My hypothesis is that Sultan Qaboos favored a social structure segmented along ethno-religious lines in order to operate with more manageable blocks whose leaders would serve as interlocutors. In exchange, they would be responsible for maintaining social peace within their own groups, distributing rents from the oil and public sectors. This policy poses the question of whether Oman has invisibilized (or at least toned down) diversity in the public space in order to preserve a national narrative and social peace, as scholars like Frederik Barth have suggested. I posit that Sultan Qaboos favored this urban and bureaucratic approach to guarantee social stability in a context of fragile yet emerging state institutions.
To approach this topic, I will mainly focus on the building of Ruwi and Qurm in the 1970s, two central pieces in Sultan Qaboos’s urban development program for Muscat. I will rely on urban masterplans and policy documents from the Petroleum Development Oman collection in Muscat, the National Records and Archives of Oman, and the British Library in London. I will also explore the ethno-religious composition of the Majlis al-Shura, the Omani lower house established in 1981, which reflects the social fabric of each constituency through its representatives, to bring together spatial development and politics in Oman during the years of Sultan Qaboos.