Museum Effects

Abstract

This chapter looks at the public spaces that have come into being; museums, heritage festivals, monuments, street montages, and exhibits have heralded the nahda in a dual sense — an epochal break from the past, even as they celebrate the “return” and the immanence of this history in the present. These values and principles have fundamentally reorganized historical experiences and cultivated new sensibilities and emotional links, providing the context for shaping the nation. In the process, the mode of museal representation that is heritage cleaved the temporal assumptions of sharīʿa time and its relations to the past. The materiality of objects and sites, including sharīʿa manuscripts and mosques, assume an iterative, pedagogical mode of representation through which historical-national claims, histories, and heritage objects substantiate the sultanate. These material effects cultivate everyday national civic virtues and new forms of religiosity and of punctuating time, defining the ethical actions necessary to become an Omani modern citizen through the framework of tradition.