Here are 100 books that A History of Modern Oman fans have personally recommended if you like
A History of Modern Oman.
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Like most writers, I’m intoxicated by stories, and when I first learned about the all-but-unknown country of Oman—once a major maritime power in the Indian Ocean—and its involvement in the East African slave trade, I was hungry to discover more. That “more” soon catapulted me into an extraordinary world filled with romance, beauty, violence, cruelty, and larger-than-life characters I had never heard of before. I was eager to share that world with others and so wrote this book. I am also the author of two other books about the Middle East and am deeply interested in writing about the region’s people, history, and culture, rather than its politics.
In this lyrical novel, winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize (the first novel in Arabic to do so), the Omani writer Altharthi captures the rich complexity of a country caught between the past and the future.
Her characters embody various aspects of Oman’s history—its slave trade, its maritime prowess, its close-knit village life, its rapid modern development—while at the same time debunking Western stereotypes about Arab women, society, and culture.
I visited Oman in early 2023 and everywhere I went, I saw Alharthi’s novel brought to life. Time and memory, religion and magic, poetry and proverbs—all swirl hypnotically together in this book, brilliantly translated by Marilyn Booth.
This winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is “an innovative reimagining of the family saga . . . Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets" (The New York Times Book Review).
In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.
I ‘fell’ into being at sea by chance, through my father’s insistence I join him on a Scottish fishing boat for a week. I discovered I adored exploring unknown islands and lonely beaches, discovering wildlife and resilient small communities. In the 1990’s a female working amongst fishermen and commercial shipping was unknown, it was a wholly male, chauvinistic world. Using these skills I found a job being paid to explore – a dream job, pioneering but frequently lonely and dangerous. It resulted in my expanding the range and world of small expedition ships into areas with no infrastructure, unexplored and uncharted, lonely, empty coasts from the Arctic to Singapore.
In this entertaining book Jan Morris crosses the Oman desert travelling as one of the Sultan’s entourage.
I know Oman well, having visited long before the country was ‘open’ to tourism. I have slept on just a blanked on the sand with the huge bowl of Arabian stars sliding across a black sky above me so the delightful prose brings this all to life again. The early days of the oil business, whilst unfashionable these days are historic, the descriptions are vivid and highly amusing.
Desert life, campfires, camels, and Bedouin are all colourfully brought to life, with descriptions of the superb mud forts and sands so frequent in the mountains and sands of Oman.
In 1955 the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, southeast of Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Sea, was a truly medieval Islamic State, shuttered against all progress under the aegis of its traditionalist and autocratic ruler. But it was also nearly the end of an imperial line, for in those days the British Government was still powerful in Arabia. Rumors of subversion and the intrigues of foreign powers mingled with the unsettling smell of oil to propel the sultan on a royal progress across the desert hinterland. It was an historic journey--the first crossing of the Omani desert by motorcar. Jan…
Like most writers, I’m intoxicated by stories, and when I first learned about the all-but-unknown country of Oman—once a major maritime power in the Indian Ocean—and its involvement in the East African slave trade, I was hungry to discover more. That “more” soon catapulted me into an extraordinary world filled with romance, beauty, violence, cruelty, and larger-than-life characters I had never heard of before. I was eager to share that world with others and so wrote this book. I am also the author of two other books about the Middle East and am deeply interested in writing about the region’s people, history, and culture, rather than its politics.
In this scholarly yet quite readable deep dive into Oman’s history, Wilkinson, an Oxford professor and former oil executive, explores the country’s two traditions: its closed, isolated, tribal interior, which until the 1950s was governed by an elected Iman of Ibadi Islam; and its more secular, multiethnic coastal region, which operated as a major maritime power for over 1,000 years.
I was especially interested to learn about the disastrous effects of Western interference in the region—which still reverberate today—and rival oil companies’ battles with traditional Omani leaders to gain control of the country’s oil reserves.
At the core of this book is an attempt to explain a conflict in Oman in the 1950s and 1960s between two claimants to authority: the Imam of the Ibadi sect in the interior and the Sultan with his capital at Muscat on the coast. The crisis, precipitated by two rival oil companies, acquired wider dimensions because the Sultan was supported by the British, whilst the Imam was eventually backed by Saudi Arabia. In his analysis of the roots of this conflict John Wilkinson traces the themes of regional identity, tribal organization and political authority over some 1200 years of…
Like most writers, I’m intoxicated by stories, and when I first learned about the all-but-unknown country of Oman—once a major maritime power in the Indian Ocean—and its involvement in the East African slave trade, I was hungry to discover more. That “more” soon catapulted me into an extraordinary world filled with romance, beauty, violence, cruelty, and larger-than-life characters I had never heard of before. I was eager to share that world with others and so wrote this book. I am also the author of two other books about the Middle East and am deeply interested in writing about the region’s people, history, and culture, rather than its politics.
In 1979 anthropologist Eickelman, together with her husband and 19-month-old daughter, took up residency in Hamra, a small village on the edge of the Jabal al-Akhdar mountains in Oman’s interior.
