since its inception as a modern nation state in 1970, the Sultanate of Oman has actively pursued a policy of national integration and modernization, smoothing over the region’s political cleavages through the practices of heritage. Oman’s expanding heritage industry and market for heritage crafts and sites is exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, cultural festivals and the restoration of more than a hundred forts, castles and citadels. The material forms of national heritage provide the context within which the very foundations of the nation take shape. But the construction of the heritage project in modern Oman has also necessitated the formulation of the public domains of history and Islam as seemingly separate and autonomous, erasing any awareness of the socio-political and ethical relationships that once characterized Ibadi Imamate rule (1913-1958) in the region. This dissertation is a study of how forms of history, the re-configuration of temporality and the institutionalization of material heritage (turāth) recalibrate the Islamic tradition to requirements of modern political and moral order in Oman. Based primarily on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Muscat, the capital and Nizwa, once the administrative and juridical centre of the Ibadi Imamate, it explores the different ways in which the Oman’s past inhabits the present, sustaining an active effect on the configuration of religion and community in the nation state.

since its inception as a modern nation state in 1970, the Sultanate of Oman has actively pursued a policy of national integration and modernization, smoothing over the region’s political cleavages through the practices of heritage. Oman’s expanding heritage industry and market for heritage crafts a...