Introduction Popular accounts from such explorers as the British writer, Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who crossed the Empty Quarter by camel to arrive in the emirates 50 years ago, have created an impression in the outside world that the people of the region were traditionally nomadic herdsmen, the bedu, moving with their camels and goats across the desert from one pasture to another. There is, of course, some truth in that impression, but it is far from the whole picture. Of the many different tribes that make up the country’s population, very few were ever wholly nomadic. The bulk of them we re settled, at least for much of the year, engaged in simple agriculture, or in the age-old practice of harvesting the pearl banks and fishery stocks of the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman coast in the east of the country. The real desert, with its great sand dunes, is confined to the south and southwest of the country, bordering the Empty Quarter or Rub al-Khali. Across these impressive sand dunes and the gravel plains that fringe them the nomadic tribesmen migrated, like the Awamir, one of the four tribes that together comprise the bulk of the indigenous population of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. For these resourceful wanderers, a journey across the desert from waterhole to waterhole was a normal part of a harsh life to be endured with equanimity. Yet even in the desert, as at Liwa, in the south of Abu Dhabi, there are little oases that have been used for hundreds of years by tribes such as the Manasir and the Bani Yas (the confederation headed today by Sheikh Zayed) to cultivate a few palm trees and to grow some vegetables. A legendary capacity for survival in the sandy wastes rendered the camel an ideal beast of burden and winding camel caravans carrying goods for hundreds of kilometers were a familiar feature of this southeastern corner of Arabia right throughout history. Before the discovery of oil, large convoys of camels regularly crossed the desert to Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and Dubai, carrying firewood, charcoal, agricultural products and livestock, returning with much-needed supplies to the desert camp or small villages. Camels transported whole families and their belongings from the humid coast to summer activities in the cooler oases.
Today, modern transport is available to everyone and well-stocked, readily accessible supermarkets provide the necessities of life. However, many local families still own a few camels for meat and for milk and they are encouraged to do so by the offer of generous government subsidies. Camels are also bred for racing, an ancient sport which has been revived with much enthusiasm in recent years. During the great camel races held in the winter months, owners from the Emirates and the rest of Arabia pit their fastest steeds one against the other. Along the coast, groups like the Qubeisat, the Rumaithat and the Sudan, all part of the Bani Yas, engaged in pearl diving or fishing. Indeed, many of the men spent part of the year in the oases and the remainder at sea, following a lifestyle far different from the romantic image of the nomadic bedu. The women of the family stayed at home, looking after the date-palm gardens and the children, obliged to develop a tough and resilient independence far removed from the false perceptions held in much of the world about the women of Arabia. In the heyday of the pearling industry, over 1,200 pearling boats operated out of the area now known as the UAE, each carrying an average crew of about 18 men. All the boats from the same port under the authority of one sheikh departed for the main summer harvest at the beginning of June in one great picturesque swoop of sail and returned to port together, approximately 120 days later, towards the end of September. Life was hard for the individual diver, but pearling was not merely a trade or a means of subsistence, it was an entirely integrated social system, which left behind a rich heritage following the collapse of the industry in the 1930s. Although the days of large numbers of pearling dhows heading off at the start of the pearling season are long past, efforts are being made to revive the pearl fishery to ensure that this traditional way of life will be preserved in some way. Along the whole of the coast in the Northern Emirates, small towns sprang up around sheltered creeks that provided havens from the often tempestuous waters of the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Here the people derived their living not only from fishing, but also from overseas trade, while the more successful ports, like Dubai, Sharjah or Julfar (later Ras al-Khaimah), the focal point of the Qawasim, looked for their livelihood outwards to the sea, rather than inland, to the desert. The wooden dhows that still can be seen carrying goods to and fro across the Gulf, apart from their diesel engines, are almost identical to the vessels that have been used for centuries. When pearling was at its height, the most important manufacturing industry of the southern Gulf was boat-building. Today in many of the UAE cities and towns, in particular in the Bateen area of Abu Dhabi and along the creek at Ajman, boat-builders can still be seen hard at work constructing dhows with few tools and no blueprints, practising the skills that have been handed down for centuries. Shell construction, involving the fitting of planks first and ribs later, is the traditional mode of dhow construction, contrasting with the European