For decades, much scholarship on state-society relationships in the Arab Gulf region has focused on how British imperial interests and oil wealth combined to created regimes buoyed by consolidated economic and military power. Unfettered by the need to impose taxes, these regimes have been described as autonomous from societal influence, buying acquiescence from their populations by distributing oil wealth (e.g. Rolf Schwarz “The political economy of state-formation in the Arab Middle East,” 2008). However, recent scholarship demonstrates that control over state coercive and economic institutions is but one arena of political struggle in Gulf states, with parallel struggles seeking to define the moral frameworks that regulate state-citizen relations (Mazhar al-Zoby and Birol Baskan, State-Society Relations in the Arab Gulf States, 2014). This paper contributes to this growing field by examining the political and ideological struggles neglected by the rentier model. Drawing from interviews, archival material and ethnographic research, it uses the aftermath of Cyclone Gonu (2007) in Oman as a case study of how various state and social actors compete to define public problems, their causes, effective solutions, and responsibility for addressing them. The response to Gonu shows that Omani citizens are hungry for ways to publicly display national honor, solidarity, and willingness to sacrifice for a larger good, and to do so in accordance with their religious beliefs. Thus, actors within the Omani state as well as citizens more broadly are deeply invested in shaping both understandings and public expressions of the “common good,” as well the extent to which ordinary Omanis look to the government and fellow citizens to achieve it. The paper concludes by arguing that this ideological conflict is not unique to the aftermath of Cyclone Gonu, but a more visible episode of a longer process in which various actors and institutions have forwarded competing values to rely on in evaluating social and political authorities. Thus, rather than reading the distribution of oil rent to society as a rational, quid pro quo exchange between citizens and an autonomous state, scholars of the Gulf should reevaluate how the use of oil rent operates in a larger field in which changing understandings of national prosperity, security, and citizenship give meaning to that exchange.