The International Journal of the History of Sport ISSN: 0952-3367 (Print) 1743-9035 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fhsp20 Modernization of Athletics in Oman: Between Global Pressures and Local Dynamics Abdul Rahim AL DROUSHI & Ian HENRY To cite this article: Abdul Rahim AL DROUSHI & Ian HENRY (2020) Modernization of Athletics in Oman: Between Global Pressures and Local Dynamics, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 37:sup1, 3-25, DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2020.1734565 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2020.1734565 Published online: 15 Apr 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 373 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fhsp20 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT 2020, VOL. 37, NO. S1, 3–25 https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2020.1734565 ASIAN JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY & CULTURE Modernization of Athletics in Oman: Between Global Pressures and Local Dynamics Abdul Rahim AL DROUSHIa and Ian HENRYb aDepartment of Physical Education and Sport Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman; bSchool of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This paper addresses the question of how the development of Modernization theory; the sport of athletics in Oman has been constructed in the dis- Oman; athletics; discourse course of six key actors drawn from five different stakeholder analysis; life history analysis groups engaged in the development process, and of key docu- ments published by related governmental and sporting bodies. In methodological terms the study employs life history interviews conducted with the stakeholders, critically evaluating the nature of discourse in the career history accounts of the six interviewees and of the content of related documentation. The research uses the vehicle of the interviewees’ construction of career histories, and the documents, to analyse their explanations of the nature of, and rationale for, policy change, perceptions of the signifi- cance of these changes, and the agents and structures which assisted or impeded them. The analysis highlights three principal discourses, namely a discourse of tradition, a religious discourse, and a discourse of modernization with sub-discourses under this third category of equity, professionalization, and nation building. The modernization of sport in Oman, while sharing features with modernization processes elsewhere also takes on features which are unique to the context of Omani culture in line with the char- acterisation of the development of multiple or plural modernities. This paper investigates discourses on the development of track and field athletics in the Sultanate of Oman since 1970, a period which has witnessed the ostensibly rapid and profound modernization of Omani society. In doing so the paper pursues three main objectives. The first is to trace accounts of the emergence, development and current status of athletics in Oman from the perspective of six key stakeholders centrally involved in these processes and from key documents relating to athletics and the emerging governance of the sport. The second is to examine the process of the modernization of athletics itself and its relationship with debates concerning modernity and the authenticity of Omani culture, in other words in discourses concerning local and global dynamics. The third objective is to uncover how discourses on modernity and authenticity, globalism, localism and glocalism, have CONTACT Abdul Rahim Al Droushi [email protected] Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, P.O.Box: 494, Al Khoudh, 123 Oman This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. ß 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 4 A. R. AL DROUSHI AND I. HENRY shaped/constructed/legitimized the modernization of athletics in Oman in different phases of contemporary Omani history. Oman as a country has been subject to remarkable processes of economic, social and technological modernization in the period since 1970 when the current Sultan, Qaboos Bin Said Al Said, came to power ousting his father Said Bin Taimur. Sultan Qaboos inherited a nation which was relatively closed to the external world and had been subject to internal struggles. The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, as it had previously been named, had effectively consisted of two contrasting cultural and political traditions: the coastal tradition of Muscat, which had been directly ruled by the sultan, was engaged in international trade and thus was more outward looking, cosmopolitan and, in relative terms, more ‘secular’, than the insular tradition of the interior (traditionally known as ‘Oman proper’), which had been under the political and religious control of the Ibadi imamate.1 The struggle with the conservative imamate which had, from the late nineteenth century, exercised de facto control over the northern interior of the country (where oil was discovered in the early 1950s) ended when the imamate was defeated by Omani forces (with British backing) in 1955, though resistance in exile by the imamate continued with support from Saudi Arabia.2 On coming to power Sultan Qaboos renamed the country the Sultanate of Oman emphasizing the integration of the territories of the coast and the interior, and this was further reinforced by the defeat of a communist-led rebellion in Dhofar, supported by the government of Yemen, in the early stages of the new sultan’s rule in 1976.3 The emergence of sport in Oman took place in this initially turbulent period and is bound up with modernization processes, though modernization, we shall argue, took on specifically Omani forms and characteristics. In tracing the development of modern sport, specifically track and field athletics, within the context of Omani modernization, this paper will address the extent to which sport is shaped by locally specific and global modernizing factors. Theoretical Background Modernization and Modernity The concepts of modernity and modernization have been a continuing focus of analysis of western social science. Modernity, characterized by the hegemony of notions of science forged in the European Enlightenment (with its twin vectors of rationalism and empiricism), and by the growth of industrial capitalism in western nation-states, has been deemed to be a western phenomenon.4 Indeed so successful had been the advancement of modernization in the west, that forms of modernization theory have tended to associate modernizing trends with the onward march of specifically western models of ‘progress’.5 Modernization is defined by scholars such as Giddens6 in part in terms of key characteristics, including scientific advances in industrial production; capitalism - the development of an economic system by which privately invested capital can generate profits; the state and the political system, which provides the organizational and ideological framework by which economic and industrial systems can operate, in the THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT 5 form of elected government (national and local), a judiciary, police, and armed forces, an education system, and health and social services. Wucherpfenning & Deutsch (2009) identify the key features of modernity as those of industrial production, industrially produced wealth, an educated and urbanized population, an open society and an emerging social structure with a developing middle class, with these social conditions being seen as conducive to the development of political forms of liberal democracy. The core argument of modernization theories, that there is, or has been, an inevitable convergence of modern societies around these key characteristics, and a growing and inevitable direction of travel of countries as a product of modernization, has however been subjected to fundamental critique. Fourie, for example, argues that ‘traditional theories of modernization … are criticized for two fundamental teleological assumptions, namely that modernity is a single, unified homogenizing process, and that the West is the yardstick by which success is measured … and furthermore that such theories promote the view that ‘the growth of institutions such as liberal democracy, capitalism and the bureaucratic state are inevitable in “modernizing” societies throughout the world and will naturally be accompanied by individualism, a secular world-view and other cultural dimensions’.7 The rejection of those teleological assumptions has led some authors (in particular Eisenstadt and his colleagues) to argue that modernity does not take a single form, but will vary in nature from one context to another, and thus that it is more appropriate to refer to ‘multiple modernities’ in which modernizing tendencies take on culturally specific forms in different societies.8 The ‘Modernization’ of Oman This paper considers the nature of the development of the sport of track and field athletics in Oman, a phenomenon which is concurrent with (and intrinsically bound up with) modernization processes in the Omani context, a context which is markedly different to the circumstances prevailing in other ‘modern’ societies. The beginnings of the modernization of Oman are relatively easy to pinpoint, according to most western observers, as expressed in the discourse of government, and evident