by Joe Bennett
Further south the beach gives way to a sea wall from which men and boys fish. On a patch of grass a black tent has been pitched behind a Land Cruiser. A mother and daughter in black abayas squat at the door of the tent washing dishes. The son comes running along the sea wall in red shorts and t-shirt, excited. He has only one arm. In his solitary hand he holds a freshly caught flatfish, flapping as it drowns in air. He shouts with joy, hands the fish to his mother, collects a tin of bait and runs perilously back along the wall to dad, his empty sleeve flapping like the fish.
I cut in from the beach past the tall blank walls of a sheikhly palace, walls crowned with security cameras and razor wire. At the giant metal gates there’s a sentry box complete with sentry. The new town centre is impersonal and ugly, a grid built for the motor car. On the dead-straight boulevards the locals drive like maniacs between speed bumps, and like nuns over them.
I get a taxi back to the Flamingo and eat there in front of a television showing a programme about an American who’s converting a car wash into an automatic wash tunnel for people. The narrator seems excessively excited about it all. I am the only diner in the restaurant and I ask the dispirited and inevitably Filipina waitress if it can be turned off. She promises to ask. She never comes back.
17
A Use for Roundabouts
‘Parking for men’, says the sign outside the mosque in Sharjah. I park, grinning. I’d like to see more such signs. Any supermarket, for example, that advertised ‘Checkouts for men’ would get my custom immediately. The queue would move so swiftly. No man would be surprised when asked to pay. Every man would have his bank card already poised above the slot and he’d have the magnetic strip the correct way round. He’d remember his pin number, and he wouldn’t try to push the buttons through the back of the machine. He would never pay by cheque. If he paid with cash he wouldn’t rootle through his bag for a purse and then rootle through the purse for coins. Nor would he then lay those coins on the scanner so the checkout girl found them hard to pick up. He’d just hand over a wad of notes and then he’d station himself behind the driving bar of the trolley and when the checkout girl handed over the receipt and his change he’d accept them like a relay runner taking the baton. In short, it would be lovely.
And this is the lovely bit of Sharjah. The unrelievedly urban drive from Umm al Quwain offered nothing to please the eye, but this down-town area has been tarted up. Here are more show-off buildings, more grass, fewer potholes, less litter, and more of a sense of civic pride backed up by civic money than anywhere I’ve seen outside Dubai itself. There’s also a lot more evidence of religious commitment. The mosque with the gender-based parking is a vast and glorious beast with a tiled tower that reaches for heaven. I’d like to mooch around inside the building, but I like even more the fact that being an infidel I can’t. When religion becomes a spectator sport for tourists it is no longer a religion.
The mosque overlooks the old port and a mass of beautiful battered dhows. A sign says ‘Fishing and Getting Closer are Prohibited’. I can’t see anyone getting closer, but there are scores of Indians fishing, tossing hand lines into the clear water between the old wooden hulls and following the progress of a shoal of sprats. The sprats shimmy this way and that, all shifting direction simultaneously, an aquatic herd driven by an unreadable collective urge. They dart and nibble at the baited hooks in an ignorant frenzy, competing to die. The Indians haul them up two, three, four at a time, tiny sparkles of fish flesh, their backs as green as moss. Into plastic bags they go to flap, expire and stiffen.
The sprats attract a diving bird, half cormorant, half duck it seems. When it dives the Indians excitedly try to catch it. As it cleaves through the clear water like a motorized bottle, hooks plop in beside it, behind it, right on its beak. To my relief it ignores them. When salmon fishing in Canada once I hooked a guillemot. It took ten minutes to land. The bird had taken the treble-hooked lure so deep down its throat that I had no choice but to kill it by bashing its head against the gunwale.
And once, from a second-floor flat in a grim bit of North London, I watched a shaven-headed child lay a baited hook in a backyard then retire inside. A pigeon descended, took the bait, flew off. The child emerged from indoors with a stout little fishing rod. He let the pigeon fly, then hauled on the rod. The bird fell through the air in a sudden entropic tumble, a chaotic blur of feathers. He loosened the line. The pigeon became a pigeon again. It swooped then rose, then rowed through the air, until whammo, he hauled on the rod again – and again and again. The scene held me like a horror movie. I hated it but couldn’t turn away. The kid was whooping with delight. The kid was evil.
