{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026446914526638558, 'fraction_numerical': 0.013415101571483326, 'mean_word_length': 4.565031982942431, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Imamate Tradition of Oman , by John C. Wilkinson. (Cambridge Middle East Library.) xii + 415 pages, tables, figures, maps, notes, bibliography, general index. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987. $59.50.

John C. Wilkinson tells us that his hope of writing a best-seller, "a good read," based on the "heady story" of how two rival oil companies set off the Buraimi oasis crisis and got embroiled in the struggle for suzerainty in south-east Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s, was over many years "doomed by the encroaching sands of scholarship." We readers may be the better off for it. With the perspective of a quarter-century, these events have taken their place as little more than a footnote in the history of the tumultuous political doings and changes in the region in the postwar era. The read that issued from these years of study is less good than very rewarding, and the scholarship is demanding and of a very high order. The final product is a work for the specialist, not the general reader. The study consists of four parts, preceded by a short prolegomenon on the tradition and history of the Imamate of the Ibadi sect in Oman. Parts 1 and 2 are devoted to two elements of real continuity amidst the many changes over at least two millennia in interior Oman: the sense of regional identity and the geopolitical structure that produced it, on the one hand, and the tribal structures that organized society and its activities, on the other. Part 3, the longest section and the core of this study, deals with the Omani Imamate structures—the Imamate community, its laws, and its dynastic history over twelve hundred years from the early years of the Islamic era down to the beginning of the twentieth century. Part 4, a bit more than a fourth of the book, focuses on the twentieth-century Imamate, its restoration in the interior in 1913, and then its destruction in the oil game played out in the 1950s and 1960s. This section explains the conflict in Oman during these years in terms of two rival claimants to authority, the Imam based in the interior and the Sultan of Muscat and Oman on the coast, and shows how the crisis, precipitated by the competing oil companies, acquired wider dimensions because the Sultan was supported by the British and the Imam was eventually backed by Saudi Arabia. The ambitious scholarly task Wilkinson set for himself was to describe and explain the closed, largely self-sufficient Imamate community of interior Oman, a community tribal in its organization and governed by an elected Imam according to the ideology of Ibadi Islam. He sees the community's