University of Hawai'i Press

Officially designated the "Year of Tolerance" by the local government, 2019 has been defined by the largesse of institutionally supported and funded initiatives in the United Arab Emirates aimed at promoting appreciation of intercultural diversity and awareness across a wide spectrum of the social scene. The country consists of seven emirates, Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujeirah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Qaiwan, which were unified on December 2, 1971. With a local population of Emiratis, or Nationals of roughly 1 million, the UAE has been anything but lacking diversity, especially since the 1950s after the momentous discovery of vast oil reserves in the Arab Gulf and the explosive growth of the population. The World Bank cites an overall population size of 92,418 in 1960, while for 2018 the statistics show a population of 9,630,959, more than a hundredfold increase; about 89 percent of the population is expatriate ("United Arab Emirates"). Since the UAE does not grant citizenship rights to foreigners, with the nominal exception of a relatively small number of naturalized citizens, the main growth factor has been the expatriate, migrant work force. This past year's official motto of "Tolerance" is, thus, reflective of a sociocultural habitus, a recognition of the country's remarkable historical route along with a forward projection and anticipation of Expo 2020, the landmark event the UAE has been preparing for over the course of the last few years. Anyone living in the country during that time must have become intensely aware of the fast pace of infrastructural development heralding the Expo: the highly visible change of the cityscape along with marked innovations in the urban transit and communication systems as well as the service sector. The availability of funds along with the readiness to invest has created a sense of a place in constant transformation all over the Emirates, particularly in Dubai, even though the UAE's capital city is Abu Dhabi. Along with this notion of ongoing change, there is the consistent effort to rely on a recognizable past, hence the publication of historiographic works aiming at narrating the biography of a nation and of a society in flux that, nevertheless, retains its national character. [End Page 165]

Such historiography of the nation has encompassed biographical and autobiographical writing capturing the lives of exceptional Emiratis whose lifepaths reflect back upon the history of the country, and often on the particular emirate with which they primarily identify. One of the most remarkable features of such works is that they are written in English, not in Arabic, addressing thus an English-speaking audience while also reflecting upon the contemporary realities of the UAE and the ubiquitous presence of English as a lingua franca here. Raja Al Gurg's autobiography narrates the story of "a little girl growing up on the banks of Dubai Creek," becoming a successful business woman, and "perhaps most surprisingly" to herself, "a forthright advocate on women's issues" (3). A member of an influential merchant family in Dubai, Al Gurg is the daughter of Easa Saleh Al Gurg, a prominent businessman and former ambassador of the UAE to the United Kingdom, whose autobiography, The Wells of Memory, probably set the precedent for his daughter's memoir, thus establishing a father-daughter autobiographic continuum. The text's formative gesture is the author's desire to "testify" to the very change her native town of Dubai has undergone (i).

From within a background of undeniable privilege and social status, Raja Al Gurg's autobiography sets, in turn, a precedent of her own: that of an Emirati woman writing the story of her professional ascent.1 Al Gurg's text is unabashedly vocal about gender and the historically important role of women in Emirati society: "Far from being passive or repressed," Emirati women, according to Al Gurg, "have been working behind closed doors for decades, centuries even" (72). Yet, she is also aware of her own exceptional position. "It has not escaped my attention that I got to where I am today because of a man," she remarks wryly early on in her memoir, the understated irony pointing toward the resolutely traditional cast of Emirati society. Yet, this profoundly traditional cultural context produced exceptional men like her father, the man to whom Al Gurg ultimately owes everything. It was her father's clear-sightedness that allowed for his daughter's success: "I realized early on that my father wanted his daughters to be as educated as his sons." This situational advantage of a father willing to provide his daughters with equal access to education becomes extremely important. Al Gurg's mother, to whom she is very close, never went to school, "although she could read the Quran" (30). Her paternal grandmother, the other significant female presence in the family, "was traditional, as were most women of that era" (30). Thus, when Al Gurg is around ten or eleven years old, her grandmother starts saying that Raja no longer "needs" to go to school. The father, however, disagrees emphatically, and Al Gurg recalls the reassurance she feels perceiving that her father "was ready to stand up to his own mother for the sake of my education," a gesture that would resonate profoundly within a traditional Arab community where parental authority is deeply embedded into the fabric of society. Al Gurg would find out only later that her grandmother herself had to fight in her son's "corner in the same way" when her husband disapproved of her son's studying in English (30). The familial tradition of going against the grain is thus set; it is nevertheless a momentous change that the daughter follows in her father's footsteps, and relies all along on paternal support while doing so. She is allowed to [End Page 166] travel abroad, though accompanied by other girls of her age, and to attend university in neighboring Kuwait. In Kuwait, in spite of her interest in politics and history, she has to settle with majoring in English literature, given that the seats for other majors are already taken and she does not want to return home to Dubai feeling defeated. She recalls her university days as the happiest of her life, marked by a sense of freedom and companionship, "flared jeans and platform heels and the songs of Umm Kulthum, the Star of the East" (37). After her return home, she marries her cousin, her parents' choice, and the couple has five children.

