The Sands incarnate
December 9, 2008
I am on the way to Al Ain to attend the opening of the newly restored Al Jahili Fort when it starts to rain. I know the event will take place in the open air and, thinking of its seemingly miraculous highlight – the presence among the audience of the late Wilfred Thesiger’s travelling companions Salim bin Ghabaisha and Salim bin Kabina, the two teenagers from the Rawashid tribe immortalised in his book Arabian Sands – I suddenly relish what cold and discomfort might come as a tiny taste of the unique spell “this cruel land can cast”.
While the microbus nears its destination, the window frames the crest of a sand dune, fleshing out the fantasy of being in the Sands. A pale yellow mound of immense proportions (though I know it is much smaller than its grand siblings to the south), the dune’s indistinct edge wavers across the gleaming orange disk of the slowly setting sun; and it is as if I am seeing animated colour versions of Thesiger’s striking black-and-white photographs of dune country. The sensation is both cheering and unsettling.
Bin Ghabaisha and bin Kabina arrived with Thesiger at Jahili, fresh from the wilderness, in 1949; exhausted by limited supplies and marauding tribesmen, they were graciously received by HH Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan, then the Ruler’s representative in Al Ain, whose hospitality they would never forget. Their admiration for Sheikh Zayed was such that, so many years later – neither bin Ghabaisha nor bin Kabina have birth dates but they must be in their eighties by now – they leapt at the chance to honour the memory and express their love, repeatedly stating that Sheikh Zayed’s virtues are incarnate in his progeny.
When I arrive at the fort, four lush, cafe-au-lait, distinctive looking camels are standing sentinel at the entryway, two on either side of the red carpet; and by asking their minders what breed they are, I manage to confirm my proximity to the Sands: these are Banat Antar, or the Daughters of Antar (as Thesiger points out, only female camels are used for riding in these parts). “He lived 150 years ago,” the man speaks of the animals’ male ancestor, Antar, “and still people identify them by his name. They cost millions, especially those of them used in racing.”
In the twilight, with spare, warm lights glittering at key spots, the space looks magical: dust ground, white crescent against cobalt blue sky, and off-white mud brick in rectangular formation; the circular towers are especially imposing in their sheer austerity of form. But it is bin Ghabaisha and bin Kabina who subtly upstage all else: the one squat and bare headed, with a grave expression on his face, his bow-shaped light beard deeply hennaed; the other taller and leaner, wholly affable, with a simple white head dress, a long white beard and a stick in his hand.
Drawn in by bin Kabina’s smile, I join their gathering for as long as I can. “When I walked in Jahili today,” bin Kabina whispers at one point, “I remembered Zayed and the day we came. And I felt just as young as I was then.” But with officials and friends charging ahead in various directions and the two old Bedouin constantly changing position to keep up with them, before too long I have lost sight of the two people I came to see.
Night falls to the sound of drums as the incredibly poised ayala dance is performed outside the gate. Two lines of men face each other – barely moving as they sway in tempo in a manner that recalls the camel’s sedate gait, waving their sticks and chanting in hoarse unison – while the drummers flit in a single, integrated troop from one row to the other, exaggerating the movements of the dancers as they vigourously set the rhythm: a many-bodied, loudly provocative beast.
For hours, while official functions render bin Ghabaisha and bin Kabina (in the company of HH Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon now) inaccessible, I dither between the exhibition and the stage, biding my time while I attempt to reconcile the two strong, rough-hewn teenagers in Thesiger’s photographs with these wise old men, as well heeled as they are frail. But as the evening comes to a close I see them leaning on their children’s arms on their way out. I attempt to catch up but I lose sight of them again.
Sighing, I waddle in the wake of the departing audience when suddenly I glimpse the yellow kandura of bin Ghabaisha and realise they have been ambushed near the parking lot. “Zayed is the best ruler,” I hear bin Ghabaisahas saying, “and his children by the will of God are also the way he is. I take pride in this state. The Christian,” he refers to Thesiger, “depended on Zayed. When he went to a place he did not know, he only had to mention Zayed’s name, because who has not heard of Zayed? His generosity, his courage, his knowledge, his horsemanship, his camel riding, his every quality – no one in the entire world,” he says again, “no one surpasses Zayed.”
When, several years ago, the magazine Hijab Fashion launched in Cairo, few registered the anomaly in its name: Hijab – a veil to reduce visibility; and Fashion – the compulsion to stand out. Only the most cynical amalgam of capitalism and Islam seemed capable of delivering that speedball.
