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

 

Driving: I’m a 45-year-old man who takes the bus. So what?

Outing yourself as a 45-year-old non-driver in Abu Dhabi attracts the same mixture of disbelief, suspicion and pity that’s usually reserved for British teetotalers and vegetarians in France

In 1986, the year her government privatised and deregulated Britain’s bus networks, Margaret Thatcher is reputed to have said that: “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure.”

If that’s the case, then the vast majority of men in Abu Dhabi are certain winners in the great commute of life, whereas my failure is absolute: not only do I not drive, but I cannot.

In 2009, fewer than 1 per cent of men in the emirate used buses as their primary form of transport; a whopping 49 per cent used private cars, 8 per cent used private taxis and 22 per cent walked.

Only 0.3 per cent travelled by bicycle and 0.1 per cent used a motorbike, which is understandable given the suitability and safety of the UAE’s highways where, according to estimates, 5.9 road traffic fatalities were recorded per 100,000 people last year, with the number of fatalities surging by 7.4 per cent.

Outing yourself as a 45-year-old non-driver in Abu Dhabi attracts the same mixture of disbelief, suspicion and pity that’s usually reserved for British teetotalers and vegetarians in France.

“You mean you don’t drive?” people say when I confess, seemingly happier for a journalist to have a criminal record or a problem putting words in a coherent order, than an inability to steer a potentially lethal piece of machinery that travels at high speeds.

At home in the United Kingdom, where 80 per cent of the men eligible for a driving licence have one, I was happy with my minority status, but now that I live in the UAE, a place where the distances between work, home and my children’s school are vast and the love of driving runs deep, I’ve decided it’s finally time I learned to drive.

As I make my way to the Emirates Driving Company (EDC) in Mussaffah, the idea feels both liberating and rash.

It’s only 2pm in the afternoon, but homebound traffic is already hurtling thick and fast as it jockeys for position along Al Khaleej Al Arabi Street.

Four-wheel drives bank across the highway like jets in an aerobatic display, and my taxi driver, who clearly thinks that a stopping distance of three metres is more than generous, cruises behind a white Lexus at 120 kilometres per hour, sending my stress levels sky high.

After nine years in Abu Dhabi, I’m normally inured to such behaviour, but I’m now focused on the road around me as never before and I’m finding the experience alarming in the extreme.

Sending non-drivers to Mussaffah feels like a punishment that is particularly cruel. If areas such as Yas, Al Maryah and Saadiyat Islands represent Abu Dhabi’s polished super-ego, Musaffah is more like the city’s unburnished id, a bewildering labyrinth of workshops, foundries, factories and camps that become increasingly industrial and more confusing the further you venture in.

As the prize-winning author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta, confessed to me recently after he had to abandon a walking tour of the district, Mussaffah may be the place to discover Abu Dhabi’s unvarnished underbelly, but it’s no place for pedestrians.

Arriving at the vast driving-school campus, I join a knot of salwar kameez-­clad fellow hopefuls who are just as eager to escape the 46°C heat, and through the heat haze before us we spy our immediate goal: the EDC test area packed with learners. A rink of infrastructure – bridges, flyovers, underpasses and car parks – designed specifically for driving instruction, it represents a condensed and uncanny simulacrum of Abu Dhabi’s urban landscape.

Before we can join in, however, we’re required to open a file, have our eyes tested, submit our documents and pay our fee, a process that takes place in a sparkling building on the far side of the campus, an anvil of melting asphalt that feels soft and sticky underfoot.

Arriving at speed, we push at doors with scalding, stainless steel handles, only to be repelled. They are locked, so we work our way around the building, desperately looking for an opening.

It’s only once we complete a circuit that we notice the sign bearing the news we had all feared: at 2.30pm, the EDC may be open for learners, but for non-drivers, registration is already closed.

Before even reaching the rink, I’ve failed my very first driving test so I leave the EDC’s car park in search of a taxi, knowing I will have to make the 60-kilometre round trip to Mussaffah all over again.

My feelings of exasperation are intense, but as a 45-year-old pedestrian in Abu Dhabi, what more did I expect?

This article was originally published in The National

 

Linguistic twist: is Arabic in crisis?

