Scholars contend that heritage industries are a specifically nationalist undertaking or one aimed at an international audience. Using publicly available statements, newspaper reports, and other historical sources, this chapter revises both of these intellectual currents and suggests that while the museums in Qatar and the UAE are aimed at national and international audiences, the decision to fund and display heritage institutions has yet a third audience. These museums work to reinforce the legitimacy of the Gulf States’ own histories vis-à-vis the hegemonic historical narrative that values Iraqi, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, or Levantine history over that of the Gulf.

For the past century, the Gulf has been characterised political and intellectually as either separate from or following the trends of Cairo, Beirut, and Baghdad. Influential states (notably Egypt, Syria and Iraq) have lost much of their authority due to violence and political unrest and many Gulf States have attempted to insinuate themselves into the wider region. Although this trend has been discussed most recently within the political realm, it is also true of the cultural realm. The UAE and Qatar have invested heavily in heritage institutions including Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Souq Waqif, and Msheirib project, as well as the UAE’s Saadiyat Heritage District museums (Louvre Abu Dhabi, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Zayed National Museum, Maritime Museum, and the Performing Arts Centre) and the Heart of Sharjah development as part of this ongoing project. Their decision to attract market share from the traditional cultural powerhouses of the Middle East represents not only a judicious business approach on their part, but also an important step in asserting the Gulf ’s wider importance within the Middle East overall.

Until now, academics have assumed that target audiences for the large museums and urban renewal projects were either local or global or that the projects reflected an expression of or desire for hybridity or cosmopolitanism. Domestically, the museums have been viewed as tools to construct a national identity or to create nostalgia for a mythic past. Internationally, heritage projects work to build the state’s brand, promote tourism, or represent an attempt by a foreign country to assert soft power.