But what amazed me was the un-ironic enthusiasm with which the target market took the shot. Piety and consumerism evidently mixed so freely you could place their glaring buzzwords side by side and no one would even notice.
Less as a title than a frame of mind, “Desert Destination” – the catch-all term now being coined for a host of tourist developments across the Emirates – strikes me similarly (see From Desert to Destination, The National, April 28).
Another incompatible pair of words: barely inhabitable land wedded, improbably, to expensively canned luxury; the quest for the wilderness tightly fenced in by tourism. As is the case with the first pair, one half all but negates the other.
Yet aside from Muslim arguments about commodification and literalism, the DD paradox may have more to say to humanity at large.
For settled Arabs as much as their adventurous colonisers (the Oxbridge traveller Wilfred Thesiger, a proud beacon of the British Empire, being the most relevant), ar Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter, where one of the DDs is to be located, denoted not merely a place, but a state of being. It was the desert of the desert, the deepest kernel of identity by which Arabs defined themselves; simultaneously the hell of teeh (loss in quicksand) and the heaven of guiltless origin; the void without which no fullness is possible.
Notwithstanding the mortal peril of actually being there, its lure, the lure of the desert to the power of infinity, kept even non-Arabs like Thesiger busy for entire lifetimes. Perhaps Thesiger’s greatest achievement was to communicate a sense of that lure. He says, for example, that local tribesmen never knew this vast desert by its literary name but called it, as he too would in his books, simply the Sands. Only Arabs who were far enough away to romanticise the desolation referred to it as ar Rub’ al Khali.
The wryly titled Qasr al Sarab, whose name means Mirage Palace, is rising very tangibly from those Sands as we speak. Five more overblown stars hailing the multinational break-in: once it is complete, both the Empty Quarter and that gung-ho Etonian’s endless dunes will disappear forever. All that they mean for Arabs, not to mention Thesiger’s white-man fetishes (hardship, courage, purity of race and tongue, dodgy attachment to she-camels) will be reduced to a tourist DD.
Empty, in other words, will no longer be empty; after Qasr al Sarab, even the geographic shape of the Quarter will change. And as one logical conclusion to the post-Enlightenment project to divide up and classify the world, the unknown will become known down to the last U-turn. So ends the other side of the Arab looking glass, the id to the Arab ego, the invisible nexus through which Arab relations extended in defiance of space and time. The empty is filled.
Development in the UAE is radical and frighteningly fast. Much like the old-school colonialist deprived of the opportunity to break new ground, the settled Arab will now be divested of a crucial part of his psyche. No longer will it be possible to think of the Empty Quarter and imagine a nothingness of scalding quicksand. Rather than risking his life for a reunion with a more authentic version of himself, the contemporary Arab who can afford it must take out his credit card and put on a fake explorer hat to learn about falconry.
But perhaps this is unnecessarily negative. Perhaps resort developments in the Empty Quarter will make heritage more accessible. But the notion of a palace in the desert – mirage or otherwise – is anathema to the very meaning of the Empty Quarter. Here there is no perhaps.
Many more thousands of visitors may annually contribute to the UAE’s gross GDP, but there is no escaping the enormity of an Empty Quarter no longer empty – increasingly eroded by the agents and implements of a world that can accommodate neither void nor origin; neither heaven, in practice, nor hell.
In the mid-1940s, Thesiger could not have predicted with accuracy what would become of this part of the world, but he did have the foresight to realise what his presence among the Rawashid who accompanied him across the Sands might herald for the region even as he spoke their obscure dialect, rode she-camels as they did, drank brackish water and ate sand-baked bread, all the while armed with the requisite khanjar.
When an ancient, destitute Shahara tribesman approached with the words “I came to see the Christian” laughing, the dismissive Rawashid would insist he was a madman Thesiger did not share their amusement. “I wondered fancifully if he had seen more clearly than they did, had sensed the threat which my presence implied the approaching disintegration of his society and the destruction of his beliefs. Here especially,” the explorer wrote, “it seemed that the evil that comes with change would far outweigh the good.”
An imperialist’s self-fulfilling prophecy? Perhaps the death of the Empty Quarter was a forgone conclusion even then. Not even Thesiger could have guessed that tourism, not oil, would wield the weapon, though. And yet there is nothing fanciful about any of it. Back in Cairo, Hijab Fashion is still selling well.