Throughout the Arab world, young people are rejecting classical Arabic in favour of a mish-mash of English and their own local dialects – ‘Arabish’ – a popular chat language that mixes the two, writes Nick Leech.

When Jihad El Eit opened the first branch of his fast food business in Dubai, he relied on little more than gut instinct when it came to choosing a name. At the time, ‘Man2ooshe & Co’ seemed like an inspired choice. Not only did it fit with the company’s contemporary take on traditional Arabic street food but it also used the Arabic chat alphabet in its name, a phonetic mish-mash of Arabic sounds and Roman characters that has become one of the most common and convenient modes of written communication for Arabic-speaking youth.

In the phonetic Arabic chat alphabet, ‘Man2ooshe’ becomes ‘Man’oushey’ because the ‘2’ is used to represent a pause between syllables in Arabic. The name spoke directly to the young, hip, Arabic but English-speaking market Jihad El Eit was aiming for.

Unfortunately, ‘Man2ooshe & Co’ soon became the victim of its own success, as non-Arabic speakers, unfamiliar with the phonetic transliteration that defines the Arabic chat alphabet, also started to demand the firm’s home-made take on traditional Middle Eastern snacks such as manakeesh, burek, and minikeesh.

“We never expected a non-Arabic audience to be interested in our food,” explains El Eit. “As more Western and Asian customers started coming to our stores, they didn’t understand what the ‘two’ meant. Some people started calling us ‘mantooshey’. Some people thought we were called ‘man-two-ooshey’. The name started to distract from the essence of the brand.”

Three years and five Man2ooshe stores later, El Eit wanted to expand his business further, but felt he had no choice but to employ the services of a consultancy to remedy the issue surrounding the brand’s name. The result was what the chief executive now describes as a “costly facelift”. ‘Man2ooshe & Co’ became ‘Man’oushe Street’ and no longer employs the Arabic chat alphabet in its branding, menus or signage.

“We didn’t do our homework properly when we started in terms of acceptance of the brand,” El Eit explains. “If we had used a generic texting message that was understood by all audiences, I don’t think we would have changed our name, but we used an Arabic word with a twist of English and that created confusion. I regret it now because I paid much more for the rebrand than I did when we started.”

While El Eit’s experience may provide a salutary business lesson for companies targeting non-Arabic speakers, the exponential growth of the Arabic chat alphabet since the 1990s has led to a sea change in the way the language is written by young people across the Arabic-speaking world. Arabish or Arabizi (a contraction of Arabic and Inglizi) even appears in advertising and on TV, especially on youth-oriented shows and channels such as Na3na3 on MTV Middle East. Throughout the Arabic speaking world, Arabish has become a default for written communication among the young in text messages, in email and online.

The preponderance of Arabish in the digital realm should come as no surprise. The language was born online during the 1990s, when operating systems, web browsers, personal computers, keyboards and keypads were unable to support Arabic.

The only readily available option at the time was to use the Roman fonts and characters defined by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a character-encoding scheme based on the English language that defined the 128 characters – including the numerals 0-9 and the letters A-Z – that appear on printers, keyboards, computers and communication equipment. Originally developed for telegraphic communication, ASCII soon became the effective lingua franca of the internet, a huge benefit to languages written in Roman script, but a massive problem for the users of different alphabets.

Arabic speakers responded to the absence of Arabic script in two ways: some used English, but many more began to use Roman characters to recreate the appearance and the sounds of Arabic words. Arabic was effectively ASCII-ised so that it could be written on a standard keyboard, and numerals were enlisted to represent specific Arabic sounds that do not occur in English. The number 5 became kha; 6 became taa; 8 qa and so on. It was from this ingenuity and the desire to communicate that Arabish was born.

David Palfreyman, a linguist based at Zayed University in Dubai, was the co-author of a 2003 research paper, A Funky Language for Teenzz to Use: Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging, one of the first academic studies of ASCII-ised Arabic. Palfreyman had arrived in the UAE in 1999 and soon became interested in the way the university’s female students were making use of technology and social media to express themselves.

