Islam: Omar Ghobash’s Letters to a Young Muslim

Omar Ghobash wrote Letters to a Young Muslim while he was serving as the UAE’s ambassador to Russia out of a desire to prevent his son from succumbing to the perils of radicalisation. The book has won critical acclaim for its message of tolerance, writes Nick Leech.

If the level of publicity and media attention associated with the launch of a book is any measure of its success, then the UAE Ambassador’s to Russia, Omar Saif Ghobash, has every reason to be pleased.

Even before his Letters to a Young Muslim was published in January, Time magazine billed it as one of this year’s most anticipated books, alongside non-fiction works such as a memoir by transgender media celebrity Caitlyn Jenner and the latest novel by Paula Hawkins, author of the best-selling Girl on a Train.

Written by the 45-year-old diplomat as a series of informal letters to his teenage son, Saif, Letters to a Young Muslim can be seen as part of a literary tradition that extends back to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929).

It also includes more recent examples, such as Christopher Hitchen’s epistolatory blueprint for debate and dissent, Letter to a Young Contrarian (2001), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ exploration of what it means to be black and American, Between the World and Me (2015).

“It has been very interesting. I’ve spent a long time thinking about these issues and I’ve been very pleased with the response,” says Mr Ghobash.

“The worst thing would have been if it had fallen flat, but the international response has been great.”

Far from falling flat, the book has been reviewed by the The New York Times and The Times of London and has earned Mr Ghobash an in-depth profile in the London newspaper, The Guardian, and appearances on CNN and National Public Radio, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and the long-running PBS current affairs programme, Charlie Rose.

“People talk about a clash between civilisations but I actually think there is a clash within our own civilisation and within our own Islamic community,” Mr Ghobash told Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham on a recent episode of the show.

“I think that’s particularly worrisome, but also tantalising in a way. There are 1.7 billion Muslims, and the kinds of ways that we discuss ideas hasn’t really progressed in the sense that there is a tremendous amount that is kept under wraps.”

The issue of language is central to Mr Ghobash’s analysis of the issues confronting Islam and the contemporary Arab world and provided him with the immediate inspiration for Letters to a Young Muslim, a project born of his desire to prevent his son from succumbing to the risks associated with radicalisation.

“I was listening to my kids coming back from their Arabic lessons and I thought, ‘This is terrible, nothing has changed in the last 30 years’.”

“Soon, you were coming back from school telling me what I had to do to be a ‘good Muslim’. You became a little aggressive and I began to realise that your mother and I were not the only ones bringing you up,” Mr Ghobash writes in his book.

“I had images of you running away to Syria, where people would exploit your good nature. I imagined you cutting yourself off from us, your family, because we were not strict enough Muslims according to the standards that you had picked up from these so-called teachers of yours.”

When his son brought home a book about Osama bin Laden and started to express respect for the founder of Al Qaeda and to defend some of his actions, he knew as a father that he had to act and his book is part of his response.

Creating a space where Muslims of all ages can discuss faith and issues that are often considered taboo, critically and without fear of condemnation, is one of the central tenets of what Mr Ghobash defines as his call for a “post-modern clarification” of Islam.

“I’m trying to legitimise the normal layperson’s approach to the world and to say that people shouldn’t allow themselves to be shamed or put under a spotlight as being a good Muslim or a bad Muslim by people who are simply shutting their eyes to the modern world,” he says. “It’s about having the right to engage in discussion about these very important issues without feeling as if we are children to be pushed around and shouted at if we ask a difficult question.”

In emphasising the importance of personal responsibility and insisting that there is no contradiction between faith and rational enquiry or modernity and tradition, Mr Ghobash’s approach is one that would appear to put him at odds with existing religious authorities.

But it’s a perspective, he insists, that is born of respect and necessity.

“At the moment, as far as I can tell, there are not really many clerics who are trying to accommodate modernity or really trying to understand how globalisation is affecting people’s lives and psychologies.

“And so I think that to ask them to come to terms with that is going to be difficult.”

Central to the accommodation for which Mr Ghobash is looking is a rejection of the certainties offered by extremism of all forms and a version of the faith that allows young Muslims to stay true to the tenets of Islam while navigating the doubts and uncertainties that beset them in the modern world.

