SOAS Middle East Issues S.

Alsharekh Alanoud, Robert Springborg

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780863568626
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

As the Gulf assumes an ever more important identity in the global political economy, we see the emergence of a new popular and political culture underpinning its increasingly self-confident national identities. This volume explores the new dynamism of the Gulf, reflected not just in high-rise buildings and booming stock markets, but also manifested in the realms of art, ideas and expression, and their relationships with political authority. Contributors include figures instrumental to the emergence of these new identities, including artists, broadcasters and cultural commentators.

ONE

Heritage and Cultural Nationalism in the United Arab Emirates

Fred H. Lawson and Hasan M. al-Naboodah

Cosmopolitanism enjoys a long and vibrant history in the communities situated along the southeastern shore of the Gulf. Close commercial and religious contacts with Iran, central Arabia, the Indian subcontinent, east Africa and southeast Asia created a rich and complex mélange of cultural idioms and practices in the territories that made up the early twentieth-century Trucial Coast. Cultural pluralism remained a characteristic feature of local society during the years immediately after the formation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in December 1971. As oil revenues flooded into the country over the next two decades, however, indigenous components of popular culture steadily diminished. On one hand, nouveaux riches citizens abandoned established ways of life and adopted more attributes of the industrial world. On the other, the oil boom attracted large numbers of expatriate labourers, who brought with them the icons and mores of their respective homelands. By the early 1990s, popular culture in the UAE consisted almost entirely of idioms, symbols and practices that originated outside the country.

Faced with these trends, a number of influential actors took steps to encourage greater public awareness and appreciation of older forms of cultural expression. Senior members of the UAE’s ruling families sponsored the formation of a network of clubs and agencies to promote respect for the country’s heritage (turath). Such organisations included the Emirates Heritage Club in Abu Dhabi, the Folk Arts Society in Dubai, the Heritage Directorate in Sharjah, the Documentation and Studies Centre in Ras al-Khaimah and the Fujairah Cultural Organisation.¹ These bodies began to host lectures, seminars, book fairs, exhibitions and festivals to preserve and celebrate the rapidly receding cultural traditions of the pre-oil era.

As a complement to the network of heritage societies, a cluster of more specialised centres was inaugurated as the 1990s drew to a close. Among these was the Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktum Centre for Cultural Understanding, which opened in Dubai in March 1999. It took upon itself the task of ‘familiarising expatriates with various facets of local culture’, and announced that it intended to ‘conduct familiarisation and Arabic language courses as well as lectures on Islam, in addition to guided tours of local homes and places of worship’. At the same time, the Zayed Centre for Heritage and History opened in al-‘Ain, under the patronage of the UAE’s deputy prime minister and president of the Emirates Heritage Club, Sheikh Sultan bin Zayed Al Nahayan, to promote scholarly research on the traditions of the Arab Gulf states in general and the UAE in particular.² It announced plans to publish a series of books, pamphlets and brochures; to forge links with overseas universities and institutes; to confer an annual award for turath studies; and to set up an archive and library containing relevant documents, reference materials, monographs and academic journals.

The Zayed Centre immediately initiated an Oral History Project to create a permanent record of daily life in the emirates in the years before oil. The interviews that were conducted as part of the project were deliberately carried out in an unstructured fashion, so as to allow the elders of the community to narrate their recollections in whatever way they thought best. Some told stories of momentous events that they had witnessed or in which they had played an active part; others described the everyday struggles and hardships that they had endured. Still others took the opportunity to recite poetry composed to commemorate a notable occurrence or to express deep-seated emotions.

The Oral History Project has been carried out in three successive stages. First, the centre’s staff gathered up and duplicated all recorded interviews that had been conducted in the UAE by specialists in folklore during the 1970s and 1980s. Around 400 such interviews have so far been preserved, which make up a significant archive, since most if not all of the interviewees are now deceased. Secondly, thirtyeight elderly people of special interest were interviewed between 1999 and 2003. Thirdly, interviews were carried out during the course of 2004–05 with more than 100 long-time residents of the oasis community of al-‘Ain. Although many of the tapes in the Zayed Centre’s archives have now been transcribed and indexed according to topic, much of the recorded material remains in raw form, awaiting further study and analysis.

One of the oral histories is a lengthy interview with Saif al-Riyami, a retired major general in the UAE armed forces. Al-Riyami served with the Trucial Oman Scouts from 1958 to 1966 and then joined the Abu Dhabi Defence Force after it was established in 1966. With regard to economic life in the past, he relates that many people’s livelihoods depended on collecting and selling dried wood for sale in the market, and this is how people managed to buy the food and clothing they needed for their families. Farmers cultivated date palms and raised a variety of different livestock, especially oxen. A favourite way to spend leisure time was to gather in front of the mosque after evening prayer, to exchange news and to converse while sitting on small mounds called araqeeb. People often slept outside their homes in the open air, a form of repose often referred to as al-siheeh (healthy).