“I’m interested in the creative aspect of ASCII Arabic and how the issue is playing out in a society that is changing,” Palfreyman explains. When the linguist conducted his research back in 2003, he had no way of knowing just how successful and pervasive ASCII-ised Arabic would become. Not only has it survived the introduction of technologies that now support the Arabic language, but it has thrived.

“Students could write in Arabic now, but I still find lots who continue to type in Roman script. In theory, the technical reasons for using ASCII-ised Arabic have disappeared, but the fact that it has survived shows there must be other reasons for its use.”

Palfreyman believes that ASCII-ised Arabic is not only an important expression of youth culture but that its use of Arabic, English and Roman characters also allows it to act as an identity marker that simultaneously references global, non-Arabic norms. It also gives a voice to the very local Emirati dialect.

“In Emirati Arabic there is a ‘ch’ sound in words like ‘kitabitch’. It’s the feminine form of ‘your book’,” the linguist explains. “In standard Arabic, the same word would be ‘kitabuk’. There’s no normative way in the Arabic script … to write ‘ch’, whereas English has an accepted way of writing that sound. The use of the English ‘ch’ allowed the student in my study to write in the way that she spoke.”

Palfreyman also believes ASCII-ised Arabic contributes to literacy by encouraging reading and writing, but admits he takes an optimistic view of an issue that has become something of a moral panic throughout the Middle East. Instead, there is a widespread and growing perception that classical and modern standard Arabic – the official language of government, news and the Quran – are in a state of crisis.

An increasing number of column inches have been dedicated to the apparent rejection of standard Arabic by the younger generation, while concerned parents have added fuel to the debate by voicing their concerns about the standard of Arabic teaching and the seeming inability of their children to master even basic Arabic skills. Their fears appeared to be confirmed by the findings of a recent report, issued by Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority, which showed that over the last five years, students in the emirate’s private schools had shown little or no improvement in the language.

Educational experts may identify outdated teaching methods and a reliance on rote learning as reasons for the current malaise, but there is also a widespread perception that the increasing use of English in schools and the popularity of Arabish are also to blame.

“Arabish started with our generation, but it has passed on to the next and now it is even worse,” bemoans Jaber Mohammad, a 35-year-old businessman from Dubai. “We did our 12 years of schooling with normal Arabic and never used Arabish until we were in college, but now the younger generation start using it when they are in school,” he explains. “I see it with my cousins and my nephews – they all use Arabish – I doubt they even have Arabic installed on their mobile phones.”

Mohammad has a long history of promoting the use of the Arabic language and Arabic content online. In 1997, he helped to develop an early Arabic chat room that provided users with an on-screen Arabic keyboard that allowed them to type with their mouse. Since then, he has helped to develop Arabic literacy, football and medical websites and his latest project is tajseed.net, a not-for-profit initiative that seeks to promote the development of Arabic infographics. He is alarmed and mystified by the enduring popularity of Arabish, but is clear about the scale and the nature of its threat.

“Lots of companies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi might not care if you can’t speak proper Arabic, but you might not get the job if you can’t speak proper English. We’ll end up with a generation who aren’t even linked to their own language and Arabish isn’t helping. It used to make sense back at the time, but not any more.”

Omar Al Hameli is one Emirati who is determined not to lose his relationship with the language he describes as his mother tongue. The 25-year-old insists on using Arabic in all forms of written communication and thinks that it is “ridiculous to talk with other Arabic guys in English.” He readily admits however, that this marks him out as unusual among his family, colleagues and friends.

“I am the only one of my friends who is like this. Some use the mixed language, but some use only English and when they try to type in Arabic I always find lots of mistakes. Sometimes I poke fun at them and tell them that they should use their own language.”

For Al Hameli, an environmental science student at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, the correct use of Arabic is central to his sense of self.

“I hate it when somebody messes with Arabic because I love this language. It is part of my identity. The Quran is in Arabic and I am an Arab and a Muslim. I would love to do my Master’s in Arabic because I want to learn more about the language and I want to understand the holy book.”

Salem Al Qassimi has rather a different perspective on Arabish, and is used to having to defend his views. “People have criticised me for advocating this way of writing, but I have never said that Arabish is good or bad.”