“I’ve heard it from my conversations with young people over the past two years,” he says.

“Uncertainty is right at the heart of everything they do and they are barely holding it together.

“I’ve spent time with ex-members of the Muslim Brotherhood and people with PhDs in the sayings of the Prophet and they’ve all admitted to having to keep things a secret.

“‘I couldn’t tell anybody’, they say, ‘but I can tell you because you seem to be open to these ideas’.”

The failure to address the reality and needs of young people, whose reality has been transformed thanks to the impact of oil and the internet, has resulted, Mr Ghobash argues, in a generational crisis in which parents and children no longer understand one another and in a migration by young people away from the language and traditions of mainstream Islam.

“A remarkable number of Gulf Arab kids from wealthy families don’t speak Arabic any more and the wealthier you become, you migrate out of the region physically, because you spend your time in either America or Europe,” he says.

“You spend your time speaking English and you begin to think in terms that are very different from the structures of the traditional system.

“There is also a growing atheism in the Gulf and in Egypt at the moment but because of the way the Arabic language is so intertwined with religion it’s actually very difficult to pull off speaking Arabic and to be an atheist at the same time.

“So in migrating out of the faith, young people are also migrating out of their language.”

Despite his championing of Arabic and Islamic traditions, Mr Ghobash’s arguments are delivered in a language and a manner that speaks more about his education in England, where he studied at Rugby School, the University of Oxford and the University of London, than of his Emirati and Russian heritage.

But his decision to write his book in English and to pursue opportunities to discuss the issues it raises in the West have been made, Mr Ghobash insists, with a dual purpose.

“My publisher wanted to do an American launch first. From their perspective, that was the most interesting thing, to enter the American debate about Islam,” he says.

“But one of the key things that I really wanted to do was to insert myself, and the Emirates, into the global discussion about these issues,” the ambassador says before his latest local appearances at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature and New York University Abu Dhabi.

“One of the things that I’ve noticed and still see is that most of the time when the region is discussed, it’s discussed by foreign expats from the region, but I wanted to contribute an Emirati voice.

“I also wanted to get the discussion going in the international Muslim community outside the Arab world and to put the issues of the Arab world and the Muslim community on the table from an Arab perspective.”

Mr Ghobash’s mother was Russian and his father, Saif Ghobash, the UAE’s first Foreign Minister, was killed at Abu Dhabi international airport in 1977 by a terrorist whose target was the Syrian minister with whom his father was travelling.

As well as establishing the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arab Literary translation in his father’s memory, Mr Ghobash is a sponsor of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction – an award described as the Arab Booker Prize – and serves on the advisory body of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London.

“I’m trying to give expression to an approach to the world that I’ve seen in the Emirates,” Mr Ghobash says.

“Obviously, there are elements that come from my personal life and the fact that I’m half Russian and an outsider, in a sense, but otherwise, what I’m talking about is pretty much what I have absorbed from many people here,” he says.

Mr Ghobash is encouraged by the responses the book has provoked among its target audience, Muslim youth.

“One of the things that is really interesting for me is to see the response of young Arabs in particular who are getting in touch with me and saying ‘Thank you for having voiced these issues, thank you for putting the words on my feelings and for giving me something to hold on to’,” Mr Ghobash says.

“I actually think that most people in this age have an awareness of the internal contradictions in the things they are being told and I don’t think that’s a big deal.

“I think that we all have the brain power and the cultural resources to find interesting answers to these questions.”

This article originally appeared in The National in 2017

 

Art: Lalla Essaydi’s Still in Progress at Leila Heller, Dubai

Nick Leech speaks to the Moroccan artist who uses carefully staged portraits of Arab women to investigate the complexities of her contemporary sense of identity as a woman, an Arab and a Muslim

The New York-based Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi admits that when it comes to the discussion and reception of her work, she has had to develop something of a thick skin.

Carefully staged portraits of Arab women that are often larger than life-size, Essaydi’s photographs not only engage with the art of the past, but also combine traditional Arabic calligraphy, architecture and interiors to investigate the complexities of her contemporary sense of female, Arab and Muslim identity.

