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Oman's efforts to increase literacy rates have further strengthened the use of Arabic as the language of education. Other mother tongues were not included in the curricula, even as secondary languages, in the regions where they were widely used. It hastened the decline of local languages, as their use became limited to the family and local community. As the number of public schools has grown steadily from one in 1951 to more than 1,100 in 2017, Al Jahdhami reports an "intense exposure to Arabic" among the youth and a shift toward the language.

the young generations simply ask, “What would I learn this for?” because outside of the home, Arabic is the predominant means of communication

Across Oman's Dhofar mountain range, between 25,000 and 50,000 people who belong to different tribes and clans speak Jabbali (or Shehri), which literally means "the language of the mountain." However, although the youth are proud of having a language of their own, with its colorful vocabulary for nature and the mountains, their language proficiency is much lower than that of the older generations. This is partly because the young generation, educated in Arabic, employs a mixture of Jabbali and Arabic. Furthermore, the internet and TV — whose content is predominantly if not exclusively in Arabic — are aggravating the loss of linguistic skills among young Omanis. 

In the north, the tribal community in the village of Kumzar tries to hold on to its language, Kumzari. At 5,000 speakers, UNESCO considers Kumzari severely endangered. It is a Southwestern Iranian language that is heavily influenced by Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi and English.

To save ancestral traditions and reach out to Kanim’s tech-savvy generation, a Dhofar-born singer has chosen to broadcast his Jabbali music on YouTube.

a project led by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture is researching the languages ​​spoken in the sultanate and another, by the Department of Culture at Oman’s Royal Court, is working on Oman's dead languages — ones that no longer have any speakers

Local and international academics are working to document those languages before their remains disappear entirely, mainly in Dhofar and in the mountainous peninsula of Musandam, which overlooks the Strait of Hormuz.

With all this rich, Maghrebi and Middle Eastern culture, aesthetic and historical references on display, once again I must ask: where are the significant MENA actors?

What an opportunity it would have been to cast the likes of Egyptian actor Amr Waked or French-Algerian actress Lyna Khoudri in these roles. Instead, we get Javier Bardem doing whatever the Arab version of Blackface is.

The rest of the Fremen - those whose faces aren't masked and have speaking roles - are made up of actors of Guyanese, West or East African heritage. This wouldn’t be a problem at all if there were at least some MENA actors to reflect the diversity of that region which Villeunueve claims to care so much about and admitted to using as inspiration: “I feel true that I’m right in doing it this way. It feels authentic, it feels honest and true to the book.”

We’re used to being vilified, maligned or erased on screen. We’re used to having most of our representation in Hollywood limited to plane hijacking or suicide bombing or perverted sheikhs or refugees or having non-MENA actors replacing us in our own stories. Like Dwayne Johnson who is playing Black Adam, the first MENA superhero character to get his own solo movie. Can you imagine the outrage if The Rock was cast as Black Panther? Or Shang-Chi? People wouldn’t stand for it.

But in a post-9/11 world where Arabs and Islam are still considered too dangerous and foreign to pass the racial profiling in studio boardrooms and casting call discrimination, too taboo to be given the same equal opportunities for positive or nuanced representation as other ethnic minorities are now slowly beginning to benefit from, must we continue to wait and bittersweetly watch films like Dune that take but do not give back?

In the years after the Baath party came to power, writes Abdi, the budget for the Department of Antiquities increased by 80% and the number of excavations mushroomed, as did the renovation and reconstruction of historical sites

In Syria, too, Assad’s promotion of archaeology was, as the late journalist Patrick Seale described it, part of his exercise in nation building. Stéphane Valter, a French political scientist who specializes in Arab culture and civilization, studied Assad’s relationship to Syria’s archaeology in his 2002 book, “La construction nationale syrienne” (“The Syrian national construction”). He writes that because of the fragility of a social cohesion in Syria due to its varied ethnic and religious communities, it was important for Assad to establish a territorial and historical identity in which all minorities could find a legitimate place. The archaeological richness of Syria doubtless helped build a national identity based on a culture that was promoted as authentically Syrian.

Gadhafi’s view of Libya’s heritage was selective, but like the other dictators, it aligned with the message he wanted to transmit.“Libya links east to west, and north to south, and there are examples of all the cultures that were around us,” said Fakroun.But Gadhafi largely favored Islamic archaeology, in keeping with his Pan-Arab ideological preference at the time (vis-a-vis Pan-Africanism, which he embraced in later years), and after that, prehistory because it was far enough into the past to be relatively uncontested. In contrast, British archaeologist Graeme Barker, who spent many years in Libya, explained that “the country’s fabulous Greek and Roman archaeology represented to him simply the precursor of the hated Italian colonization of the 20th century.”

when Gadhafi saw that the museum staff had named some of the rooms “Greek” or “Roman,” his face fell, said Fakroun, “and he made us change the names to ‘Greek colonization’ or ‘Byzantine colonization.’ ”

“We couldn’t talk about our Amazigh heritage. Or objects that were Tuareg, we had to say they were Arab. We wanted to be scientific, but we couldn’t, because the only ethnicity that existed for him was Arab,”

the Baath regime in Iraq sought to “connect modern-day Iraq with its glorious Mesopotamian past, leaving aside any possible Sunni-Shia division or ethnic divide. Instead, it stressed that Iraq was one nation unified in a shared Mesopotamian-inspired culture.”

Iraq was flooded with propaganda posters, murals and sculpted reliefs in the style of ancient artworks, all depicting Saddam superposed with Mesopotamian rulers or symbols

Saddam rebuilt the site shoddily, most professionals agree, and built a palace for himself on top of it. He used new materials and inscribed his name on the bricks, as Nebuchadnezzar had done over 2,000 years before him. Moreover, said Almamori, “he dug three or four lakes, which damaged and removed part of the Persian cemetery near the northern lake. Many layers of different civilizations were removed. He constructed artificial mounds and built his palace on one of them. Archaeologists with high positions were afraid to say anything.”

“When Nebuchadnezzar II took over from his father, Nabopolassar, he ruled from the same palace which he rebuilt. The Baath party related to this — we have a long history, a strong civilization, that needs a strong army. Nationalists in other countries think the same way.”

the Umayyad period of history was useful to the party because of its multiethnic nature. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus was one of the best symbols for the party, writes Valter, because of its specifically Syrian cultural traits — first an Aramean and then a Roman temple, then a church and finally a mosque. The mosque figured on Syria’s most valuable banknote at the time, behind an image of Assad. Banknotes included images of Aleppo’s Citadel, the Roman amphitheater of Bosra and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and clearly showed the regime’s wish to conflate ethnocultural Arab references with nationalist pride and a pinch of Islam

one of the most important ancient sites for Assad was Ugarit, near the Mediterranean city of Latakia. With five layers of cultures going back to the Neolithic period, not only is it famous for its clay tablets with an alphabet in cuneiform script, but Ugarit is also just north of Qardaha, where Assad was born and is buried.

Unlike in Saddam’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria, in Gadhafi’s Libya, the Department of Antiquities suffered from constant underfunding. “Our budget was next to nothing,” recalled Fakroun. “Once they forgot about the Department of Antiquities when they were drawing up the country’s budget. We had no salary for six months. We’re talking about a country with tons of money from petrol, and they gave us pennies. And we have five World Heritage sites.

outstanding archaeological sites in all three countries suffered looting, vandalism, neglect, or at the hands of the Islamic State or, in the case of Ancient Babylon, from U.S. and Polish troops building their military base on top of the ruins in 2003