The 30-year-old designer and founder of the Fikra Design Studio in Sharjah started researching the cultural significance of Arabish and its impact on Emirati identity while studying as a postgraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design. Language is also central to his sense of identity, but bilingualism was something with which Al Qassimi has grown up.

“I went to an American school, an American university, and I was trained as a designer in English. There are certain design terms that are difficult to translate into Arabic, so I use English when I talk about design. At home with my family and friends however, I use Arabic, and if I am speaking about religion, there is no way I can translate that into English because Arabic is the language of Islam.”

For Al Qassimi, Arabish is something more than a matter of emails and text messages, it is a concept that has become central to his design practice and his whole way of life. Right or wrong, Arabish is a cultural reality that cannot and should not be ignored.

“Right now, I feel that we live in a hybrid culture and Arabish is a philosophy about the merging of cultures. The way we dress, the cars we drive, the lifestyle we carry, all of those confirm Arabish as a fact.”

The cultural and linguistic hybridity of Arabish is something that Al Qassimi investigates through graphic design, typography and film, media that come together in projects such as Typographic Hybrids in the City, an animation that sees Arabic letters and their Roman replacements fly across the cityscape of Dubai, set to a soundtrack that mixes classical Arabic oud music with modern electronica. In Hybrid Dress, Al Qassimi created a series of posters that overlaid a kandura, the traditional clothing of Emirati men, with Western shirts and jeans and the words “Arab” in Arabic, and “Western” in English.

Rather than trying to resist the kind of cultural change that Arabish represents, Al Qassimi believes that it should be embraced, not only because it is inevitable, but because it also denotes an openness and a vitality in contemporary Emirati culture that he believes are necessary and that should be encouraged.

“To identify Emirati culture today as something that it was 50 years ago is incorrect. We are creating our own culture and a new identity right now by taking the identity we had previously and building on it, but if we restrict ourselves by not absorbing or taking things from other cultures, then our culture will become stagnant.”

“Will English affect our local, colloquial Emirati Arabic? For sure. Is it going to affect formal, classical Arabic? Not so much, because that is the Arabic of the Quran and we will always go back to that. It is the biggest protector of Arabic that we have.”

If the use of hybrid text and language has assumed the status of a moral panic in discussions about the fate of the Arabic language – a term used by sociologists to describe phenomena that are perceived as threats to cultural values and social order – there are Arabs who are campaigning for a brighter future for written and printed Arabic.

The Lebanese designer, academic, and writer Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares is one of these. As the founding creative director of the Khatt Foundation, a largely virtual cultural organisation and network of experts, designers, and researchers, Smitshuijzen AbiFares has been responsible for organising a series conferences, exhibitions, books and workshops dedicated to improving the quality of contemporary Arabic typographic design.

Her vision is nothing less than the regeneration and the renewal of Arabic visual culture – something that she currently defines as “poor” – and her aim is to achieve this using the medium of Arabic type. “Our main goal is to talk about a constant rejuvenation of the culture through typography” she explains.

“It’s important that we look at our script. In Arab culture, two of the highest forms of art we have are calligraphy and poetry, but we no longer see these in our public spaces and our cities. That is a loss.”

Smitshuijzen AbiFares has been in Dubai for the last nine days, coordinating a series of daily, nine-hour-long practical workshops in Arabic calligraphy and font design. Despite its gruelling workload, the course, the third of its kind to be held at the Tashkeel studios in Nad Al Sheba, has succeeded in attracting a dedicated band of delegates from across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe and the United States.

The quality of tutors, internationally recognised luminaries such as the Syrian calligrapher Mounir Al-Shaarani and the specialist Arabic type designer Lara Assouad Khoury attract some. Others are drawn by the prospect of producing their own unique digital font, no small matter in a world where the number of Roman fonts outnumber their Arabic counterparts by more than 100 to one. The course’s biggest pull however, is its rarity, as Smitshuijze AbiFares explains.

“Arabic type design has not been properly covered in design education, especially in the UAE. There are graphic design courses, there are typography courses, but Arabic specific courses are lacking. Even elsewhere in the world, these kind of courses are not widely spread.”

“We need these courses in the Middle East because we do not have enough well-crafted, good quality Arabic typefaces. I have a class full of Arabs, but every one of them speaks a different Arabic. That should also be seen in the way they design.”