In photographs such as Bullets Revisited #21 (2013), which features thousands of carefully cut, polished and assembled cartridge cases, Essaydi reflects on the violence that engulfs the daily lives of so many women, while in other works she engages with the art of the past and the ways in which this continues to frame western views of the Islamic world.

Essaydi achieves this in pictures such as Les Femmes du Maroc: Harem Beauty #1 (2008) by echoing and critiquing the kind of western, erotically charged, 19th-century paintings of harems and odalisques that were identified as part of a colonialist “narrative of oppression” by celebrated Palestinian critic Edward Said in his influential 1978 text Orientalism.

Despite her profoundly political stance, Essaydi’s work has frequently attracted criticism, and she has been accused of not only perpetuating western stereotypes, but also of aping the very works and artists she sets out to critique.

“People couldn’t see the difference between my works and the original paintings, they couldn’t see that I was trying to engage the viewer and to criticise the paintings in a very, very subtle way,” the 61-year-old artist says from Marrakech. “In a sense, they didn’t know how to read my work, but I’m an artist, not a militant, and I can’t do away with the art.”

The most dogged criticism Essaydi’s work, she admits, is the charge it has faced since the very start of her career.

Essaydi’s professors at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had no problem with the issues she wanted to investigate: her sense of identity as a woman, a Moroccan, a Muslim and an Arab, and the prejudice and injustices of Orientalism, but they did take issue with the manner of her engagement.

“When I was studying for my master’s degree, my professors said my work was too beautiful, that it could not convey the messages I wanted to communicate” she says. “But for me, beauty in art is very important, it’s what attracts me to an artwork in the first place and so if I want to engage somebody, I’m not going to create something ugly and I couldn’t change anyway because my work is part of me.”

In art as in life, beauty has always held a double-edged appeal. Long-equated with perfection and the highest form of aesthetic achievement, beauty also arouses suspicion, associated as it was with seduction and temptation, and as it now is with being glib, old-fashioned and aesthetically irrelevant.

Despite the many charges, Essaydi’s commitment to both her subject matter and her particular treatment of it has never wavered, and she has answered her critics with a more-than-decade-long body of work that has been exhibited in international venues such the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington.

The artist’s first solo gallery show in the UAE, Leila Heller Gallery’s Lalla Essaydi: Still in Progress, features 15 works that span each of Essaydi’s major projects from 2003 to 2013.

The show’s title is taken from a quote by Essaydi that gets to the heart of the complexity that informs her work.

“I wish for my work to be as vividly present and yet as elusive as ‘woman’ herself,” Essaydi said in a 2015 monograph. “Not simply because she is veiled or turns away – but because she is still in progress.”

It was a very personal response and a sense of dissonance that spurred Essaydi’s engagement with 19th-century depictions of the Islamic Middle East by European artists such as Ingres, Delacroix and Gérôme.

“I always knew those paintings, but for me they were a fantasy, like a novel, something we know is not reality, but then, when after studying and after seeing what people thought about them in the West, I was driven to this kind of work,” the artist tells me.

“A lot of people still think that’s the way we live, but as an Arab woman, I don’t recognise myself in those paintings,” she adds. “That piqued my curiosity and made me think about my identity as an Arab woman, so in a way, I reencountered my own culture through Orientalist paintings.”

The bodies of work represented in Still in Progress – Converging Territories, Harem, Les Femmes du Maroc and Bullets Revisited – reveal both the continuities and discontinuities of Essaydi’s investigation.

All of the works include Essaydi’s hand-rendered henna calligraphy, written with a syringe, that she uses to cover her subject’s bodies and clothing like a veil, but whereas her earlier projects placed her subjects in a neutral setting, the latter use complex mises-en-scène, complete with traditional geometry, tiling and interiors, that often require years of planning to execute.

“When I started working, I started photographing women in amazing houses, but when I brought my work to the West, all people were seeing were the beautiful spaces – they weren’t seeing the women and that was disappointing,” Essaydi explains, reflecting on works that were often mistaken as the product of fashion or interior design shoots.

“I was curious why people couldn’t see it, and it was only when people were starting to understand what I was trying to do that I was able to reintroduce architecture and colour back into my work.”

Despite all of these details, Essaydi insists her focus is the women – friends, family and neighbours from her ancestral home in Marrakech – who remain her focus.