method of forming a skeleton of ribs prior to planking. Boats are carvel-built with planks laid edge to edge: hundreds, sometimes thousands, of holes are hand-drilled to avoid splitting the wood and long thin nails, wrapped in oiled fiber, are driven through to secure the planks to the frames. Measurements are made solely by eye and experience; templates are, however, used to shape the hull planking. Although it appears that accuracy depends solely on the instinct of the boat-builder, in reality a highly experienced master-craftsman usually oversees the calculations. The tools used in building traditional boats are very basic: hammer, saw, adze, bow-drill, chisel, plane and caulking iron are all that is required to produce such a sophisticated and graceful end-product. Nowadays, traditional dhows are used as short-haul cargo vessels while specially adapted craft take part in traditional sailing races. In fact, two kinds of boats are used in traditional boat-racing. The first is powered by a single sail that catches the wind to drive the wooden boats of shallow draught. A couple of dozen such sailing boats scudding across the waves, their sails shining in the sun, is one of the most romantic sights to be seen anywhere in this often romantic country. Other craft are powered by man, not the wind, great rowing boats of 20 meters or more in length, rowed by up to 100 oarsmen straining every muscle to reach the finishing line. At the present time, boat races are held on special occasions throughout the year, to commemorate events such as the annual National Day holiday, serving to keep alive the maritime traditions of the region. In areas along the edge of the Hajar mountains, where subterranean water supplies were much more plentiful, such as at Al Ain, the inland oasis-city 160 kilometers from Abu Dhabi, tribes like the Dhawahir spent the whole year tending their palm groves and farms irrigated by tapping the underground water through falajes tunneled through the earth. The earliest falaj so far discovered dates back to around 1,000 BC, evidence that agriculture has long been a part of the local way of life. In the Northern Emirates where the gravel plains are more fertile than the sand dunes, and where there is generally more rainfall, it was also possible to cultivate crops throughout the year, while in the Hajar mountains, tribes like the Shariqiyin, whose center is the east coast town of Fujairah, and the Shihuh from Musandam, delved deep for the water flowing under the gravel beds of the wadis (valleys) to irrigate small terraces carved out of the mountainsides. Falconry, an integral part of desert life for many centuries, was practiced originally for purely practical reasons, i.e. the necessity to supplement a meager diet of dates, milk and b read with a tasty hare or well-fed bustard. In time it developed into a major sport enjoyed by rich and poor alike. The saker (Falco cherrug) and the peregrine (Falco peregrinus) are the two main species of falcon used for hunting in the UAE, the former being the most popular since it is well suited to desert hawking. The female saker (al hurr), larger and more powerful, is utilized more frequently than the male (garmoush). Sakers, brave, patient hunters with keen eyesight, take easily to houbara as their primary quarry. They are less fussy feeders and more able to cope with the stress and rigors of camp life than the temperamental peregrine whose brittle feathers tend to get damaged when struggling with houbara. Like other hunters, the people of the UAE are concerned with the need to understand and protect the environment and the quarry which they hunt, lest it disappear. With government support, there are now a number of programmes designed to study ways of breeding in captivity the most popular quarry, the houbara bustard and a full programme of research into the country’s birdlife is now well under way. Camels were always a beast of burden in the desert areas and are rarely seen on the east coast, a narrow agricultural strip hemmed in by the Hajar mountains. Here, a rather different traditional sport still survives; that of bullfighting. No Spanish-style corrida, however, but a contest that pits bull against bull, with the massive animals locking their horns and wrestling until one turns tail and flees. These bulls are descendants of animals from the Indian subcontinent that were brought in to turn the waterwheels lifting water from shallow wells. Today, their traditional function has been taken over by the pipe or the diesel pump, but the east coast’s bulls survive and thrive as the popularity of bullfighting among both expatriates and UAE citizens grows. |
The people
of the UAE, like those of the rest of the peninsula,
are of Arab stock. Their fore fathers formed part of
successive waves of migration 2,000–3,000 years ago
that spread eastwards across Arabia, bringing with
them their culture, their language and their skills at
surviving in what was becoming an increasingly harsh
climate. As they arrived, they
mingled and then merged with the people already living in
the region now known as the UAE, people who, like them, we
re of Semitic stock. 
Camels we re
also the main means of transport for pilgrims visiting
Mecca. But the camel was much more than a useful pack
animal. Not only did it provide milk, meat, wool, skin
for water containers, belts, sandals and dung for
fuel, it was also a marketable resource used to
acquire certain essentials such as rifles, clothes,
rice, coffee, sugar or even jewellery
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