Muscat emerging: tourism and cultural space

Abstract

This is a pre-print version of the following article, published in print form and available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14766825.2010.521246. El-Amrousi, Mohamed and John Biln. “Muscat Emerging: Tourism and Cultural Space.” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 8:4 (2010): 254-266. Muscat’s development into a modern city has been of an entirely different order from that experienced elsewhere in the Gulf. The Muscat of the 1970s and 1980s was a complex urban environment, and the Muscat of today remains complex in ways not typical of cites such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The novel Warda by Sanallah Ibarahim and the memoir Arabia by Jonathan Raban, provide insights into the ground conditions of Muscat at a time before present economic pressures propelled a new round of changes in the physical fabric of the city and tourist resorts nearby. Under pressure to accomplish agendas both of heritage preservation and economic development, recent urban transformations in Muscat comprise three basic strategies, each organically linked to the Muscat of previous decades: Re-Covering the Past, evident in Muscat’s historic core; Phasing Space, seen in the Grand Mosque of Sultan Qaboos; and Forging Reality, present in a new wave of tourist enclaves along the Oman coast. Taken together, these strategies can be understood as original attempts to harness Muscat’s complex urban and cultural pasts in order to construct a robust framework for the development of everyday life, national identity, tourist engagement and a uniquely Omani modernity for the future.