Essaydi organises gatherings of between 20 and 40 of these women every year in Morocco, during which the group spend anything from a week to a fortnight discussing their lives and the daily challenges they face.

It’s only once these discussions are finished that Essaydi starts on the construction of that year’s artwork, using transcriptions of the women’s conversations as the basis of her henna calligraphy, rendering each project a different chapter in the artist’s development and each her models a different page in the journal of her career.

“The photographic part of my work documents the experience I have with the women I work with,” Essaydi explains. “I have absolutely no audience in my mind when I am working, I do it for me and the women I work with.”

Lalla Essaydi: Still in Progress runs at the Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai until August 15, 2017. For more information, visit www.leilahellergallery.com

This article originally appeared in The National

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s HOME1947 reimagines Partition at the Manchester International Festival

The Pakistani filmmaker’s project at the Manchester International Festival marks the anniversary of a cataclysm, writes Nick Leech.

“When we think about refugees and wars and displacement, it’s all too political today. It’s about ‘us’ and ‘them’; about ‘their’ way of life and how it’s going to impact ‘our’ way of life. It’s all about boundaries,” says the award-winning Pakistani journalist, filmmaker and activist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.

The crossing of borders is central to the Academy Award- and Emmy- and Academy Award-winning director’s latest project, HOME1947, which received its world premiere in June 2017 at The Lowry in Salford, Greater Manchester.

At a time when the number of people forcibly displaced worldwide has risen to an estimated 65.6 million according to the UN Refugee Agency, its highest level ever, HOME1947 could not be more timely. Yet and yet, as its title suggests, its immediate focus is not on the present but on the creation of Pakistan by partition, a 70-year-old event that still stands as one of the greatest migrations in human history.

The filmmaker’s first immersive installation, HOME1947 examines the human cost of the sub-division of the Indian subcontinent Subcontinent along religious lines, a process that began on 15 August 15, 1947, but still resonates today.

The creation of India and Pakistan saw Hindus and Sikhs cross new borders in one direction while Muslims travelled in the other amidst an unparalleled wave of murder, destruction and savage sectarian and sexual violence.

Within a few months, more than 10 million people were displaced, almost two2 million had died and an estimated 75,000 women were raped in an event that the Pakistani historian, Ayesha Jalal, has described as a defining moment that “continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”.

Part of this year’s Manchester International Festival, HOME1947 has been devised by Obaid-Chinoy, in collaboration with the United Kingdom UK and Pakistan-based producers Shanaz Gulzar, Aleeha Badat and Maheen Sadiq, the Karachi-based architect Ali Asghar Alavi and filmmaker Kamal Khan, the musician Ahsan Bari, and the Islamabad-based photographer Mobeen Ansari.

Despite the team effort, however, the installation remains a deeply personal endeavour for Obaid-Chinoy, whose previous projects have included A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (20152016) and Saving Face (2012), Academy Award- and Emmy-winning documentaries that addressed issues of honour killings and acid attacks in her native Pakistan.

“I’ve been thinking about partition for a long time, so when the festival approached me, I knew that it would be the ideal subject for my very first installation,” she tells me. “The thing about history and 1947 is that it’s always very political, but I grew up listening to my grandparents’ stories about the childhood homes they left behind, the smell of the earth when it rained, the fragrance of jasmine in the spring and the friendships they longed to rekindle, and so I wanted to make it very personal.”

The 48-metre-long, four4-part installation consists of a series of interiors that use archival footage, film, music, objects and 360-degree photographs of abandoned homes to pay tribute to the generation who lived through the rupture and violent legacy of Partition.

“We want people to feel like they are back in the Indian subcontinent in 1947. One day your home was your home, but the next it was in another, enemy country,” explains Obaid-Chinoy, who has even employed the unmistakable fragrance of night-flowering jasmine to evoke a sense of place.

Despite the scale of the tragedy and its role in the formation of contemporary Indian and Pakistani identities, Obaid-Chinoy has taken every effort to avoid issues of nationalism and religion.

“It’s not about who did what; it’s about the individual and their experience,” she explains. “So at no point in any of the installations do you know whether somebody is from the Indian or the Pakistani side of the border.”