Here she befriended the village women, witnessed their daily lives and traditions, and learned about how they were coping with the modernization rapidly overtaking their society. The women she describes are self-confident, reserved, thoughtful, and polite—much like the women I met while traveling in Oman.
Eickelman’s book is a valuable record of a disappearing world.
Before 1970 Oman was one of teh more isolated countries on the Arab peninsula. The growth of the oil economy during the seventies, however, has brought rapid change to the small towns and villages that make up the country.
In Women and Community in Oman Chritine Eickelman captures the tone and feel of this desert culture on the verge of substantial, and probably irreversible, change. During 1979 and 1980 she lived in Hamra, an oasis of 2,500 persons and the capital of the Abriyin tribe. Situated on the western edge of the Jabal al-Akhdar region of inner Oman, this was…
I’m an accidental historian, one that stumbled over a love of history in spite of myself. In school, history was all just dates and places—not the kind of thing to inspire a kid that loved stories about people, not dusty old battles. But then a funny thing happened on the way to an English degree. A few history electives suddenly seemed way more appealing than another round of Austen, and led me to a BA History with Distinction. The first half of the twentieth century is a favorite period, but I say bring on the Renaissance and Viking ships too!
This book is a gut punch of straight-up prose that reads like pure poetry. The story begins during the convulsions of the American Civil War, and tracks a line directly from the 1860s to the 1950s. This is no dry history lesson though. Presidents and generals don’t rate a mention and the heroes are ordinary people. And that’s where the novel shines: it proves that profound thoughts can be expressed in plain language, and the author delivers them here with powerful simplicity. A Shout in the Ruins is an absolute gem of a story that should not be missed.
The Sultanate of Oman overlooks one of the most strategic waterways in the Middle East: the Strait of Hormuz. Sharing the guardianship of the Strait with Iran, Oman's position is of key importance to the security of the entire Gulf, which holds a large portion of the world's oil resources. In a 1970 palace coup, Sultan Qaboos ibn Sa'id overthrew the repressive and reclusive rule of his father and embarked on a program of modernization. Oman became one of the success stories of the developing world, instituting a modern educational system, creating a modern infrastructure, becoming an oil exporter, and…
I am a Lebanese-born, New York-based Caterer, Chef, and Owner of Edy’s Grocer in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Born and raised in Lebanon, I have a passion for Middle Eastern food, culture, and, cookbooks. Growing up with a grandmother who never wrote one recipe down, it's been a journey to nail each recipe she used to make. When I moved to America, it was so hard to find good Middle Eastern cookbooks. Fast forward to 2024, a plethora of talented chefs have written books to help transport me back to Lebanon, sharing our Middle Eastern cultures, flavors, and heritage in such a beautiful way. I am proud of these cookbooks representing the Middle East.
What Dina Macki did with this book is beautiful, specifically the visuals and how she showcases the food. Many people, myself included, don’t know much about Omani food specifically, and this book dives deep into the unique food, culture, and region, including beautiful photos taken locally throughout her travels and mini-history lessons.
This is the first Omani cookbook ever written, and she did it well.
With honesty and curiosity, British-born Omani-Zanzibari chef Dina Macki explores the unique foodscape of Oman, in the first Omani cookbook to be written by an Omani chef.
Bahari, meaning "ocean" in Swahili, is a culinary exploration of the rich flavors and history of Omani cuisine, a food culture shaped by boundless coastlines and complex maritime history, with origins and influences spanning Pakistan, Iran, India, the Swahili coast, and Portugal.
In this distinctive cookbook, Dina Macki travels across Oman and Zanzibar, unearthing regional delicacies and recreating the food of her heritage. With more than 100 recipes for meat, fish, vegetables, homemade…
I am a returned U.S. Peace Corps volunteer who served as a community health worker and educator in Zambia from 2004-2006. My highly-anticipated debut memoir, The Color of the Elephant: Memoir of a Muzungu, a Zola Award finalist, releases January 2022. As an avid reader of adventurous, fish-out-of-water tales, I’ve read dozens of memoirs by fellow Peace Corps volunteers who’ve served all around the world from the 1960s to the present day. These are my top picks based on literary merit, engaging storytelling, and pure heart.
Truly a “two for the price of one” read! This tale begins in the early days of the Peace Corps, where newlyweds Laurie and Rich are assigned volunteer posts in Niger (pronounced nee-zher), Laurie as a public health worker, and Rich on an agricultural assignment at a peanut cooperative. Packed with lively prose and riveting tales of close calls, humorous misunderstandings, finding one’s feet, discovering meaning in the midst of suffering, and the bewildering feeling of displacement upon arriving back in the States, the first half of the story encompasses all the earmarks of a “classic” Peace Corps experience.