With the early death of her mother, the relationship that becomes transformative in Al Gurg's life is her evolving connection to her father, the "Chairman," as she affectionately calls him (76). The Chairman is indeed an imposing pater familias with an extensive family, and a figure her daughter obviously respects very much and to whom she turns intermittently for "pearls of wisdom" and guidance (76). One of the high points of her autobiographical narrative is her description of the day her father gathers all his children around the family table at a Friday lunch. He announces that he wants one of them to take over his managerial position at the helm of the family company, the imposing conglomerate he established in the 1960s. Duly impressed with the weight of such a "heavy mantle," no one at the table is willing to "volunteer their services" (55). In a life-changing moment, Al Gurg, who by then works as a school principal, "without knowing the full consequences of what I was doing," and just like in a classroom, raises her hand: "I'll do it," she says (56). Thus starts her apprenticeship at her father's company and her path to succession to the managerial position. She describes it as a trajectory marked by hard work and her desire to prove herself worthy both as a daughter and as a manager at a time when few Emirati women held leadership positions in the public sphere and in the business sector. Her personal and professional growth into a success story parallels, as Al Gurg likes to point out repeatedly, the story of Dubai: "Just as Dubai was growing in different directions, so was I" (75).

Though Dubai certainly takes the limelight among the seven Emirates, people tend to speak affectionately about other emirates, especially Ras Al Khaimah (RAK), the Northern emirate closest to the Strait of Hormuz. One of the most endearing publications this year is the collection People of Ras Al Khaimah, a book beautifully executed, with stunning photos. Of course, as is the case with many glossy publications in the UAE, there is the question of whether a coffee table book is the most appropriate format when trying to avoid an overly commercial and touristic perspective. Yet, what distinguishes this text, which is part ethnography, part photojournalism, is the genuinely warm approach it conveys both in its overall selection of representative voices and the visually rich and engaging portraiture. As editors Anna Zacharias and Jeff Topping, both long-time residents of RAK explain, the book "is a story of Ras Al Khaimah, in the words of its people" (7). Both journalists by profession, Zacharias and Topping were recipients of a grant from the Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research, and, thus, they spent the winter of 2014–2015 interviewing the inhabitants of RAK. Although their primary aim was to "document disappearing trades," they ended up recording much more than that: [End Page 167] individual agency, migration, and adaptation accompanied by human emotions within a rugged landscape where "emptiness," the mountains, the sea, and the vastness of sand can alienate but it can also draw one in and make one stay for a lifetime (7). The faces in the photos, often in close-ups, are mostly those of older people, smiling or serious, uncovered or half hidden below traditional face cover or head gear. Most striking of all is the overall aesthetic impact of these faces regardless of wrinkles, as if the weather-beaten, henna-stained human face would be so markedly stamped by individuality and inner force that its visible aging would be either an irrelevant feature or an ornament. The portraits sample the "people of Ras Al Khaimah," from locals tracing their ancestry to the Bedouins in the region to inhabitants who have spent most of their lives in RAK. As Paul John Eakin reminds us, "as a discourse of identity, delivered bit by bit in the stories we tell about ourselves day in and day out, autobiography structures our living" (122), and the short accounts gathered in this anthology exude precisely the ordinariness that is constitutive, ultimately, of the very texture of life.

The protagonists in the book are listed by name and occupation. For instance, Shamsa is a fish-salter recounting the old trade of salting and preserving fish underground before the age of refrigerators. She learned the trade from her father whom she lost a month after she got married at the age of twelve. The different types of fish she dries, "qobah, qanad, khobbat, and the small fish, khleisah," which vary in size and mode of preparation, used to be abundant in the Musandam, the waterways the UAE shares with Oman (70). Similar to Shamsa, Maryam, a wheat farmer, emphasizes the nature of manual labor that filled her past, and the fact that there was no gender division in terms of the physical work in the wheat fields: "There were three months of rain and after the rain finished both men and women worked with wheat. Men and women did the same work, exactly the same work." Like many older Emiratis, Maryam does not know her exact age, birth certificates being a relatively recent invention, especially amongst the mountain tribes of RAK. "I'm maybe 70 or 75 years old," she reports. Her family worked on wheat fields in the mountains for "200 or 300 years, or even more," and she started to "work with wheat" when she was fourteen years old, having lost her father at age ten (65). The adjacent portrait shows Maryam with hennaed hands and wearing a niqab, the traditional face cover of Gulf women. The women in the chapter entitled "The Neighbors" come together every afternoon to sit on a stone bench in the mountains. None of them knows her exact age. Aisha does not see a point to such a concern: "My name is Aisha Saeed Hassan and I'm—how am I supposed to know how old I am? I'm from the mountains." Fatima says she is "maybe 55 or 60," while Maryam is succinct and to the point: "I don't know my age. I was born up in the mountains. Yes, we remember the days we were there. We were happy like brides. It was good but now it's past" (122).