The installation draws on oral testimonies and old photographs that the filmmaker has been collecting since 2007 when she founded the Citizen’s Archive of Pakistan, with the aim of recording Pakistan’s vernacular history, and Obaid-Chinoy has also collaborated with the Partition Museum in Amritsar to gain access to similar material from India.

The decision to commission Obaid-Chinoy was made last year in 2016 by the Manchester International Festival’s new artistic director, John McGrath, who spent months travelling the world searching for the right mix of artists who could create brand new works for the MIF’s extraordinary 18-day run.

These include the Pakistani musician Sanam Marvi, a master of the epic qawwali style of devotional singing, and the Indian playback singer Harshdeep Kaur, both of whom will perform on stage in Sangam 2017, an evening of Sufi music that will mark the installation’s opening.

“Rather than commissioning a documentary from Sharmeen, we gave her the opportunity to work in a different way,” says McGrath says. “But even though HOME1947 is talking about something that happened 70 years ago, it’s also talking about something that’s happening today, – how things like violence can erupt when the world changes and how we get back to humanity and the things that we value.”

After the festival, Obaid-Chinoy plans to take HOME1947 to a second venue in the UK, before touring Pakistan and India, and hopes that the installation will play a part in a new living history museum that she plans to open in Lahore next year in 2018.

“Anybody that has ever left home, been asked to leave home and not been able to return will find a resonance in HOME1947, because if you listen to these stories, you feel for people because you realise leaving your home changes you forever,” the filmmaker saysinsists. “Today, the world is in conflict and families are making the same journey, and I want people to go through the installation and think about every refugee who has to leave home and the feelings they carry with them.”

This article originally appeared in The National

 

 

 

Architecture: Marina Tabassum’s Bait-ur-Rouf Mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh

One of six winners of the world’s richest architecture prize, the US$1 million Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Marina Tabassum’s Bait Ur Rouf mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has now been shortlisted for the V&A Art Jameel Prize.

On Monday morning, international news journalists, members of the architectural press and representatives from the UAE’s tourism and heritage community gathered at Al Jahili Fort in Al Ain for the announcement of the world’s richest architecture prize, the US$1 million (Dh3.67m) Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

The award’s director, Farrokh Derakhshani, revealed that a master jury had chosen six winners, whittled down over three years from an initial list of 348 nominations, as projects that not only set new standards in architectural excellence but also make a significant contribution – social as well as cultural – to communities in which Muslims or the heritage of Islam have a significant presence.

In their own way, the success of each project came down not just to the quality of their design but to more profound acts of reinvention.

In Copenhagen, an urban park turned traditional, well-mannered notions of modern Danish design on their head by including elements borrowed from the city’s new ethnic communities, raising questions about contemporary Danish identity in the process.

In Iran a new pedestrian bridge has helped redefine what infrastructure can achieve by doubling as one of Tehran’s newest and most popular open spaces; while in Beijing, the sensitive renovation of a traditional hutong, or courtyard house, recognises the wisdom of including residents’ ideas and existing living patterns in housing design.

Of the six winners, however, the project that engages most directly with the culture and heritage of Islam is the humble and transcendentally beautiful Bait Ur Rouf mosque.

Located on the periphery of Dhaka in Bangladesh, the mosque, which cost $150,000, was funded entirely by private donations, and its flexible design allows the building to act as a school, meeting room and informal playground as well as a place of worship in an area where community facilities are notable by their absence.

“It’s a community mosque that is a space for contemplation and getting closer to God which is cooler, calmer and more comfortable, and it’s location is also interesting,” explains Derakhshani.

“It isn’t in the city centre, it’s on the periphery, and the role and importance of these spaces – urban villages as they are sometimes known – is just starting to be recognised.”

With no dome, minaret or mihrab, the building also stands in contrast to popular notions of what a mosque should look like.

“At the beginning of my design process I wanted to look deeper into the rich architectural legacy of Islam,” says the mosque’s architect Marina Tabassum.

“Domes and minarets are symbolic gestures [and] symbols are not the essence of devotion or faith. At times they can detract from the main essence of Islam, which is about complete submission to one God omnipresent.

“To be in complete communion with God one needs a space that evokes a feeling of spirituality, a space where people can connect with the divine. I find symbols a distraction and I wanted to focus instead on the sense of spirituality.”

