This article discusses the various challenges the Education and Interpretation Department at Sharjah Museums Department has faced since its establishment in 2006. It outlines the challenges faced by the education team and subsequent achievements in the current programming offered for families, schools and adults.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century cities along the eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula have undergone rapid economic development facilitating the emergence of global urban projects. Museum buildings anchoring cultural heritage projects are being launched to construct an image of the host cities as uniquely competitive within the global post-industrial economy. These projects, although based on international cooperation, advance a nationalistic narrative architecturally framed within maritime imagery to attract the global flow of tourists. This article critiques selected museums and cultural heritage projects to advance the public understanding of host port cities as sites of pre-modern urbanism shaped by the interconnected maritime space of the Gulf.

In the emirate of Sharjah the commitment to culture, and in particular culture presented through the medium of the museum, has been at the very heart of the vision of its ruler, His Highness Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed al Qasimi, a dedicated and exceptionally committed supporter of education and patron of the arts. Sharjah today has a family of nineteen museums run by the Sharjah Museums Department. Together, these museums are intended to cater for the interests and concerns of local society. The Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization is seen as a particularly important addition to the museum landscape in Sharjah, as it reflects the vision of its ruler to preserve and promote Islamic Culture. It is the first and only museum of its kind in the UAE to focus entirely on the universal achievements and contributions of Islamic civilization.

Since the establishment of the Federation, everyone has been concerned with preserving the heritage. This is evident from the creation and foundation of a large number of heritage-related institutions and agencies, both at federal level and at a local level in each emirate. There are a number of specialist heritage bodies within the relevant ministries and local agencies. There are societies and centres concerned with heritage and antiquities in all of the emirates, in addition to public interest societies, including folk arts and popular heritage societies concerned with all aspects of the tangible and intangible heritage of the Emirates, including Nabati poetry, handicrafts, revival of the architectural heritage etc.

Until the 1970s there was nothing to suggest that countries such as the Kingdom of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar, former British protectorates that had recently won independence, would become known for a cultural policies on a grand scale, in which museums of both national and international importance would play a leading role.

With the end of the last century and the start of the new millennium, a radical transformation in this approach has become apparent in national policies, in which the cultural aspect, and particularly the creation of new museums, has become a priority for the countries of the region, with an almost dizzying number of approvals for the establishment of new museums.

The UNESCO Sharjah prize for Arab Culture was established in 1998, at the instigation of the United Arab Emirates, to be awarded every two years. With the adoption of the UNESCO universal declaration on cultural diversity of 2 November 2001, it quickly gained prominence and became annual in 2003.