Yet the sultan now faces a vaguer threat to his regime: acceleration of change that threatens to end Oman's relative isolation. Half the population is under twenty-one, and increasingly more young people are dressing in Western clothes and wearing baseball caps. Partly to create jobs for all these young people and partly to diversify the economy, the sultanate is now being forced to move in the direction of mass tourism, filling up the unspoiled coast with holiday villages for Europeans that will, in turn, affect Oman's carefully preserved traditional culture.