A 12-year project, the Bait Ur Rouf mosque, or House of the Compassionate, was more than just another commission for Tabassum. Not only was the architect’s grandmother, Sufia Khatun, the client, but Khatun’s decision to donate land and money toward the mosque’s development was born of a tragedy that affected the whole family.

“My mother passed away in 2002, she was my grandmother’s eldest born, and then the next year she lost another child, my aunt, so she experienced two of her children passing away in two years,” says Tabassum.

“She asked me to design it because I am an architect and she could also sense my suffering. In a way, designing the mosque became a kind of a healing process for both of us.”

By 2005, Tabassum’s grandmother had become very ill, so the architect decided to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the project even though there was only enough money to build its foundations.

The event took place in September 2006, but by the end of that year, Khatun was dead and Tabassum was left with sole responsibility for raising the funds that would allow the project to be completed, a process that took another six years.

“When we had a good sum of money and we could buy, say, five trucks of bricks or some bags of cement, then we went about doing the construction,” the architect says.

“But you can’t really forecast when you are going to get some fund to keep it going. So, at times we had to stop construction for some months because there was no material to go on building.”

In choosing to use local, handmade bricks, Tabassum used a vernacular material that looked back to a golden age of Bengali architecture, the Sultanate period of the 14th to 16th centuries, but also sought to keep construction and maintenance costs to a minimum, a factor that led to the exclusion of costly features such as extra storeys and air conditioning from the design.

The thinking and research that Tabassum went through in designing the Bait Ur Rouf had a profound influence on a UAE-based project that she embarked on just as the Dhaka building was nearing its completion.

As part of a project team at Hyder Consulting, Tabassum conducted six weeks of research that was used to inform the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council’s mosque development regulations.

“My investigation of mosques in Bangladesh and of how it is possible to move from historical models to contemporary designs influenced, to a certain extent, the work that I did in Abu Dhabi,” she says.

“Many different styles were brought into Abu Dhabi in the past decades of its development that were not of the region and had no connection to the early Emirati mosques.

“We suggested a deeper understanding of the local tradition and extract from that what is essentially Emirati to give a contemporary expression through architecture.”

The announcement of the Bait Ur Rouf’s success came at a triumphant week for Bangladeshi creatives.

The building was one of two Bangladeshi designed and built projects to win this year’s Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The other, the Friendship Centre in Gaibandha, was designed by Tabassum’s former colleague, Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury, of Urbana architects, and on Wednesday, Dubai’s $100,000 Abraaj Group Art Prize 2017 was awarded to the Bangladeshi artist Rana Begum.

Tabassum however, is keen to emphasise the collective nature of her success. “The project wins, not me, I am a part of the project. We’ve had three projects from Bangladesh win the award before and none of those were designed by Bangladeshi architects, and with this cycle now we have two,” she says.

“For the country that’s a great honour, and being part of that makes me proud. The award is also for the community here, as well, and also for my grandmother.”

This article originally appeared in The National

History: digging Zanzibar’s Arabian past

Just in time, Mariyam Al Hammadi managed to record her grandfather’s recollections of his seafaring youth.

Now in his 80s, Mohamed Ali Mubarak Al Hammadi’s memory has recently faded, but when she interviewed her grandfather earlier this year, the old man regretted that Mariyam had not come to him earlier.

“I kind of feel bad,” Mariyam tells me, her regret tempered by the pride she feels about her grandfather’s ocean-going adventures. “He told me that if only I had asked him when he was just a bit younger, he would have remembered more, but speaking to him like this made me value him even more.”

Throughout the 1950s, Mohamed was one of many Emiratis who made a series of long-­distance dhow journeys throughout the Gulf and down the coast of East Africa. They sailed on favourable monsoon winds to trade mangrove poles, which were used in construction, and foodstuffs such as raisins, corn, cloves and dried fish. Cargo was shipped between Muscat and Mogadishu, Mombasa and Zanzibar, Dubai and Kuwait.

“Generally, we made most profit from [mangrove] wood trading and on our journey we sang different songs, in a language that often mixed Arabic with African languages such as Swahili,” Mohamed remembered.

“From Basra, we buy big cows for their meat, and the fish and meat would both be dried so we can eat them in stages, and for dinner we also ate fish and lentil beans with coconut, and we bought a lot of drinkable water for the journey.”

