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وصول البرتغاليين  The Portuguese Arrive 

Portuguese sea captain Alfonso de Albuquerque was a short man with a long beard. For convenience’ sake he kept his beard tied in a knot. In good company, Albuquerque was known for his wit. But the Arabs of the Persian Gulf saw little of the captain’s humor. In 1506 the Portuguese crown handed Albuquerque a job he didn’t want: forging a trade route around Africa and Arabia, to India. His mandate called for setting up way stations in the Arabian Sea and the Gulf that Portuguese ships could call upon on trade voyages between Indonesia and Europe.

At the time, Arabs of the lower Gulf knew little or nothing of Europe. When the billowing sails of Albuquerque’s five-ship flotilla appeared on the horizon, it was the first major European arrival in the lands that formed the UAE. The pioneering Portuguese had the unique privilege of introducing the Gulf Arabs to European civilization. No matter what he did, Albuquerque’s actions would be remembered for centuries as the behavior of Europeans and Christians.

Albuquerque made the impression a lasting one. Rounding Africa and reaching Arabia, the mariner destroyed every Arab vessel he saw. When Omanis refused him permission to land, he sacked their towns. When Albuquerque’s fleet arrived in Khor Fakkan – his first stop in what is now the UAE – crowds gathered on the beach, beating drums and shouting. Horsemen galloped up and down the shore, and spectators climbed atop the town’s wall and the hill behind, to catch their first glimpses of the European visitors.

Albuquerque and his men peered at the spectacle from their decks. They decided Khor Fakkan’s raucous reception wasn’t submissive enough. The Portuguese waded ashore, unsheathed their swords, and began hacking off noses and ears, bayoneting men, capturing or killing women and children, and putting the torch to every one of Khor Fakkan’s handsome houses, with their lemon and orange trees and horse stables.

The Portuguese made sure the next century in the Gulf wasn’t a pleasant one for Arabs who had the misfortune of meeting them. Albuquerque’s compatriot, the great mariner Vasco da Gama, burned a ship crammed with hundreds of Muslims pilgrims bound for Mecca.

While the Arabs of the remote Gulf knew nothing of these warlike Iberians, the Portuguese, like their Spaniard cousins, had plenty of experience with Arabs. Just over a decade before their arrival in Khor Fakkan, the Portuguese and Spanish had put an end to seven hundred years of Muslim rule of their homelands. When Granada fell in 1492, the last Arab-governed city in Europe had been captured and the Reconquest was complete. Now the Iberians were in a mood to conquer and colonize. They viewed Arabs and Muslim civilization as heathen enemies. They killed thousands. If a town didn’t hand over its harbor, ships, and forts, the entire population risked death or mutilation.

Historians like Abu Dhabi-based Frauke Heard-Bey believe the unnecessarily cruel Portuguese occupation soured Arabs on Westerners in general and Christianity in particular. “The memory of the indiscriminate killing of women, children and the old, and the mutilations inflicted on their prisoners by the Portuguese became engraved in the minds of Arabs living anywhere between the Red Sea and the Persian coast, and were remembered as the deeds of Christians,” she writes.

The Portuguese showed little staying power. In 1631, after defeats by the surging navies of the Dutch and British, the Portuguese began to fade away. They anchored off Ras Al-Khaimah and fought running battles with the Arabs, and built a shot-lived fort. Soon they were gone.

Beyond memories of their cruelty, the Portuguese legacy is minimal. A few crumbling forts and rusty cannon remain, as well as a handful of Portuguese words that still cling to the patois of the remote villages in Oman’s Musandam Peninsula, at the Strait of Hormuz.

When the British arrived in earnest two hundred years later, they were unwelcome. In the Arab view, there was no reason that one Christian power would act less barbarically than another.  

                          KRANE, Jim, "Dubai. The story of the world's fastest city", London, 2010.

دبي Dubai: The Middle East Dream

This is the story of a small Arab village that grew into a big city.

It was a mud village on the seaside, as poor as any in Africa, and it sat in a region where pirates, holy warriors, and dictators held sway over the years. There was even a communist uprising for a time, right next door. But the village was peaceful, ruled by the same family generation after generation.

No one thought the village would become a city. It sat on the edge of a vast desert, surrounded by a sea of sand. There was no running water, no ice, no radio, no road. The village drifted in an eddy of time. While other nations launched rockets into space, the villagers fished and napped. They and their slaves dove for pearls in the sea.

The villagers trusted the family that ruled them. The family produced generous men who ruled by three principles: what is good for the merchant is good for the village; embrace visitors, no matter what their religion; and, you cannot win if you do not take risks.

The ruling family and their villagers were sorely tested during the hard times of the 1930s and 1940s. People starved. Slaves fled, because masters had no food. Rivals rose against them. Schools crumbled into the earth. The only blessings came as clouds of locusts, which the villagers toasted and ate.

But the villagers were a gregarious and hardworking bunch. They pulled themselves together. They enlarged their sailing fleet and began trading and smuggling. They borrowed money and dredged a little port. They invited foreigners to settle, promising freedom from taxes and turmoil. Foreigners who ventured in liked the village and its ambitious leader, a man named Rashid. The village grew into a town. The foreigners told Rashid of the wonders of the modern world, the skyscrapers of New York and the London Underground. He listened intently.

Rashid wanted the name of his town, Dubai, on the lips of every person on earth. When a family sat down to dinner in America, Rashid wanted them to discuss the happenings of Dubai. And when two Englishmen paused for a glass of beer, it was Dubai that he wished them to talk about. Farmers in China, bankers in Switzerland, and generals in Russia: All of them must know of Dubai. For this to happen, the town couldn’t stay small and poor. Rashid made a wish. Dubai must become the most luxurious city the world has ever known: the City of Gold.

In 1960 Dubai set off on a journey that was more exciting that anything the Arabs had done in seven hundred years. The town grew bigger and more dazzling with each passing day. Rashid’s son Mohammed took over and pressed forward with even more passion. The villagers whose parents ate locusts donned gowns embroidered in crystal. Illiterate elders went shopping by private jet.

Arabs everywhere admired Dubai. A people down on its luck found pride flooding back. They asked their own leaders why they couldn’t be more like Dubai.

But like all great wishes that are granted, the success of Rashid’s quest brought unforeseen trouble. Lives were trampled by the city’s growth. Greed eclipsed common sense. The old ways were lost, and simplicity disappeared, never to return. The dream of capitalism brought them a new city, unlike any other. It also wed Dubai to the fickle ways of the global marketplace, which, as the desert-dwellers learned, can inundate you with wealth and then, even more quickly, take it away.

The story of Dubai’s wild ride contains powerful lessons for all of us. It starts long ago, when a great migration took place in Arabia’s most isolated corner.

KRANE, Jim, “Dubai. The story of the world’s fastest city”, London, 2010.