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  Oman has a particular culture and history that distinguish it from its neighbors. It also is the state with the shortest coastline along the Persian Gulf. Most of Oman lies along the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. The gulf has been an important waterway since ancient times, bringing the people who live on its shores into early contact with other civilizations. In the ancient world, the gulf peoples established trade connections with India; in the Middle Ages, they went as far as China; and in the modern era, they became involved with the European powers that sailed into the Indian Ocean and around Southeast Asia. In the twentieth century, the discovery of massive oil deposits in the gulf made the area once again a crossroads for the modern world. The people are mostly Arabs. Because they live in basically tribal societies, family and clan connections underlie most political and economic activity. The discovery of oil and the increasing contact with the West has led to tremendous material and social changes. In Oman high mountain ranges effectively cut off the country’s hinterland from the rest of the region . Moreover, various tribal loyalties throughout the region are frequently divisive and are exacerbated by religious differences that involve the major sects of Islam-- Sunni and Shia (see Glossary)--and the smaller Kharijite sect as well as Muslim legal procedures. Qatar is a small country dominated by the Persian Gulf’s largest ruling family, the Al Thani. The amir, Shaykh Khalifa ibn Hamad Al Thani, is the country’s ruler, but his son, Shaykh Hamad ibn Khalifa Al Thani, in addition to being the heir apparent and minister of defense, wields considerable power in the day-to-day running of the country. The Al Thani regime tolerates no political opposition. The social mores of the country are shaped by a somewhat milder version of qatar/qa_glos.asp#Wahhabi">Wahhabi (see Glossary) Islam than is found in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Women are permitted to drive if they obtain permits, for example, and non-Qatari women need not veil in public. Occupying a barren peninsula scorched by extreme summer heat, Qatar was transformed between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s from a poor British protectorate noted mainly for pearling into an independent state with modern infrastructure, services, and industries. The state was built using mostly foreign labor and expertise, with funding from oil revenues. And as in other states where oil dominates the economy, Qatar’s fortunes have followed those of the world oil market. The late 1980s and early 1990s were times of relative austerity, with development projects canceled or delayed. But those years were also a period of significant transition when Qatar began its shift from an economy reliant almost entirely on oil to one that would be supported by the exploitation of natural gas from the North Field, the world’s largest natural gas field. The early 1990s also constituted a watershed period in foreign relations because the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq on August 2, 1990, changed regional and world alignments. Qatar sent troops to fight for Kuwait’s liberation and, reversing its previous opposition to the presence of foreign forces in the region, permitted United States, Canadian, and French air force fighter aircraft to operate from Doha (also seen as Ad Dawhah). This placed Qatar firmly on the anti-Iraq side of the great rift that split the Arab world after the invasion and weakened the full support for the Palestine Liberation Organization that the country had previously shown. Human habitation of the Qatar Peninsula dates as far back as 50,000 years, when small groups of Stone Age inhabitants built coastal encampments, settlements, and sites for working flint, according to recent archaeological evidence. Other finds have included pottery from the Al Ubaid culture of Mesopotamia and northern Arabia (ca. 5000 B.C.), rock carvings, burial mounds, and a large town that dates from about 500 B.C. at Wusail, some twenty kilometers north of Doha. The Qatar Peninsula was close enough to the Dilmun civilization (ca. 4000 to 2000 B.C.) in Bahrain to have felt its influence. A harsh climate, lack of resources, and frequent periods of conflict, however, seem to have made it inevitable that no settlement would develop and prosper for any significant length of time before the discovery of oil. The peninsula was used almost continuously as rangeland for nomadic tribes from Najd and Al Hasa regions in Saudi Arabia, with seasonal encampments around sources of water. In addition, fishing and pearling settlements were esta