Across the road from the dhows and the fishermen is a vast tunnel of a building reminiscent of one of London’s Victorian railway stations. But its roof is crowned with a golden dome that announces it emphatically as Islamic. It turns out to be a former shopping mall, built in the Eighties as the first wave of western consumerism swept the UAE. But with a nice twist of irony it has now been converted into the Museum of Islamic Culture, part of Sharjah’s bid to become the region’s moral and cultural epicentre. And the conversion is splendid. The building has the feel of a temple: spacious, reverential, subtly lit; a place where the clock doesn’t tick and where you tread with quiet deference.
It is perhaps unfortunate that the first gallery I step into houses a range of swimwear for Islamic women. The range was designed in Australia and is called MyCozzie. The conflicting demands of modesty and streamlining make it purely comic. But I didn’t come in here to laugh, and in the next gallery I don’t. I gawp. I gawp at an exhibition on the Hajj, the greatest human pilgrimage on earth. By far.
There are about 1.3 billion Muslims alive today. That’s about four times the population of the United States. That’s one in five of the world’s people. And every one of those 1.3 billion is supposed to do the Hajj to Mecca at least once in their lives.
The Hajj happens every twelve months. With Islamic months being lunar months, the date of the Hajj moves back a few weeks every year and sometimes takes place in high summer. High summer in Mecca is impossibly hot. How do they cope? The answer is that some don’t. Every year hundreds die on the Hajj. Sometimes there’s a stampede and the hundreds become thousands. But still the next year there will be millions more undaunted pilgrims.
Last year three million turned up. And here in the museum there’s an aerial photograph of most of them at prayer simultaneously. It’s prostration for as far as the lens can see. All of them in white. All on their knees. All with their foreheads to the soil and their backs to the sky. It’s a field of devotion. It’s like wheat flattened by a storm. It’s astonishing to stare at. Harness this devotion, this self-abasement to belief, and what could you not achieve? This is Islam made flesh. The word means submission to God.
The mosque that they’re kneeling in and around is an open-air amphitheatre. The aerial photo shows only the mosque’s top storey. Apparently there are two more storeys below ground. The building can accommodate two million people. That’s a church the size of more than twenty Wembleys.
The object of these people’s veneration is a black cube on a plinth, the Kaaba. It’s the holy of holies, the house of Allah, the literal centre of Islam. In my hotel room in Ras al Khaimah there was an arrow on the wall beside the bed. It pointed towards this building. Five times a day, every day, at sunrise, sunset and three times in between, 1.3 billion people are supposed to kneel in this direction. And a goodly percentage of them do.
Finding the right direction for prayer is straightforward in the Middle East, where most Muslims live, because every mosque is aligned to Mecca. And if you can’t find a mosque there’s an Islamic pocket compass that will do the job for you. But further afield the business gets trickier because of the curvature of the earth. A Muslim in New York, for example, has two options. One is to pray in the direction that an aeroplane would fly if it were heading to Mecca. That’s the great circle route, heading north-east over Ba
ffin Island and the Arctic tundra. It’s the shortest route by far but it seems counter-intuitive and perhaps sacrilegious. The alternative is to kneel in an east-south-easterly direction, following a straight line ruled between the Big Apple and Mecca on a Mercator’s projection map of the world, as in an atlas. It’s a far longer route, but to our literal minds it seems somehow more fitting.
The difference between the two is close to ninety degrees and that right angle has provoked a fierce dispute among American Muslims. There is now a schism between the flat-mappers and the great circlists. It has not yet led to bloodshed, but in the course of human history millions of people have lost their lives over far more trivial theological disputes.
The Kaaba is an ancient place of worship. It predates Islam by thousands of years. Its original function seems to have been as a place of truce, a white flag, as it were, of black stone. The leaders of warring tribes could meet in its peaceable shadow to thrash out their differences without fear of being killed.
Which suggests that, just as Christianity grafted its nativity myth onto the winter solstice and its resurrection myth onto the celebration of spring (what exactly have bunnies and fluffy chicks to do with Jesus?), so Islam grafted itself onto what was already there. Long before Mohammed was even a twinkle in Allah’s eye, the Kaaba had been a place of mystical reverence, a place apart. Islam simply purloined it.
With only a couple of days of car rental left I ought to go to Abu Dhabi. It’s the paterfamilias of the UAE, and I have been told so many things about it: how its wealth drives development throughout the UAE; how it has resisted Dubai’s headlong rush into the brasher qualities of twenty-first century capitalism; how it works quietly offstage while Dubai charges to the front and seizes the microphone; how it is smugly enjoying Dubai’s current financial woes with more than a hint of, ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you’; and how indeed it is quietly stepping in with its petro-dollars to buy Dubai’s distressed assets.
Of the seven emirates Abu Dhabi is by far the largest. The city of Abu Dhabi itself sits on the coast but its domains stretch hundreds of miles south and west. Most of those domains are sandy nothing, but underneath them lies the good black stuff that has paid for everything; the stuff that has allowed the ruling Al Nayhan family to snaffle up any trinket that catches their eye: a squadron of American fighter jets, say, or Manchester City Football Club. And there’s plenty more oil yet, about seventeen million American dollars’ worth, or so I’ve read, for every citizen of the emirate. Abu Dhabi can afford to be smug.
As you may already have deduced, the United Arab Emirates is not preponderantly Arab. Nor is it very united. The ruling families of Abu Dhabi and Dubai trace their ancestry back to the same tribe, but that has not always made them brothers. When Thesiger arrived on his best camel in 1948, Dubai and Abu Dhabi were engaged in a minor war with each other. To some extent it seems that they still are, though the war these days is economic and rarely acknowledged. There is, for example, a dogfight taking place right now in the airspace above the UAE.
One of Dubai’s greatest successes has been Emirates Air. It serves the world. And you can drive to the Emirates terminal from Abu Dhabi in less time than it takes to drive to Heathrow from central London. Yet Abu Dhabi has recently launched and heavily promoted its own airline, Etihad, which competes directly with Emirates. The reason for doing so does not, one suspects, have an awful lot to do with economics.
Abu Dhabi likes to see itself as mature, whereas Dubai is the exuberant headstrong wilful teenager. Abu Dhabi specializes in grand civic buildings, huge bravura pieces of contemporary architecture, done with a less overt obeisance to glamour and commerce. That maturity, however, does not extend to its citizens’ driving. Abu Dhabi’s drivers manage to kill themselves in even greater number than the drivers of Dubai. Last year almost a thousand people died on Abu Dhabi’s comparatively few roads. That’s roughly twelve times the rate at which New Zealand drivers die. And I read in the paper yesterday that because of the abundance of vehicles and the shortage of space, people have taken to parking their cars overnight in the middle of those roads. The police say they’re going to take this new offence seriously and the culprits will be in hot water, but since those culprits are certain to be Emirati nationals, I doubt that the water will be more than lukewarm.
All of which means that I ought to go to Abu Dhabi to have a look round. But I don’t. Instead I point the Nissan towards Al Ain, the second city of that emirate, partly because I have an acquaintance there so I won’t have to pay exorbitant hotel rates, and partly because I doubt that in forty-eight hours I’ll do anything more than scratch the surface of Abu Dhabi. But mainly because I don’t think Abu Dhabi would surprise me.
Al Ain on the other hand, I know next to nothing about. I know only that it is described as an oasis city, and the word oasis still performs its cartoon magic on my mind.
I crawl through traffic jams out of Sharjah, swing round the unappealing backside of Dubai and spear across the increasingly desertish desert on highways that dismiss the landscape as an irrelevance, a mere backdrop to air-conditioned comfort. I get vistas of sand stretching limitless to the edge of the world and I simply keep going. And when I reach Al Ain after a couple of hours, unwracked by thirst, untroubled by anything except a numb foot from keeping the throttle depressed, I take to the place immediately. It seems better tended, better built, and better laid out than anywhere I’ve been in these parts, probably because it’s got more money.
It’s got more money because it’s part of Abu Dhabi, and it’s got even more money because it’s the birthplace of the ruler of Abu Dhabi. He looks after it like a shrine. Al Ain’s suburbs are suburban, its streets wide, its pavements clean, its poor less obvious, and though it’s caught the standard dose of decorative roundaboutitis, it seems immediately a comfortable place to live.
And the first thing I come across, slap bang in the town centre, is what I think may be a graveyard. Nothing odd about that, of course, because they’ve been dying hereabouts for several thousand years, yet this, if it is a graveyard, is the first I’ve seen. It’s surrounded by a wall of concrete block, one corner of which has been flattened and reveals a patch of what appears to be wasteland dotted with trees and several little hummocks, some of which end in what could be a headstone.
I clamber in over the rubble. The place is about a third of a football pitch in area. No one’s about. Litter abounds. The hummocks are of roughly the right size and shape to be graves. A couple of the rough headstones have an Arabic inscription on them though these don’t seem to have been done with any care. The place feels unloved, ignored. I climb back out over the rubble, uncertain what I’ve found.
The main drag is busy with Arab men and women shopping, though the shopkeepers and stallholders are still predominantly Indian, as is the English on the shop signs. It has the usual errors of transcription. I am particularly taken by Hawazen Lungerie.
By a patch of wasteland near the top of town there’s a line of Toyota pick-ups. They’re all dead. They’ve sunk to their axles in the sandy ground and their tyres are long gone. Collectively they now form a goat market, with the goats penned on the flat beds of the trucks, bleating, clambering over each other, their long ears dangling like the side curls on a Hasidic Jew. Their owners squat in groups, playing cards or chewing on bread or smoking or snoozing. Most of these men give me only the most cursory of glances and dismiss me as a gawper. One man however is convinced that there’s a hole in my life and that hole is exactly the size and shape of a goat. He follows me, speaking in broken English, taking my arm, leading me twice back to his pen of little brown and white goats as skinny as orphans. ‘You like goat. You buy goat.’ He’s half right, as it happens. But I’ve already got two at home.
Just below the goat market is the oasis proper, the reason for Al Ain’s existence. It is a dense mass of date palms, a forest of date palms, encircled by a daunting wall. A gate with a barrier arm permits me entry and I wander a while do
wn roads that wind and threaten my sense of direction. But I find only more date palms and I am prevented from wandering among them by more walls, mile after mile of wall. I emerge with some relief through a different gate, to find myself in a part of town that looks similar to the one I parked in but that no longer seems to contain my Nissan. I solve the problem temporarily by going for lunch.
The restaurant is Arab. My fellow lunchers are Arab. It’s a first for me. But these are not the landlord Arabs of Dubai, the spotlessness of whose dishdashes is matched only by the spotlessness of their Porsches. These men, and there are only men of course, wear dun-coloured robes, unironed and lived in.
Before I came here, just about the only thing I knew, or thought I knew, about Islam was that the left hand is unclean. The reason, as I understood it and without wishing to go into detail, is lavatorial. So you greeted people with the right hand and you ate with it, exclusively.
Well, not in Al Ain. Or at least not among these rough-shaven men in this cheap restaurant in Al Ain. In consuming a heap of meat and rice and grease, while devotedly looking up at a screen showing motor racing, they go at their food with both hands. I go at mine with cheap cutlery.
The intermission for lunch solves the problem of my missing car in the same way as taking the dog for a walk often solves the last clue in a crossword. It’s as if the subconscious mind chews things over better when the conscious mind isn’t telling it to chew, a truth that I suspect applies to far more than crossword clues. I leave the restaurant and find a phone booth. Then another phone booth, then another. There’s one on almost every street corner. And the fifth one I find actually works. The others have not been visibly vandalized; they just seem to have died. I dial my only acquaintance in Al Ain.