For Smitshuijzen AbiFares however, the main obstacles to the cultural rejuvenation she seeks are not only a lack of knowledge and expertise but something more profound, an over-protectiveness of Arabic that stems from a lack of self-confidence among Arabs.

“There’s a sense that we do not know how to define ourselves because everybody tears you in different directions. If you try to do something new, everybody automatically labels it as Western, but if you do something traditional, it doesn’t quite relate because you’re dealing with something that comes from a thousand years away.”

For Smitshuijzen AbiFares, the success of the Khatt Foundation’s project relies on the development of tools that will enable designers working in Arabic to develop a contemporary and authentic voice of their own, independent of Western firms, commercial concerns, and unfettered by what she sees as a widespread tendency to constantly revisit and refine things from the past.

“There’s a misunderstanding that being contemporary is not being Arab,” she explains. “I don’t believe we should shut other cultures out, not at all, but instead of just absorbing everything that comes from abroad, just because it comes from Europe, [that] is a bit strange … Our culture is not dead and I don’t believe we need to preserve it, but to evolve it and to nurture innovation. That is the best way to ensure our culture goes on.”

This article originally appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi

 

 

Suketu Mehta: Bombay’s laureate on Abu Dhabi’s backstreets

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, Suketu Mehta has gained global acclaim for his book on Mumbai and his writings on migration and community in major world cities, Nick Leech talks to him about Abu Dhabi.

When it comes to thinking about cities, the view from his temporary home at New York University Abu Dhabi provides Suketu Mehta with all the material he needs.

“When I look at a place like this, I wonder what genius of an urban planner thought that it would be a great idea to make a city without sidewalks and decided that the automobile would have primacy over the pedestrian?” the writer wonders, looking across Saadiyat Island’s twisting motorways and flyovers towards the hotels that line its distant coastline.

“I’d love to be able to walk to the beach but I can’t really go for a walk outside this apartment. And, as you can see, I’m literally at the end of my road,” he says, pointing to a patch of waste ground beneath his window where six lanes of motorway simply disappear into the sand.

More than his role as an associate professor of journalism at New York University, his alma mater, it’s Mehta’s thinking and writing about urbanism that have brought him to NYUAD.

Since January, the award-winning author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found has been teaching a course at the university that not only involves looking at fiction, film, non-fiction and poetry, but also includes field trips to places such as Dubai’s Hor Al Anz, a neighbourhood that he considers to be one of the UAE’s more inspiring destinations.

“It’s the Jackson Heights or the Southall of Dubai. We hung out, we walked the streets, had a biryani and I really felt at home,” Mehta enthuses.

“The more time I spend here the more I realise how little I know and how wrong the rest of the world is about this place,” he says. “It’s much more complex.”

It is difficult to consider a contemporary writer who is more committed to cities and city life than Mehta.

Born in Kolkata in 1963, he spent his early years in Mumbai before his family moved to Jackson Heights, a multicultural neighbourhood in Queens, New York, in 1977 and it was 21 years before he returned to the city he still refers to as Bombay.

After years spent working as a journalist and editor for business-to-business computing titles, Mehta returned to India with a determination to write and a seductively simple question: Can you ever go home again?

“I thought I would go to Bombay for a year to write a quick and dirty book about a quick and dirty city,” Mehta told the writer William Dalrymple in a panel discussion at last year’s Zee Jaipur Literary Festival in Boulder, Colorado.

Fortunately, as it turns out, the budding writer was mistaken. Mehta spent two and a half years immersed in the company of gangsters and hitmen, Bollywood moguls and call girls, police chiefs, religious rioters, actors and politicians.

“In Bombay I met people who lived closer to their seductive extremities than anyone I had ever known. Shouted lives,” Mehta writes in the book that resulted from his unexpected sojourn.

“These are not normal people. They live out the fantasies of normal people. And the kind of work they do affects all other spheres of their lives … in this sense they have become artists.”

Published as his first book in 2004, Maximum City earned Mehta a place on the finalist’s list for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and catapulted him, then 41, to the forefront of world literature.

