The Sand Sea

So it’s been almost half a year since I’ve added anything to my blog, but not for lack of stimulus.  I don’t promise to restart the blog on a regular basis, but I do promise, in the next couple of weeks to provide some the perspective that a year’s stay in the Middle East has given me. 

Here’s a quick history of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.  The British, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, used this end of the Arabian Peninsula as a kind of staging/refueling area as they spread their influence to more prosperous regions like India and East Africa.  Abu Dhabi, in those years (and through most of the 20^th century) was no more than a handful of grass huts, maybe 100 full-time residents, and a pearl-diving industry that swelled the population to maybe 1000 during the season.  It would have been negligible to the British except that one of the most powerful sheiks profited from the pearl diving so used Abu Dhabi as a second home occasionally.

Dubai actually appears on western maps as early as 1725.  The area’s only creek flows into the gulf there, so naturally, it attracted full-time camel-grazing residents, and even some merchants from India and especially Iran who would trade there and use it as a jumping off point for better trading up the gulf.  Until 1971, the de facto currency on the peninsula was India’s rupee. 

Even beside the creek, however, there was next to no sustainable crop except for the miraculous date palm tree… and no one really survives on dates, do they?  Two miracles kept life going in the desert: the date and the camel.  The camel was both transportation and meat; it really was the measure of wealth.  Vegetation is sparse so to feed the camels, most of the population traveled around from oasis to oasis, letting their camels graze where they could.  They were not peaceful.  Camel theft was a mark of honor.  The Dubai tribes and the tribes across the area now known as Abu Dhabi warred over camels and territory much more often than they cooperated. It was an intensely primitive life that favored those with sharp eyes and heroic powers of endurance.  The strict discipline of Islam was perfectly suited to survival here. Only the tiniest fraction of people could read.  Most people could hold everything they owned in one hand.  It was like this until about 1960. 

Sometime around World War I, the British realized, from clues in the geography that had always been near the surface, that there must be oil under the sands.  By that time, they were understanding that distant colonies in volatile lands were more costly than they could afford so were already reducing their holdings around the world.  They didn’t want to manage Arabia, but they certainly wanted access to the oil and its profits.  They paid the sheiks for the rights to explore, and ultimately, to drill, but the oil itself always belonged to the Arabs.

The British had never been particularly helpful to the Arabs before, using them only so far as they were useful, and offering little in return.  There was precisely one doctor in all of the emirates, for example, and that was the one on the British military base in Sharjah.  If an Arab could drag himself to that one doctor, and the doctor was charitable, the Arab might be helped, but the Brits weren’t going out of their way.  They did nothing to modernize the area, nor even to mediate disputes – indeed, many Arabs thought (and think) that the British considered it in their best interests to let the Arabs kill each other in innumerable skirmishes across the region.  So when wealth began coming in from the exploration permits and the land leases, Sheik Shakhbut bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, the most powerful sheik in the land, horded the money.  He did not trust windfalls and he did not trust the British.  There were centuries old land disputes between his family and the Mahktoums of Dubai, the Saads, and the Sultan of Oman.  There were any number of catastrophes that a tribal leader like Shahkbut must be prepared for.  The oil money was for the inevitable bad times to come.

His younger brother, Zayed, had a much deeper grasp of not only the tremendous wealth at their feet, but also what it meant to lead.  He cared for his people and took it upon himself to usher them into the modern world.  In 1966, he took over leadership from his brother.  No one speaks or writes of how, exactly, he accomplished this.  It was entirely bloodless, but Shahkbut left Abu Dhabi for Bahrain (I think) and never returned. 

Immediately, Zayed began building roads, desalinization plants, hospitals, and schools.  He brought in experts and teachers from all over the world; he gave seed money to any local Arab who wanted to start a business.  Also, he strove to raise the profile of Abu Dhabi, both locally and abroad.  He gave money to struggling Arabs in places like Lebanon and Jordan that had no oil; and closer to home, he resolved land disputes with Saudi Arabia and Oman.  And perhaps most importantly, he forgave all old grudges with local sheiks and began negotiations to form a new nation among them.  In 1971, The United Arab Emirates was formed of seven emirates.  Zayed’s title became “supreme ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE.”  Sheik Rashed Maktoum became “supreme ruler of Dubai and vice president of the UAE.”

I spent this weekend in the Empty Quarter, or the Rub al Khali, the largest sand sea in the world which stretches across most of the UAE, deep into Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Oman.  The northern edge of it is marked by Liwa, a 120 kilometer string of oases.  We drove to Liwa and then set out across the sands until one of our 4-wheel drives bogged down.  We recovered the car after much digging, took shelter from the wind behind a nearby dune, and called that home for the night.

 
From camp, several of us hiked barefoot to the top of the tallest dune we could see.  By the map, we stood at the very edge of the sand sea, and yet even from that high place we could see nothing but dunes stretching to the horizon.  From there, we ran down the side of the dune – a drop of easily 500 feet – setting off the famous “singing of the sands.”  There is some dispute about precisely what occurs in this phenomenon, but somehow the movement of sands of a certain consistency and humidity achieves a harmonic effect that sounds like distant engines or a symphony of tubas.  We could feel the dune quaking around our ankles even when the person setting it off was fifty yards away. 

 
Once we landed in the sabkha, or salt flat, below, the sun was setting and we began the trudge back to camp.  I turned around now and then to check the sun for how much time we had, and every time I did, I was struck by how stark and bleached the desert looked beneath that glare.  It looked like nothing so much as a killer of men – a place to disappear, desiccate, and die.  But walking as we did away from the sun, the same desert was warmly tinted, all peach and terracotta.  It glowed the color of a child’s ear.  The desert loves the light and light loves the desert.  They caress each other and fondle each other like astonished new lovers.

