WD, sand flying behind the car, as he went to pay one of his well-known visits to his people. My father’s friend also recalled the Port Sultan Qaboos, the colourful Muttrah souq, desert-toned buildings, and the camel market and a lovely hotel in Nizwa. Watching the clear night sky from a rooftop, he felt both Oman’s vastness and his own smallness. Sharing a floor-seated meal with a local woman brought him closer to the culture despite the language barrier. Reading this reminded me of the real Lawrence of Arabia’s words, “Get to speak their dialect ... not yours.”
The other of my father’s university peers had worked as what he described as the Al Mudir Al Ahm De Sharikat Shell in Oman in the 1960s and early 70s, which probably means he was in charge of Shell’s Oman office. He shared with my father a letter he had written to an acquaintance from the Al Shanfari tribe in which he recounted their local trips. It is hard to imagine that back then there were only three schools in Oman, with no higher education institutions or proper healthcare system. Yet all of that would change rapidly in just a few decades, laying the foundations of the wonderful nation that today plays its unique part in a global world.
Reading these letters and reflecting on his many visits to Oman made me think that perhaps my father had not bought the Understanding Arabs guide for himself, but for those close to him who never had the opportunity to experience Oman or the region firsthand. However, to me it seems wiser to read letters written by people who actually experienced individual Arab countries, rather than a single guide attempting to cover an entire region or culture at once.