Before long, Maximum City came to be considered not just as a great book about a great Indian city, Mumbai’s answer to Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi or Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Calcutta, but it also earned Mehta a place in the pantheon of literary urban investigators alongside Dickens and Orhan Pamuk, Joseph Mitchell and Jan Morris.

Since the publication of Maximum City, Mehta has spent a decade writing articles for publications such as The New Yorker, The Guardian, Time magazine, and Newsweek while working on a new translation of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography and researching material for his next book, a study of the immigrant experience in New York tentatively titled City of the Second Chance.

At the same time, Mehta, whose accent still ties him to Mumbai and bears no trace of his many years in the United States, has been visiting cities as the only writer to participate in Urban Age, an itinerant city research programme established by Richard Sennett and Ricky Burdett at the London School of Economics.

“I’ve never taken a course in urbanism or architecture, but after Maximum City I was asked to be part of this travelling group of urbanists, planners, architects and mayors,” he says.

“I started getting invited to their conferences in cities all around the world where there were all these debates taking place about the future of cities. I started wondering why they invited me, a complete amateur at all this, and I realised that it’s because the story of the city needs to be told.”

For Mehta, writing about cities and the deliberations of the people who have the power to shape their future is a civic duty and helps to ensure that, rather than talking about buildings, the debate around our urban future focuses on people instead.

“The jargon of urbanism has become like a Latin mass and this is where I think storytelling needs to re-enter the whole conversation,” he says. “There’s a role for journalists and writers to listen to the deliberations of the good and the great and to translate this into stories for the rest of us.

“If you’re a literary theorist or a philosopher you can write in obscure journals, but it will not have much effect on the rest of the public. But the dreams of urban planners can become our nightmares because we have to live with them.”

The outcome of all this travel, research and meetings with urbanism’s great and good is a book-length essay, The Secret Life of Cities, that Mehta describes as an amuse-bouche for his forthcoming book about New York.

Focusing on migration, alienation and community in the world’s cities, the book, which is yet to be published in English, examines just what it is that makes great cities great, a quality, Mehta insists, that is quite different from the liveability indexes produced by organisations such as the Economist Intelligence Unit.

“The world’s most liveable cities always include places like Canberra and Munich, places made for expat bankers that completely bore the s*** out of me,” Mehta says.

“I think there needs to be another list of liveable cities that considers that metropolitan excitement, that sense of chaos and informality and a little bit of unpredictability, even a little frisson of danger. This is what makes for a great city.”

Rather than the sterile lakeside sidewalks of cities such as Geneva, the epitome of the kind of vibrant urban environment that Mehta favours is the Coney Island boardwalk and beach in New York, which serve as a metaphor for a workable urbanism that is open and realistic.

“A great city doesn’t have to include everyone. You could sit at Ruby’s Bar in Coney Island and watch the whole parade of humanity,” he says.

“Bangladeshis in their hijabs next to Russian girls in bikinis, and anarchists from the East Village in leather and Dominicans, and they all walk side by side before going off to their little knots on the beach.

“It’s not that they’re all happy and talking to each other. It’s not that you’ll get invited to every picnic on the beach, but somewhere on the beach there’s a picnic that you too can go to.”

The alternative view, as Mehta sees it, is a socialist notion of equality that he rejects as utopian and unrealistic, preferring instead to focus on openness, tolerance and dignity.

It is an approach that is heavily influenced by Mehta’s upbringing and from his teenage years when he grew up in a building in Jackson Heights in Queens, the easternmost and largest of New York’s five boroughs and a district that is statistically and linguistically the most diverse in the US.

In the building where the Mehta family lived, which was owned by a Turk and managed by a Greek, Indians lived alongside Pakistanis, and Jews lived next to Muslims.

“It’s not that we started loving each other. When we went inside we all said horrible racist things about somebody else. But there was a cessation of hostility and an understanding that we were all making a new future,” Mehta says.

When it comes to the UAE’s future, the real stories, he believes, lie not in the architectural visions that adorn the property developer’s hoardings he sees from his window, but in the backstreets of the neighbourhoods where the vast majority of Abu Dhabi’s population lives.

“This city is made up of layers, but the most visible layer – the one you see in advertisements and on airlines – is only the tip of it,” he says.