Earlier this month, another teacher, Sena, and I took eight students to Portugal where we built a house (a week’s worth of house) through Habitat for Humanity.  Since developing a few carpentry skills years ago with Tod, I’ve always figured I’d do some work for that organization, and the opportunity fell into my lap here.  It was a no-brainer when Sena asked if I’d like to help out.

In Bend, the future owners of the houses we built often contributed to the construction of their own homes and it was such a pleasure to see how that emotional and physical investment connected them to this most basic of human needs – their own shelter.  Habitat does the same thing.  The father of the family whose house we helped build was on site, laying bricks, cutting stone, and mixing concrete every day.  The economy is slow in Portugal and like so many of his countrymen, he is currently out of work, so this was perfect for him.  His wife was there whenever she could get away from her work cleaning homes, and on the weekend, their daughter came to lay bricks.  A boy from the farm up the path came twice, for no other reason than that he liked the work and wanted to help his new neighbors. 

The kids we brought from Abu Dhabi worked hard (some harder than others, of course).  None of them really knows what it’s like when a parent fears the landlord, but most showed enough imagination to sympathize with this family and to feel that their work might serve as the foundation from which a family could step into a less desperate way of life.

As for me, it was wonderful to slop concrete on a mortar board again and spread it with a trowel.  I even loved the last day when we cleared the work site and I lugged heavy boards across ditches all day.  I know I get sick of that work eventually.  I know that waking up day after day in the rain or cold to break my back again against obdurate materials makes me depressed after a while.  But for one week, how satisfying it is!

And of course I loved being back in Europe.  The middle east fascinates, but somehow any old European town, with its cobblestone streets and hand-hewn rafters, feels both homey and exotic, simple and sophisticated.

We dreaded Cairo.  It’s the second largest city in the world; twenty million people crowd its chaotic streets and all of them, we felt, wanted nothing more than our green American dollars (my two companions, they would insist I note, were not Americans, but all of us earn Arab Emirate Dirhams which are pegged to the dollar).  In the far smaller town of Luxor, especially on the East bank, we had been besieged by touts and salesmen so persistently that even the words “No, thank you,” were taken as an invitation.  In Luxor, we found that, in certain areas, withdrawing into the tiny circle of our own conversation and rudely ignoring all comers was the only way to pass down the street.  It made us feel snobbish and closed-minded, but it was the only way to avoid harassment.

 
We had been warned that Cairo would be a den of touts, at best, and conmen more likely.  Isn’t it wonderful to be surprised?

 
Chaotic, yes.  When they built the roads, they did paint lines to suggest lanes, but the Egyptian tolerance for personal space makes a mockery of that.  Twenty inches between cars is valuable real estate – what, do you think the molecules will scratch the paint if you compress them to ten?   The cab drivers take justifiable pride in their ability to judge centimeters at 60 kilometers an hour.  The horn, to a western ear, means eminent disaster or an angry shout; if I hit my horn in America, I’m usually muttering something with four letters.  To the Egyptian, the horn is a friendly sound, a tap on the shoulder, a hello or excuse me.  True, they might lean out the window to shout at times, but a shout melts to laughter in an instant.  One particularly enthusiastic (read: maniacal) cab driver in Alexandria, who was apparently infuriated by the orange salesman who had opted to do business in the street (really), giggled about it with me the moment we passed.

 
On our first night, we went to see the whirling dervishes near the Al Ghouri mosque.  We’d never heard of it; it was free; we were tired.  It was a filler, something to tide us over to bedtime.  Surprised again!  The dervishes didn’t even show up until about an hour after the starting time, but I didn’t care; by that time, the music had entranced me.  Twelve drums rolled – eight of them ringed with cymbals like bloated tambourines – providing the platform for those Arabian strings – they pull on them with bows like they’re pulling a child from its womb – and six cobra-charming horns, topped by two soloists: one, a singer who wailed like the muezzin, the other, an old flatterer, tattering tiny brass zils – or finger cymbals – that wriggle beneath the rhythm.  It screamed, this band; I screamed, that’s for sure.  It howled like a sandstorm, blared like a riot, rolled like the hooves of Saladin’s charge.  That’s Cairo.  It’s no wonder the dervishes consider their whirling a spiritual journey.

And the Khan al-Khalili – that should have been the heart of Cairo’s horrors: it’s a souk (Arabian market) but so big that it’s also a neighborhood.  Certainly, the salesmen were aggressive, but not leech-ish-ly.  They believed you when you said “no” and many were satisfied to earn nothing more than a smile off of you.  Our café owner, who was bored no doubt since his staff ran the place hummingly, ended up dashing us all over the market introducing us to rug merchants, jewelers, perfume mixers, engravers, inlayers, and more.  When we gave him 25 pounds (about $5) he thanked us, shook hands, walked off waving, and slipped the bill into the hand of a woman begging. 

 
Somewhere in our wandering the market, we stumbled out of it, into the Islamic neighborhood surrounding it.  Here, we were more conspicuous, being the only westerners in sight, and yes, it did occur to me to stay on my toes, but it was hard not to be charmed by the mechanic, from the shadows of his garage, jutting his hand into the air and shouting his English, “Hello!!”  A man with a face like a peach stone, swathed in the austere woolen shirt of the old ways, eyed me warily, but when I touched my chest and said “Salaam Alaikum,” he busted into a pumpkin-toothed grin and stammered the return “alaikum as salaam.”

 
All during our stay, we were greeted with smiles and “Happy New Years” (it’s our new year, not theirs), as much from those who had nothing to sell as from touts.  This is a city to return to often.