Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs (Oman)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Oman's Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs (MoARA) carries a wider brief than its name alone suggests. Registering, developing and investing waqf endowment assets across Oman is its founding purpose, but the Ministry also manages zakat collection and distribution, administers orphans' and minors' funds, and oversees mosque administration and religious affairs nationally, four distinct functions gathered under one government body rather than split across separate agencies as several neighbouring states divide them.

That breadth shows in how the Ministry reports on itself. Rather than a single annual figure, MoARA publishes yearly performance data across each of its separate mandates: endowment asset growth, zakat revenue, and fund investment returns, each measured against a stated yearly target set in advance, presented together at a public year end review.

Measuring performance against self-set targets, rather than against an external benchmark, is itself a choice about how a religious-affairs ministry can be held accountable in a system with no equivalent institution to compare it against, and it is the frame within which every other figure attributed to MoARA in this record should be read.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

MoARA's 2025 results, as the Ministry itself announced them, showed returns from endowment assets, the Public Treasury and orphans' and minors' funds of 8,556,799 Omani rials, 130 percent of its own stated target, alongside 168 new endowment assets registered during the year valued at 53 million rials, exceeding a 7 percent growth target. Every figure in the Ministry's own report is presented against a target it set for itself in advance.

Zakat revenue for the year reached 15,785,119 rials, 183 percent of its target, the single largest overshoot among the Ministry's reported figures. Separately, the orphans' and minors' fund investment portfolio exceeded 123 million rials with a 5.15 percent investment return, and the Ministry signed new investment contracts worth nearly 6 million rials across 16 endowment assets during the year.

Reading four separate targets all beaten by wide margins in the same report invites a question the report itself does not answer: whether the targets were set conservatively to begin with, or whether 2025 was genuinely an unusually strong year across every one of the Ministry's four mandates at once.