Another revealing interview preserves the recollections of Khamees al-Mirri, who is said to have been 120 years old. He worked early in life as a pearl diver, and then became a camel breeder. He notes that even though large numbers of people earned their living from pearl diving in the 1940s and 1950s, it was camel herding and the hunting of hares and other wild animals that enabled people to survive the winter. In addition, the slave trade continued to be a thriving business, and slaves were brought regularly to the oasis of Buraimi for sale to buyers based in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

Sultan al-Darmaki’s memories of al-‘Ain date back to 1967, when he studied at the Nahayaniyyah school. The school was located near the current Clock Tower roundabout and was constructed of mud brick and plaster; it had only a few tables and desks. The roads of the town consisted for the most part of unpaved sand tracks at this time, and houses were built out of mud brick and date-palm leaves (‘arish). There were very few cars. Most of the local population lived in al-Mu‘tarid, al-Muweeji, al-Jimi, al-Qattara and al-Hili, because there were date-palm groves in those districts. Several canals (falaj), such as al-Da’udi, al-‘Ain, al-Hili, al-Mu‘tarid, al-Qattara and al-Jimi, supplied water to the fields and date-palm gardens. The old market (suq), where rice, bread and dates were sold from shops made of mud brick, stood close to the current premises of the al-‘Ain Co-operative Society. A cement and brick factory was the first industrial plant in the town; electricity began to be supplied in 1968. The currency in use was the Indian rupee, which was followed by the Bahraini dinar and then, after the establishment of the federation, the UAE dirham.

Most of the oral histories depict the pre-oil era as a time of hardwon contentment. ‘Akeeda al-Miheeri observes that life was strenuous, yet productive and fulfilling: farmers took care of the date palms in the summer, while wheat was grown and harvested in the winter. People from al-‘Ain would travel to Abu Dhabi to sell dates and date-palm leaves. Others used to sell dried wood and charcoal. These activities provided families with sufficient income to get by. Saif al-Riyami concurs: ‘Our times were beautiful, despite the simplicity of life and lack of money. People did not envy each other. Nowadays, hatred is everywhere. I remember how simple life was, despite the harsh and difficult living conditions.’

By collecting and memorialising such reminiscences, the Zayed Centre has played a key role in formulating and codifying a notion of the heritage of the UAE that underscores the importance of the federation’s more insular communities. Cultural icons, tropes and practices that merit respect by virtue of their connection to the past are found to have been concentrated in the agricultural and pastoral districts of the interior, whose inhabitants have predominantly been Arabic-speaking and Sunni, rather than in the polyglot cities of the coast. Furthermore, the image of the good old days that is presented in most interviews collected by the centre is one in which personal and collective self-sufficiency was not only possible, but in fact constituted the norm. Ties to the outside world appear to have been tangential to everyday life, and might well have been loosened or even severed with very little impact on the overall welfare of the community.

In addition to compiling an extensive archive of oral histories, the Zayed Centre has from the outset focused attention on the archaeology of the territories that merged to form the UAE. In April 2001, the centre hosted the First International Conference on Emirates Archaeology ‘to examine the results of archaeological excavations and studies in the United Arab Emirates and to place these within a context of interaction with other cultures in the region’, as well as ‘to generate a greater awareness amongst academics and among the UAE population at large about the heritage and history of the country.’ The conference programme included five papers on the late Stone Age, seven on the Bronze Age, six on the Iron Age, four on the late pre-Islamic period and six on the Islamic era.

Two years later, the centre organised the first annual symposium on archaeological discoveries in the emirates. Ahmed Hilal of the National Museum of Ras al-Khaimah reported on excavations carried out at a group of Neolithic tombs scattered around Qarn al-Harf, in the western foothills of the Hajar mountains.³ Anne Benoist of the French Archaeological Mission in the UAE surveyed a major site near the village of Bithnah in Fujairah, observing that ‘the aim of this research is to study the organisation of the landscape during the Iron Age period, and to compare it with other Iron Age settlement areas in other parts of the Oman peninsula’.⁴ She concluded that, in the case of one particular grouping of three buildings and nearby altar at Bithnah-44, ‘no similar site has been identified elsewhere in the region.’⁵ In both cases, the distinctive character of the respective emirates was found to be reflected, or perhaps better presaged, in the archaeological record.

Christian Velde, also of Ras al-Khaimah’s National Museum, summarised excavations and restoration efforts that had been undertaken at the fort at Falayah, the summer residence of the emirate’s ruling family and the place where a pivotal treaty was signed in January 1820, which established British control along the southeastern shore of the Gulf. Velde remarked that ‘in 1999 Sheikh Sultan bin Saqr al-Qasimi, director of the Department of Antiquities and Museums, Ras al-Khaimah, decided to restore this important historical complex and open it to the public.’⁶ The stone fort at the site was built in the mid-eighteenth century, and exhibits ‘the typical features of a for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction, by Robert Springborg
• 1. Heritage and Cultural Nationalism in the United Arab Emirates: Fred H. Lawson and Hasan M. al-Naboodah
• 2. Place and Space in the Memory of United Arab Emirates Elders: Nadia Rahman
• 3. The Nationalisation of Culture: Kuwait’s Invention of a Pearl-Diving Heritage: Sulayman Khalaf
• 4. An Aspect of Cultural Development in Bahrain: Archaeology and the Restoration of Historical Sites: Mohammed A. Alkhozai
• 5. The Social and Political Elements that Drive the Poetic Journey: Nimah Ismail Nawwab
• 6. Sport and Identity in the Gulf: Abdullah Baabood
• 7. Media as Social Matrix in the United Arab Emirates: Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, Mohammed al-Mutawa, John W. Fox and Tim Walters
• 8. Diversification in Abu Dhabi and Dubai: The Impact on National Identity and the Ruling Bargain: Christopher Davidson
• 9. Debates on Political Reform in the Gulf: The Dynamics of Liberalising Public Spaces: Amr Hamzawy
• 10. Gulf Societies: Coexistence of Tradition and Modernity: Lubna Ahmed al-Kazi
• Conclusion, by Alanoud Alsharekh
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright