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Countries / Middle East

United Arab Emirates

works
8
8 books
period covered
1490–1991
language of writing
Arabic

On 17 December 1987, a poet created a prize. Sultan bin Ali al-Owais, born in 1925 at Al-Heera in the emirate of Sharjah, descends from a family of poets and scholars, made his fortune in trade and is among the founders of the Dubai chamber of commerce. He devoted part of that fortune to rewarding Arab writers, with no regard for nationality or political opinion. The prize is today one of the most prestigious in the Arab world.

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The singularity lies there. Applications come from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Arabia far more than from the Emirates, and the country that distributes those rewards has the youngest literary production in the region. There is a logic in that paradox: a federation formed in 1971, whose population is mostly foreign, gives itself a place in Arab culture through funding rather than through the number of its authors. The library, the prize, the book fair come there before the work, and that inversion lends itself to two interpretations, calculated image or generosity, without either prevailing.

What Emirati authors have worked on, within that framework, is the short form. Mohammed al-Murr published in the nineteen eighties brief stories about a city changing too fast to be told in a novel: a building replaces a house, a neighbour disappears, a woman looks out of the window. The format matches the subject, since nothing lasts long enough to make a plot. Al-Owais himself wrote brief romantic poems, published first in the newspapers of Cairo and Beirut, where he became known before being known at home.

What awaits the reader is therefore short texts, often without conclusion, in which the disappearance of a place stands in for an event. The collection that opens this page gathers the love poems of a Sharjah merchant, written in the ancient metres, and a prize in his name now honours writers from across the Arab world.

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A way to begin

ديوان سلطان العويس

Sultan al-Owais · 1978

The love poems of a Sharjah merchant, written in classical Arabic in the ancient metres.

The entry See the author

The collected poems of a Gulf merchant, written in classical Arabic in the ancient metres. Love and woman come first, with the sea and the homeland; then beauty and nature, national feeling and wisdom. Politics is little present. The pieces were gathered by others than the author, and each edition added more.

Timeline

  1. 1900–1960Nabati poetryNabati poetry, sung in dialect, carries the memory of the coastal and inland tribes.
  2. 1971FederationThe union of the seven emirates creates schools, press and cultural institutions.
  3. 1980–2000Story and novelThe first Emirati short stories and novels appear, often in reviews first.
  4. 2007–2020Fairs and festivalsBook fairs, Arabic literary prizes and film festivals establish Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

Reading keys

1Names and kinship
  • The name reads as a genealogy with ibn and bint, and the last element designates the family or the tribe, which immediately places a character.
  • The kunya, "father of" followed by the name of the eldest child, is the ordinary respectful form of address.
  • Al followed by a name, as in Al Maktoum or Al Nahyan, designates a ruling house and is not to be confused with the article al.
  • The majority of the population is foreign, and the name therefore also indicates whether a character is a citizen, which changes his entire legal status.
2What is said and unsaid
  • The condition of migrant workers, mostly South Asian, is the subject that local literature addresses least directly.
  • Criticism of power is not publishable and appears only by detour.
  • The majlis, the reception room, regulates social speech, and serious business is dealt with there without being named.
  • Refusal is expressed by a pious formula rather than by a no.
3Religion and the unseen
  • Sunni Islam is in the majority and frames representations, but the presence of Hindu, Christian and Buddhist communities makes the city a multiconfessional space in fact.
  • The jinn belong to Quranic cosmology. Umm ad-Duwais, a seductive creature with goat's feet who leads men astray, belongs to Emirati folklore.
  • The lunar calendar moves Ramadan through the seasons.
  • The palm tree and the water of the falaj, irrigation channels, have an almost sacred value in the older texts.
4Colours, rites, mourning, feasts
  • Muslim mourning is swift, burial takes place on the same day and condolences are received for three days, separately by sex.
  • The white kandoura and the black abaya are everyday garments, not marks of circumstance.
  • Ramadan reverses the rhythm of the days, and the narratives set during it live at night.
  • The collective ayyala and razfa dances, with their poetry sung in alternation, mark festivals and weddings.
5Shared references
  • Nabati poetry, in dialect, is the living heritage and is still judged in competitions.
  • Umm ad-Duwais and the creatures of the desert and the sea form a folkloric cast common to the Gulf.
  • The songs of pearl diving and the vocabulary of the dhow are shared with Kuwait and Bahrain.
  • The Mu'allaqat and the Romance of Antar serve as a learned reference common to the whole peninsula.
6Misreadings to avoid
  • The absence of an old written literature does not mean the absence of a tradition: nabati poetry was oral and was transmitted without a printing press.
  • The modernity of Dubai is not the subject of Emirati literature, which speaks above all of what that modernity erased.
  • The word "emirate" designates seven distinct entities with different histories. Sharjah has an older cultural tradition than Dubai.
  • The al-Owais prize is not an instrument of national prestige: it rewards mostly authors from other countries.

Tales and mythologies 1

Available in English 2

The books from this country that can be read in English, in the original or in translation.

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