Since its inception as a nation state from 1970, Oman’s expanding heritage industry – exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, cultural festivals and the restoration of more than a hundred forts, castles and citadels saturate the landscape and become increasingly ubiquitous as part of a public and visual memorialization of the past. The Ibadi sectarian tradition that predominated the interior for more than a thousand years is still in evidence in the great fortresses, watchtowers, mosques and walled residential quarters that dot the landscape. However, The Omani past, once articulated through references to the Quran, stories about the Prophet and his companions, the Ibadi imams and tribal lore was transformed with the emergence of new public history institutions from 1970 onwards when nation state building began. Through documentary and ethnographic research, of one particular fortress, the Nizwa fort, my paper argues that national heritage, as a form of history making, was established through the forceful elimination of Ibadi sharī’a as a legal tradition as well as a historically grounded way of life. The Nizwa fort, once the administrative and juridical centre of the Imamate (1913-1958) sanctioned a past that was primarily moral in nature, oriented towards God and salvation and grounded in Ibadi doctrine and practice. The function of history held that the heterogeneity of every-day life’s interactions and relationships facilitated by objects and texts could be assessed on the basis of past authoritative and exemplary forms of justice and morality, as embodied by the lives of virtuous forbears such as former Imams as well as the Prophet and his companions. Cleaving through the temporal assumptions of sharī’a time, heritage and conservation practices of the secular modern state, reconfigure Ibadi religiosity through adopting a temporal engagement with a past that entails a changing teleological future rather than one continuous with an exemplary history. Through institutionally circulating circuits of education, aesthetics and ethics, the national heritage project that was undertaken in modern Oman has treated history and Islam as seemingly separate, erasing any formal awareness of the socio-political and ethical relationships that once characterized Ibadi Imamate rule (1913-1958) in the region. In the process, the discursive practices of a museal mode of representation reconfigure religion through a temporal rationale that entails a progress-oriented future, rather than one drawing upon an exemplary history.