Mandana E. Limbert has drawn on her personal experience of living in Oman and her love for the country to write a book exploring the country's mysterious past and its march into the 21st centuryTHE Sultanate of Oman is an Arabian marvel. In the last forty years, it has leapt from poverty to prosperity under the guidance of Sultan Qaboos Bin Said. Hailed as “al-nahda” or “renaissance,” Oman's path to progress is the subject of several fine new academic studies. A notable example is Mandana E. Limbert's “In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory & Social Life in an Omani Town” (Stanford University, Press, 2010). A graduate of Brown University and the University of Michigan, Mandana E. Limbert is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In her book, she takes a look at the Omani transformation through the prism of a small town, called Bahla, in the country's interior region (Al-Dakhiliyia). How did the residents of this town adapt to change in a new era of (finite) oil wealth? Limbert studied “how the past was evoked, experienced, and managed in the present, and how the present was haunted by the future.” In an interview with Saudi Gazette, she discussed her latest project. What inspired you to write “In the Time of Oil”? I had often heard the Gulf region characterized as one of new wealth and shallow history. Growing up in the region, I knew that this characterization was less than accurate and that although oil wealth had dramatically altered the region's infrastructural and social landscape, the way people understood and experienced these changes was not simple and could hardly be reduced to a clash of tradition and modernity. I wanted to write a book that took readers into a world rich in poetic, political, and pious life. What challenges did you face in writing your book? The complexities that inspired me to write the book were the same ones that made it so challenging. It was often difficult to know where to begin, not to mention where to stop. Of course, it was also challenging to write a book that aimed to emphasize the importance of the past when the past appears almost exclusively in fragments: in religious endowment documents, in British archives, in local oral and written histories, in crumbling buildings and walls. Without established political, economic, or social narratives to rely on and in order to understand the significance of the fragments, I found myself piecing together a lot. Finally, it was challenging to write a book that was concerned with very ephemeral subjects such as conceptions of the past and future as they related to oil wealth. I was not doing research about an oil company nor was I necessarily working with people who worked in the oil industry. And, yet, I was interested in the ways that oil wealth affected people's material conditions and the ways they saw the world. Did you enjoy living in Oman? What impressed you about the people and the culture? I loved living in Oman and in Bahla in particular. As many people who have conducted research on the region know, the interior of Oman has the reputation of having been rather unwelcoming to strangers. And, with the added reputation of being a center of occult knowledge, I was warned that Bahla would be particularly unwelcoming. I did not find this to be the case at all. Though understandably curious about why I was in Bahla, most people became very interested in my project and helped guide me through some of the contours of their world. I was often struck, in Bahla, by people's piety and their unexpectantly dry sense of humor; and, I was especially struck by the tolerance that many elders exhibited towards worlds wholly different from their own. I hope the book does justice to the richness of life in Bahla. What do you think will be the lasting marks of Oman's “Renaissance”? If there is one thing that I learned during my research, it is that people should not try to predict the future. Indeed, this is one of the main themes of the book. Nevertheless, I believe it would be safe to say that many of the achievements of Oman's renaissance will be credited to Sultan Qaboos's personal investment in the nation's well-being. And, I believe, that though all its effects and implications can never be completely anticipated, the introduction of mass state schooling and literacy programs will have profoundly altered peoples' expectations, understandings, and desires. What do you think Oman will be like in 2050? Again, predicting the future is precisely what I learned I should not do. I do not know what 2050 will be like in Oman. I do believe that much depends on who will be governing the country, and how they will govern. Much depends on the state of the country's economy and whether its natural resources can sustain the expectations – whether economic, social, or political – of its population and whether its economy and its productive wealth become successfully tied to other industries, whatever they may be. Much also depends on the political, economic, and social conditions in other Gulf states. Though each of the states in the region is unique, they are all connected and it would be naïve to imagine that what happens in one place does not affect the others.