“There are all these other layers that are South Asian and Filipino and African and Egyptian, and the most interesting parts of the city are the interstitial spaces where these bubbles mix.

“There’s a great Maximum Abu Dhabi or Maximum Dubai to be written,” Mehta insists. “I’m certainly not the person to write it, but I think somewhere out there there is a young writer – they could be Emirati, they could be Pakistani or they could be English – who is collecting observations and stories and will write the great non-fiction book about this city, because it certainly demands it.”

This article was originally published in The National

Photography: Olivia Arthur’s Stranger in Dubai

The product of a three-month-long artist’s residency, Olivia Arthur’s ‘Stranger’ takes an episode from Dubai’s recent history as its starting point, the forgotten MV Dara maritime disaster.

When you see somewhere you know through someone else’s eyes, it’s impossible not to judge the tone and tenor of their vision and to try to match it with your own.

That’s certainly the case with Olivia Arthur’s work, which was exhibited by Dubai’s Cuadro Gallery as part of this week’s Warehouse421 and Abu Dhabi Art’s Galleries Week, held in Mina Zayed.

Part of a wider project titled Stranger, Arthur’s photograph was suitably maritime and local for an art fair held on the margins of a port and dhow harbour.

The picture features a young South Asian man standing in the sunlit waters of a shallow sea, and for anyone familiar with Dubai’s interstitial spaces, the totemic pillars in the photograph’s background immediately reveal its location – the beach at the base of the incomplete and abandoned Palm Jebel Ali.

The real difference however, between Arthur’s bleached and beguiling image and so many of the photographs that are currently taken of the UAE is that rather than falling into the trap of making trite and didactic statements – about migrant labour, the UAE’s culture of excess or its unbridled urbanisation – it raises more questions than answers: just how old is the picture; what is the man doing; and what, if anything, does the image mean?

The product of a three-month-long artist’s residency sponsored by Fairmont The Palm and Project Encounter, that Arthur undertook in 2013 and 2014, Stranger takes an episode from Dubai’s recent history as its starting point – a maritime disaster whose 56th anniversary took place on April 8.

On that date in 1961, MV Dara, a British India Line steamship that used to ply its trade between Bombay and Karachi, Bahrain and Basra, sank in the waters off the coast of Dubai.

The deadliest disaster in the Gulf’s peacetime maritime history, an estimated 238 lives were lost. Some of the victims’ bodies were recovered from the shallow waters, but some were not. Among the families of those missing, there are still relatives who hold out the hope that their loved ones will return.

“What if someone could have survived on an island in the Gulf?” Arthur asks in the 224-page book and nine-minute film that are the key components of Stranger. “What would they see if they came to the city now, 50 years later?”

“I was totally fascinated by the idea and by that belief, that you could continue to look for someone, after 50 years,” the photographer tells me from her studio in London.

“But Stranger isn’t about those families or the victims; they’re just a starting point that allows people to interpret things in different ways, and I think that’s more interesting,” she says.

Arthur is one of only nine living female photographers to belong to Magnum Photos, the prestigious agency founded at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour.

The agency community will celebrate its 70th anniversary this summer with an exhibition at Moma in June in which Arthur’s film from Stranger, not yet screened in the UAE, will form a key part.

Despite its association with a haunting story, none of the images used in Stranger are staged, including those that Arthur took when she eventually dived down to see the wreck, which now rests 20 kilometres off the coast.

The context of Arthur’s documentary images however, affords them a dreamlike quality that allows them float between fiction and fact, questioning their relationship with reality.

“At what point can you change what something means by placing it in a different context?,” she asks.

“For some people it might be about the way they set their photographs up, but can also be about the context you set them in and the way you put them out.”

As a body of work, Stranger is not the first time Arthur has adopted a strategy of placing documentary images within a conceptual framework. Her first major project, Jeddah Diary, used a similar technique to examine the experience of women in another port town on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula.

“Both Dubai and Jeddah are misunderstood places. They have lots of different worlds within them and I think that makes it quite hard to talk about them,” she explains.

“If you do it in a straightforward documentary way and say ‘this place is like this’, then it will be misleading because it won’t represent the complexity of the place, so that’s why I ended up with the work that I have.”

This article originally appeared in The National