Saeed, the nadeeb, or the man who shrieks the nadbah, the war cry of the Ru'us Al Jibal mountain tribes, does not know his exact age either: "I am maybe more than 75" (118). He says he has called the nadbah since he was around fourteen years old. The nadbah is closely linked to tribal identity; the nadeeb shrieks the [End Page 168] name of the tribe, and the men around him respond "to his rising crescendo with a series of grunts." Saeed recalls that they had many wars before, between the different tribes, but he says "now we have government," and "anybody who does anything is caught and sent to jail" (118). Nation-building as an ongoing process in the Emirates incorporates tribal identity and strong kinship ties with marriages performed in order to strengthen tribal allegiances. In the full-length photo juxtaposed with his personal account, Saeed stands tall with his strong profile cast against a jagged mountain range, holding a hanjar, a traditional dagger, and a walking stick that also serves as an axe. Saeed does not lean on the stick, he holds it at an easy distance. "Nowadays, kids have no strength," he muses, "they drink Pepsi and eat hamburgers and eat chocolate so they have no power. If people ate dates, bread and honey and maybe a little fish, then they'd be strong" (118). The rest of the portraits reflect upon the intercultural mix of the "people of Ras al Khaimah": the camel tack maker is Pakistani—as so many of the inhabitants in the emirate are—the nurse is from Kerala, India, the beautician from Iran, the ethnologist is Spanish, the hikers are British. Naturalized citizenship is hard to get in the UAE, yet often families live here for generations and their stories intersect with the lives of the locals.

Another publication under the hallmark of tolerance is Celebrating Tolerance: Religious Diversity in the United Arab Emirates, a collection edited by Andrew Thompson. The book sets out to encapsulate, in the form of short overviews, the history of all the religious communities in the UAE, from the Armenian Church to the Baha'i, Buddhist, Hindu, Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church, Evangelical, Muslim, Roman Catholic, Sikh, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints congregation. The first of such publications illustrating the current religious diversity in the UAE, the collection in and of itself is a remarkable work. While, for instance, the Hindu community is much larger in size, constituting over 30 percent of the UAE population (55), the Evangelical presence in the Gulf dates back to the 1890s in the form of the "Arabian Mission" and its "medical ministries," and it grew exponentially in the 1950s in the UAE with the establishment of the first modern medical facilities and their need for trained staff (43). Since then, the individual Evangelical churches across the Emirates have formed the Council of Evangelical Churches as an institutional visa sponsorship body in the UAE (47). One of the most surprising chapters in the collection is on the Jewish community; it cites a series of short interview passages from various individuals practicing their faith at ease in the UAE, though through private observance and without an institutional presence.

As the UAE still gears up for Expo 2020,2 the first world expo in the Middle East organized by an Arab country, the sense of expectations runs high within the Emirates. Along with the quickening pace of construction in Dubai, the primary site of the Expo, the public discourse across the nation centers on tolerance and happiness. While these developments further enhance the public image of the country as exceptionally receptive, they involve the strengthening of a national Emirati identity at the convergence of tribal affiliations as an understanding of e pluribus unum. The publication of books providing an overview of religious [End Page 169] diversity or of historical occupations through individual experiences emphasizes the relevance of the individual stories within the larger narrative of the community and the country. The first autobiography signed off by an Emirati woman stands for another thread in the collective story, one about female empowerment, the increasing public presence of women at high governmental levels (the UAE currently has nine female ministers in the cabinet), and of a contextualized understanding of women and their agendas, different perhaps from Western scripts but equally relevant. A father-daughter paradigm stands at the vanguard of an auto/biographical narrative tradition. This tradition, one would hope, will increasingly incorporate a multiplicity of female voices, of women coming from all strata of the community, and thus mirroring the inner diversity of UAE society as well.

Szidonia Haragos

Szidonia Haragos is currently Assistant Professor of English at Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her work has appeared in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Life Writing, and Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and is forthcoming in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies.

Notes

1. The debut novels of the Emirati author Maha Gargash, The Sandfish: A Novel from Dubai (2009) and That Other Me: A Novel (2016), are important in terms of a female novelistic presence in English in the UAE.

2. Expo Dubai 2020 has been postponed until 2021 due to Covid-19.

Works Cited

Al Gurg, Easa Saleh. The Wells of Memory: An Autobiography. John Murray, 1998.
Al Gurg, Raja. An Autobiography. Motivate Publishing, 2019.
Eakin, John Paul. "What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?" Narrative, vol. 12, no. 2, 2004, pp. 121–132.
Gargash, Maha. The Sand Fish: A Novel from Dubai. Harper Perennial, 2009.
———. That Other Me: A Novel. Harper Perennial, 2016.
Thomson, Andrew, editor. Celebrating Tolerance: Religious Diversity in the United Arab Emirates. Motivate Publishing, 2019.
"United Arab Emirates." The World Bank, "World Bank Open Data," https://data.worldbank.org/country/united-arab-emirates. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019.
Zacharias, Anna, and Jeff Topping. People of Ras Al Khaimah. Medina Publishing, 2018.

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