The living embodiment of a mercantile tradition that can be traced all the way back to the 17th century, Mohamed’s tales shed light on now largely forgotten maritime trading networks. They are also part of a deeper history that not only transports now-familiar Emirati family names such as Al Hammadi, Al Darmaki and Al Mazroui to the East African littoral, but which also locates them within the story of a far broader Arab empire that once stretched all the way from Zanzibar to the Arabian Gulf.

“We know from historical references and oral history that there was a long-standing connection between the Gulf and East Africa right up until the 1960s,” explains archaeologist Timothy Power, an assistant professor at Zayed University who taught Mariyam Al Hammadi as part of the university’s Emirati Studies programme.

“But the problem with these sources is that they are qualitative and it’s very difficult to try to get a handle on just how significant that trade was,” the Englishman says.

“So we’ve set up a project with a research grant from Zayed University to explore those historic links that will involve not just oral history – we want to partner up with the National Archives in Abu Dhabi to be able record the memories of elderly Emiratis who used to make these voyages – but archaeology as well.”

Power and an international team of archaeologists – including the University of Bristol’s Mark Horton, a maritime archaeologist who is an expert in the Indian Ocean trade, as well as Omar Al Kaabi and Mohamed Al Dhaheri from Abu Dhabi’s Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA) – have just completed their first season of excavations on Zanzibar. Against all expectations, they have already made a series of discoveries that have the potential to rewrite the island’s history, as well as that of the wider Indian Ocean trade.

“We came down to Zanzibar to try to pick up Indian Ocean trade wares – ceramics – which made their way around the west of the Indian Ocean and into the Gulf, the same kind of material that we are used to finding at Qasr Al Hosn, in Ras Al Khaimah and Al Ain,” Power says.

“The idea was that by excavating we’d be able to count the proportion of [ceramic] imports from Europe, China and India and then compare those with what we find in the Gulf region from the 18th and 19th centuries – periods that tend to be ignored by archaeologists.”

Led by Horton and Power, and accompanied by Zayed University alumni, as well as archaeologists from American institutions the College of William and Mary and the University of West Virginia, the team have conducted two excavations, the first on a 19th-century Arab house at Unguja Ukuu and the second inside an Arab fort with impressive ramparts and towers that still dominate Zanzibar’s Stone Town, a Unesco World Heritage site.

“Unguja Ukuu is a beautiful natural harbour and a very important East African site with major connections to the slave trade,” Power explains.

“The ‘Arab house’ there was built at the height of the island’s prosperity as part of a clove plantation, a crop that profited Zanzibar hugely, and the house represents a micro-history of the rise and demise of Arab colonialism on the island.”

Drone footage of Stone Town’s 18th century Omani fortress and the current archaeological excavations. Featuring 6 towers, the fortress was constructed after the Portuguese were expelled from Zanzibar in 1698.

For Horton, who has been excavating in East Africa and Zanzibar since 1984, the older history of Unguja Ukuu also connects directly with the discoveries the team have made inside the Omani fortress in Stone Town, a site that has never been excavated before.

In the eight and ninth centuries, Unguja Ukuu was one of the places where the Abbasids, the dynasty who transferred the capital of the Islamic Caliphate from Damascus to the circular Madinat Al Salam (City of Peace) in Baghdad, obtained the slaves that were used to drain and farm the marshes of southern Iraq. It’s also during this period that large numbers of African slaves were imported from East Africa into Oman.

“Unguja Ukuu was a major trade port of the Abbasid period, probably the largest and most prosperous along the East African coast between AD 750 and 850,” Horton explains.

“Excavations on the site have revealed that it’s full of glazed wares, Chinese porcelain and stoneware, thousands of beads and huge quantities of Islamic glass,” he adds.

“But one of the big mysteries has always been what happened to Unguja Ukuu, because it came crashing to an end around AD 1000. Where did everyone go? Well, we think we might have found the answer.”

Horton and Power decided to excavate inside the fort to look for evidence from the 17th to the 19th centuries, a period when the modern identities and ruling dynasties of the emirates began to be established, and that not only saw the construction of the historic buildings that are now crucial to our understanding of the UAE’s history, but of Gulf Arab dynasties in Oman and East Africa such as Al Ya’Aruba, Al Mazroui and Al Said.

