Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern explores how and why heritage has emerged as a prevalent force in building the modern nation state of Oman. Amal Sachedina analyses the relations with the past ...that undergird the shift in Oman from an Ibadi shari'a Imamate (1913–1958) to a modern nation state from 1970 onwards. Since its inception as a nation state, material forms in the Sultanate of Oman—such as old mosques and shari'a manuscripts, restored forts, national symbols such as the coffee pot or the dagger ( khanjar ), and archaeological sites—have saturated the landscape, becoming increasingly ubiquitous as part of a standardized public and visual memorialization of the past. Oman's expanding heritage industry, exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, street montages, and cultural festivals, shapes a distinctly national geography and territorialized narrative. But Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern demonstrates there are consequences to this celebration of heritage. As the national narrative conditions the way people ethically work on themselves through evoking forms of heritage, it also generates anxieties and emotional sensibilities that seek to address the erasures and occlusions of the past.
It describes its three purposes: historical retrieval of the Dhufar revolution, revision of modern Omani history, and contextualisation of local events in a manner that accounts for their global and ...regional interconnections. A review of the literature on Oman is provided and the gaps in the literature are identified. A section on terminology is also included, in which broader theories are engaged, and the revolutionary character of the events that unfolded in Dhufar between 1965 and 1976 is emphasised. Finally, the chapters of the book are outlined, and the broad range of Arabic and English sources on which they are based is discussed.
An examination of the historical environment of Muscat, the capital of Oman, and the damage sustained by the city's historical legacy since 1970. It includes a historical gazetteer of Muscat and its ...environs and numerous maps and photographs.
Looking at the social, political and legal changes in Oman since 1970, this book challenges the Islamic and tribal traditional cultural norms relating to marriage, divorce and women's rights which ...guide social and legal practice in the modern Omani state. The book argues that despite the establishment of legal instruments guaranteeing equality for all citizens, the fact that the state depends upon Islamic and tribal elites for its legitimacy invalidates these guarantees in practice. Two particular features of the legal and cultural regulation of marriage and marital rights are focused on - the perceived requirement for kafa'a or equality in marriage between so called high and low socio-economic status peoples is examined, and the institution of talaq, which grants greater rights to men than to women in appeals for divorce. This book addresses highly complex subjects with great rigor, in terms of empirical research and engagement with theory, sociological and political as well as theological and legal. It is an interesting investigation of the divisions of authority between the state, Islam and tribal norms, highlighting barriers to reform in both Oman and wider Islamic society, and advocating the removal of such obstacles.
In the Time of Oil Limbert, Mandana
In the time of oil: piety, memory, and social life in an Omani town,
2010, 2010-06-07, 20100101
eBook
Before the discovery of oil in the late 1960s, Oman was one of the poorest countries in the world, with only six kilometers of paved roads and one hospital. By the late 1970s, all that had changed as ...Oman used its new oil wealth to build a modern infrastructure. In the Time of Oil describes how people in Bahla, an oasis town in the interior of Oman, experienced this dramatic transformation following the discovery of oil, and how they now grapple with the prospect of this resource's future depletion. Focusing on shifting structures of governance and new forms of sociality as well as on the changes brought by mass schooling, piped water, and the fracturing of close ties with East Africa, Mandana Limbert shows how personal memories and local histories produce divergent notions about proper social conduct, piety, and gendered religiosity. With close attention to the subtleties of everyday life and the details of archival documents, poetry, and local histories, Limbert provides a rich historical ethnography of oil development, piety, and social life on the Arabian Peninsula.
The leaders of the oil-rich rentier states of the Middle East, and in particular in the Gulf, have hitherto often predicated their legitimacy on a tacit social contract with their (much poorer) ...populations. This social contract consists of little or no direct taxation, with some sort of subsidised living. But the casualty of this tacit agreement is often political participation, an issue which has come to the forefront in the Middle East following the 'Arab Spring' of 2011. Here, Sulaiman Al-Farsi looks at the impact the rentier nature of the Gulf States has on political participation, focusing on the nexus between tribe, religion and a new generation of young, highly educated citizens that is present in Oman. Specifically exploring the concept of shura (consultation), and how nascent concepts of democracy in the practice of shura have impacted and shaped the process of democratisation, Al-Farsi's book is vital in the examination of the political discourse surrounding democratisation across one of the most strategically important, but little understood states in the Middle East.
This is the first monograph to present research at the Adam oasis, located at the margins of the Rub Al-Khali desert, Oman. Major periods are described, with evidence of Palaeolithic occupation, ...Neolithic settlements, Early and Middle Bronze Age necropolises, and Iron Age ritual sites. An ethnographic study of traditional water sharing is included.
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•Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide deposits of Oman are mapped using remote sensing technique.•Occurrence and spatial distribution of alteration zones are discriminated by image ...processing methods.•Spectroscopy data to characterize alteration zones are documented.•Application of remote sensing is confirmed by filed and mineralogical studies.
In this study, the oxidized and hydrothermally altered zones, including propylitic, argillic and phyllic zones associated with volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits in the Sohar-Shinas region of the Sultanate of Oman are studied based on absorption characters of spectral bands of Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). In this work, we have used selected imaging processing methods, including decorrelation stretching, band ratios, linear spectral unmixing (LSU) and Mixture Tuned Matched Filtering (MTMF), as well as petrological and geochemical characteristics of the alteration zones to map and understand the distribution of these alteration zones.
Results indicate that 1) the decorrelation of ASTER spectral bands 3, 6, and 8 discriminate extrusive basalts, and the host lithology of altered zones; 2) the application of ASTER band ratios (5/3+1/2) (oxidized zone), (4+6)/5 (argillic zone) and (5+7)/6 (phyllic zone) delineate alteration zones spatially associated with mineralized zones, 3) the utilization of ASTER indices for OH bearing altered minerals (e.g. kaolin and alunite indices) confirmed the presence of alteration minerals in the mineralized zone, 4) alteration end members derived using the spectral angle mapper (SAM) method in combination with linear spectral unmixing (LSU) can be used to map the distribution of the weathering and alteration zones, 5) short wavelength infrared (SWIR) measurements on field samples were used to confirm spectral measurements from ASTER data, and 6) microscopic study and XRD analysis of field samples confirmed the presence of hematite and goethite in the oxidized zone; chlorite, epidote and calcite in the propylitic zone; kaolin and chlorite in the argillic zone; sericite and illite in the phyllic zone, the major minerals responsible to absorptions of ASTER bands 3, 8, 5 and 6 respectively. This study demonstrated the sensor capability of ASTER and the potential use of the image processing methods, and documented the spectral absorptions values of the altered minerals and the field and mineralogical characters of alteration zones of the volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits to map similar deposits elsewhere.
M. Reda Bhacker looks at the role of Oman in the Indian Ocean prior to British domination of the region. Omani merchant communities played a crucial part in the development of commercial activity ...throughout the territories they held in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially between Muscat and Zanzibar, using long established trade networks. They were also largely responsible for the integration of the commerce of the Indian Ocean into the nascent global capitalist system.
The author, himself a member of an important Omani merchant family, looks in detail at the complex relationship between the merchant community and Oman's rulers, first the Ya'ariba and then the Albusaidis. He analyses the tribal and religious dynamics of Omani politics both in Arabia, where he looks especially at the Wahhabi/Saudi threat, and in Oman's sprawling `empire', with particular reference to Zanzibar where the Omani ruler Sa'id b Sultan had his court from 1840. His aim is to consider all Oman's overseas territories as a single entity, without the usual misleading compartmentalisation of African and Arab history.
Dr Bhacker finds that despite their prestige and influence in the region neither the merchant communities nor the government were able to respond to Britain's determined onslaught. Bhacker traces the local and regional factors that allowed Britain to destroy Oman's largely commercial challenge and to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century as the commercially and politically dominant power in the region.