After 30 years, Laurie—now remarried, mother of grown children, and retired from an active career in liberal politics—travels back to Niger to reconnect with loved ones. Despite the chafing between this American woman’s independent spirit and the restrictive patriarchal Muslim society, along with the inevitable modernization of the humble agrarian…
In this delightful and insightful memoir of a mid-century American girl coming of age as a new bride in a remote village in Niger, West Africa, Laurie Oman generously shares a unique place and time that will live on in readers' hearts forever. We are right there with her as she fumbles and faux pas her way into the role of a valued member of the community as a health educator, unprepared emergency midwife, and ultimately trusted friend. So deep were the bonds from her two-year Peace Corps stay in the 1960s, that thirty years later she was invited to…
Nick Hunt is a walker and writer about the landscapes and cultures of Europe. He is the author of Walking the Woods and the Water, Where the Wild Winds Are (both finalists for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year), and a work of gonzo ornithology, The Parakeeting of London. His latest book, Outlandish, is an exploration of four of the continent’s strangest and most unlikely landscapes: arctic tundra in Scotland, primeval forest in Poland and Belarus, Europe’s only true desert in Spain, and the grassland steppes of Hungary.
Long fascinated by the accounts of travellers drawn to the world’s arid zones, as if by a strange magnetism, William Atkins immerses himself in deserts from Oman to Australia, Kazakhstan to the United States. The book is both a study of extreme environments and a deeply personal journey that often touches on the political: the Australian chapter becomes an excoriating attack on the British government’s use of the desert as a nuclear testing ground, which devastated Aboriginal communities. There are also some extremely funny parts, as when Atkins ends up in the debauchery of Nevada’s Burning Man festival, surely the most reluctant and awkward festival-goer who has ever graced its playa.
WINNER OF THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL WRITING AWARD 2019
One third of the earth's land surface is desert, much of it desolate and inhospitable.
What is it about this harsh environment that has captivated humankind throughout history?
Travelling to five continents over three years, William Atkins discovers a realm that is as much internal as physical. From the contested borderlands of the USA to Australia's nuclear test zones, via Nevada's riotous Burning Man festival and the ancient monasteries of Egypt, he illuminates the people, history, nature and symbolism of these remarkable but often volatile places.
I grew up in New York City in the 1980s as an Arab Latina American Muslim, which shaped my interest in who is considered American. Back then, there was no language to talk about my experience of marginalization as Arab or Muslim. That changed after 9/11 and the War on Terror. A decade after that, the term “Islamophobia” entered the US lexicon, leading to social recognition of this form of discrimination, and many important debates about what constitutes Islamophobia. I made my career exploring how Arabs and Muslims figure into US racial politics, and am currently a professor of US Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California.
I write about Islamophobia in the US but often wonder how it manifests in other countries. I now know where to go for answers.
This book examines Muslim racialization in four countries – the US, the UK, India, and China. It takes readers through the history of Islamophobia in each country, examining the role of media in stereotyping and Othering Muslims. Importantly, the book also explains how anti-Muslim racism has figured in recent ethnonationalist movements and counterterrorism policies.
Prejudice against Muslims has a long and complex history, shaped over many centuries. In recent decades, discrimination, violence, and human rights abuses against Muslims have taken a significant turn, with rising reports and discussions of Islamophobia across the globe. However, as the authors of A Global Racial Enemy argue, much of the conversation has missed the key features of this increasingly insidious phenomenon.
This original book puts race at the center of the analysis, exposing the global racialization of Muslims. With special attention paid to the United States, China, India, and the United Kingdom, the authors examine both the unique…
I’m a historian of Muslim – non-Muslim relations in medieval Islam. In all of my publications I've been concerned with the social intersections of different religious communities in the medieval Islamic world, whether through human agency or via institutional arrangements. My goal has been to de-center Islamic history by approaching it from its margins. Hence the choice to study the role of women as agents of religious change in my last monograph Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East. In this book I address two historical questions which I've always been passionate about, namely the Islamization of the Near East and the place of women in pre-modern Near Eastern societies.
Urban’s Conquered Populations in Early Islam is concerned with the absorption of non-Muslims within the Muslim community during the first few centuries of its formation through an Arabian tribal mechanism of patron-client relations.
As such, it offers a first of its kinds treatment of non-Muslim slave girls and concubines, whose entry into the Muslim fold was made possible thanks to the ties of dependence they forged with their male masters and partners.
Although seemingly powerless, owing to their gender and social rank, these women were in fact in a unique position to negotiate the terms of their enslavement, livelihood, and communal affiliation thanks to their unique services vis-à-vis their patrons.
This book traces the journey of new Muslims as they joined the early Islamic community and articulated their identities within it. It focuses on Muslims of slave origins, who belonged to the society in which they lived but whose slave background rendered them somehow alien. How did these Muslims at the crossroads of insider and outsider find their place in early Islamic society? How did Islamic society itself change to accommodate these new members?
By analysing how these liminal Muslims resolved the tension between belonging and otherness, Conquered Populations in Early Islam reveals the shifting boundaries of the early Islamic…