First centred in Oman and later in Mombasa and Zanzibar, these dynasties thrived thanks to their ability to control the trade routes in the western half of the Indian Ocean, and with them, the flow of slaves and ivory, gold and hardwoods, ceramics and cloves.

It was also during this period that Omani Arabs of the Ya’Aruba Imamate built aflaj irrigation systems throughout Oman in places such as Wadi Bani Awf, a castle at Rustaq, and installed wali, or governors, in Ras Al Khaimah and what is now Al Ain.

“Although the Emirates didn’t exist as a state at this time, Emirati tribes were involved in the Arab conquest of East Africa and they maintained those links all the way through to the 20th century,” Power explains.

“The first Arab governor of Mombasa appointed by the Ya’aruba was from Al Darmaki family, and when, during the 18th century, the Ya’aruba empire collapsed because of civil war, a powerful Al Mazroui emirate emerges in Mombasa and the island of Pemba.”

Between December 1698, when the Portuguese were first expelled from Mombasa and July 1895, when the Kenyan coastal city came under British control, 17 Arab governors ruled Mombasa, 15 of whom bore the name Al Mazroui and between 1746 and 1823, Mombasa became an Al Mazroui-ruled emirate that was independent of both Oman and Zanzibar.

Today’s fort in Stone Town is largely a product of Zanzibar’s occupation by the Ya’Aruba who expelled the Portuguese from the island following their capture of Mombasa, effectively ending Portuguese colonialism in East Africa in the process. “In 1498 Vasco de Gama rounds the Cape of Good Hope and lands in Malindi where he hires the services of the navigator Ahmad Ibn Majid, who came from Ras Al Khaimah, to take him to India, which is really the start of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean,” Power says.

“We also know that the Portuguese were in Zanzibar for 200 years from the early 16th century, and yet they have left very little behind,” Horton muses.

“That’s always been rather puzzling, so from my perspective, the fort provides an opportunity to understand the Portuguese occupation up until the Omani takeover in 1698.”

Traces of what was presumed to be church have always been visible in the walls of the Omani-Arab citadel, but Horton and Power were unprepared for what their excavations uncovered.

“We’ve found an absolutely massive church which is maybe 30 to 40 metres in length and 12-metres-wide,” the archaeologist tells me from the excavation site, audibly excited.

Built on the scale of Catholic mission churches that still stand in New Mexico and Mozambique, the structure also contains the ruins of a later, smaller church or chapel in which the team have unearthed multiple burials including one they believe might belong to a priest thanks to the discovery of a Catholic sacred heart brooch, a small crucifix and a ring.

If the discovery of the church allows Horton and Power to add to the history of Portuguese colonialism in the Indian Ocean, their discovery of previously unguessed at earlier African layers of occupation at the fort site, push back the horizons of what is known about the history of Zanzibar.

“Underlying the Portuguese [layer] we’ve found evidence of a Swahili port city with very extensive trade links that go back to the 11th century, maybe further. We’ve reached 1000AD and haven’t hit sand yet,” Horton enthuses.

The exploratory trenches dug by Horton, Power and their team reveal six major phases of occupation. These begin with a 12 to 13th century African village that is followed by a 14 to 15th settlement, a major 17th century church which was destroyed, Horton believes, during an Arab raid in 1651 and a later, smaller chapel.

These are followed by the 18th century Omani fortress which was extended in the 19th century, when the fort served as a prison before becoming a railway siding and a ladies’ club during the period when Zanzibar was a British protectorate.

“It’s an amazing sequence now that goes back 800 years and everything is there: the origins of the Swahili occupation, Indian Ocean trade networks, the beginnings of European colonialism in Africa and the Indian Ocean, the rise and demise of the Gulf Arabs and 20th century decolonisation,” Power explains, relocating the origins of what is now Stone Town back in the medieval period.

“The guides here tell the tourists that Stone Town is only 300 years old when actually it’s over a thousand,” Horton beams.

“Despite the incredibly close cultural relations and links between the Gulf and East Africa, this is the first time that an Arab University has conducted an excavation here and it’s been absolutely pioneering.”

This article originally appeared in The National