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Since becoming a nation-state in 1970, Oman's expanding heritage industry has included the restoration of castles and citadels, including the fort at Nizwa. The fort was once the administrative and juridical center of the Ibadi Imamate (1913–58). As the site of sharia adjudication, it sanctioned a past of primarily moral nature, oriented toward God and salvation and grounded in Ibadi doctrine and practice. This mode of history implied that everyday interactions and relationships could be assessed through exemplary forms of morality, as embodied by virtuous forbears. Yet the heritage project in modern Oman has treated history and Islam as seemingly separate, erasing formal awareness of the sociopolitical and ethical relationships that once characterized Ibadi rule. Today, the historical work done by the fort as a heritage site entails a progress-oriented future, reconfiguring Ibadi Islam in the process.
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During his five-decade reign, Sultan Qaboos bin Said relied on heritage as a key tool for nation-building. Old forts and objects central to Omani traditional culture like the coffee urn and the ceremonial dagger became symbols of a unifying national ethos. At the same time, their former political significance was downplayed. But some Omanis have held onto memories of a different conception of the past. And now, after the sultan’s death in 2020, heritage is becoming more of a privatized business sector.
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Scholarship on the Arab Gulf region often links heritage production with technologies of state pedagogy in its efforts to fix the spatial boundaries of a nation and entrench authoritarian rule. Yet, such a modular explanation ignores pressing questions regarding how statist narratives domesticate heterogeneous populations and regulate social difference. This paper explores the ways in which official accounts of the historical past have interpellated the material traces of diasporic communities, specifically the enclave of a minority community in Oman, the al-Lawati with links to the Sind region of the Indian sub-continent. The Sur al Lawati, a fortified residential enclosure of the Al Lawati community, draws from Gujarati traditional architecture rather than the surrounding Muscat cityscape. The sur (enclosure) has been mobilized as a token of the nation's pluralist history as an Indian Ocean trading power. This is consistent with Oman's expanding culture industry, which since the 1970s has generated history-making practices to sediment a homogenous Arab and general Islamic identity. However, using archival and ethnographic research, I argue that the enclave's material presence has presided over the complexities of a more entangled history in which the boundaries of this community of merchants and retailers have been reconfigured over the course of the 20th century. The very act of incorporating the sur and its residents into the history of a national people is grounded on the one hand in celebrating a cosmopolitan past as a sea-faring nation that traversed the Indian Ocean waters. On the other hand, it is also tethered to a sense of the past shaped by such categories as the "Arab tribe" and a "generic Islam" Both histories become an exercise of selectivity. They involve gaps, disjunctures, and diversity at the core of what passes as a unifying history of a sovereign nation.
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Centered on the dalla, the Omani coffee pot, this paper considers how the social practices and knowledges induced by its material form and function organize different forms of perceptual skills. These skills habituate ways of seeing that become a means towards examining the shift from the religio–ethical relationships that defined the shari'a society of the last Ibadi Islamic Imamate that ruled the interior of the region (1913–1955) to those that define ‘heritage’ as part of Omani modern nation state building today. As a coffee server in the Imamate era, the dalla facilitated a history that was primarily moral in nature, oriented towards God and divine salvation. From 1970 onwards, as a visual symbol, it became an integral part of a national linear chronicle of progressive historicity. Through a shift in authoritative time, rationales of temporality, ethics and history were reconfigured, displacing an Imamate while establishing a modern-day Sultanate in its place.
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Topic
- Coutumes -- Oman (1)
- Monuments -- Oman (2)
- Recension (3)
Resource type
- Journal Article (8)
Publication year
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Between 2000 and 2026
(8)
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Between 2010 and 2019
(3)
- 2019 (3)
- Between 2020 and 2026 (5)
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Between 2010 and 2019
(3)