Perhaps best known as a lifestyle and shopping destination, the United Arab Emirates is today developing a wealth of cultural attractions, writes David Tresilian in Dubai Many visitors to the United Arab Emirates do not venture much further than Dubai, which in recent years has established itself as perhaps the region's pre-eminent lifestyle and shopping destination. However, should they venture southwards to the country's capital, Abu Dhabi, or northwards to the smaller emirate of Sharjah, they would discover another side to the country and one that is perhaps more in touch with its Arab and Islamic heritage. Driving into Abu Dhabi, visitors cannot fail to miss the hoardings advertising the city's Saadiyat Island development, which will soon host the Louvre Abu Dhabi, a branch of the Louvre Museum in Paris designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the Zayed National Museum, designed by British architect Norman Foster, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by Canadian architect Frank Gehry, all part of a complex of institutions that is designed to make Abu Dhabi "a centre of culture and cosmopolitanism in the region and worldwide," in the words of Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, chair of the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority. However, even before these institutions open, visitors to the UAE who are willing to venture a little off the beaten track can find destinations that give at least a foretaste of what may be to come, with the Museum of Islamic Civilisation and Art Museum in Sharjah and the Jahili Fort and Museum in the oasis city of Al-Ain south from Abu Dhabi on the border with Oman being particularly worthy of a place on any visitor's itinerary. While visiting the first two institutions necessitates little more than a quick trip by car northwards from Dubai, Al-Ain is an hour and a half or so inland along the desert road. However, the trip can be easily and cheaply done by mini-bus from the central bus station in Dubai, and for many visitors the Jahili Fort that still dominates the modern city of Al-Ain will have the added interest of housing a small museum dedicated to the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger, author of the classic travel books Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, who was once hosted there by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates from 1971 to 2004. Sheikh Zayed was born in the Jahili Fort, and the building, now carefully restored, also contains an exhibition about his life and the history of Al-Ain. The Thesiger exhibition, containing many mementos of the explorer's life and travels and a collection of original photographs, has been installed in memory of "Sheikh Mubarak bin London," the name apparently given to Thesiger by local residents when he first visited the area in the 1940s. *** Visitors to the United Arab Emirates tend not to visit the small northern emirate of Sharjah, which is a pity since it contains what are at the moment probably the best museums in the country in the shape of the Sharjah Art Museum and the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation, the latter containing one of the best-designed exhibitions of Islamic materials to be found anywhere. Housed in an adapted market building built in neo-Islamic style on the city's waterfront, the Museum is a stone's throw from the Sharjah heritage area, the city's historic centre, which is now being restored. The latter contains a collection of traditional buildings set around a central square, including the restored Bait al-Naboodah, an important example of 19th- century Gulf domestic architecture consisting of a fort-like structure built of stone and coral around a central courtyard that once housed one of the city's leading families. The Museum of Islamic Civilisation contains permanent exhibition spaces divided across two levels, the ground floor having displays of religious materials in the Islamic Faith Gallery, notable not only for its fine collection of religious manuscripts, but also for its focus on the architecture of religious buildings, and of scientific and technological materials in the Gallery of Islamic Science and Innovation. Islamic engineering, architecture, military technology, navigation, time measurement, medicine, map-making, mathematics, astronomy and chemical equipment are all touched upon in the latter Gallery, there also being a collection of ingenious working models produced from descriptions in the works of mediaeval authors. On the first floor, the Museum's permanent collection is displayed across four large galleries, with the presentation being broadly chronological in character while focusing on various thematic areas. There did not seem to be a catalogue of the collection available on a recent visit, meaning that for the casual visitor it was difficult to know how important the Sharjah collection might be taken to be. However, it was striking that the material accompanying the exhibition, discussing the question of "what is Islamic art" and giving answers in terms of the range of materials -- calligraphy, textiles, glasswork, metalwork, ceramics and so on -- on show, was somewhat less adventurous than the exhibition itself. Designed as an introduction to Islamic civilisation, and not just to Islamic art, the exhibition introduces all sorts of intriguing sub-themes, raised or illustrated by the materials on display. Taken from memory, these included themes such as the use of colour in Islamic architecture, particularly in the use of decorative tiles, and the ideas of symmetry expressed in Islamic designs, as well as the design of Islamic gardens, the representation of leisure time (illustrated through surviving games and toys) and of domestic space (household tools and implements), and of the "adaptability," across different media and for different purposes, of common elements of Islamic design. Final sections considered the impact of other traditions on Islamic art and design, particularly from the 19th century onwards, and the allied questions of "continuity," "appreciation" and "tradition." In these later sections of the exhibition, the ways in which modern and contemporary designers have used or re-used Islamic designs was considered, together with the ways in which Islamic materials have been re-interpreted and re-used abroad, for example in 19th and 20th-century Europe. Contemporary understandings of tradition were investigated, as was the tradition of displaying and interpreting Islamic art, notably in Europe, with the Museum thereby framing and reflecting on its own choice of design. On a recent visit, the Museum had extended this interest in the reception and interpretation of Islamic art abroad by holding a temporary exhibition, organised in cooperation with London's Victoria and Albert Museum, on the work of the 19th-century British architect and designer Owen Jones (1809-74), who is perhaps best known for his 1856 work A Grammar of Ornament, a kind of a catalogue and pattern book of Islamic decorative designs. Jones visited the Alhambra Palace in southern Spain in the early 1830s, among the first Europeans to take a serious interest in the architecture of this outstanding monument of Muslim Spain, publishing his Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra in 1842-45. Back in London, he attempted to re-invigorate British 19th- century architecture by introducing Islamic details, polychromy, mosaic and tessellation, with A Grammar of Ornament reflecting Jones's belief that decorative schemes should be based on geometry and tessellation in imitation of principles he believed he had found in Islamic design.In presenting materials from Jones's career, among them plates from A Grammar of Ornament and wallpapers, decorative schemes and textiles produced by Jones and others, the Museum opens up the question of the 19th- century European "discovery" of Islamic art and its re-use in new and distant contexts. A short distance away in the Sharjah Art Museum this process of exchange is also investigated in the latter's collection of 19th-century European orientalist painting, the personal collection of the ruler of Sharjah, Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, now on permanent loan to the Museum.Such paintings, produced across Europe in the second half of the 19th century, repeat a catalogue of now-familiar motifs, with their Arab subject-matter betraying either ongoing decay or actual violence, subjects such as harem scenes and slave markets being particularly popular in the work of one of the best-known painters in the field, the Frenchman Jean- Léon Gérôme. None of the paintings in the Sharjah collection is by Gérôme, but in this collection of work by more- or-less forgotten painters a Gérôme-like subject-matter and mood can easily be discerned. Evidently, it was not only in the European art-centres, predominantly France, that orientalist work enjoyed its temporary 19th-century vogue, since peripheral figures like the Hungarian Ferencz Eisenhut and the Italian Filippo Baratti also produced works with titles like Marketplace in Morocco (1888) and Gunsmiths at the Palace of Alhambra (1875), both in the Sharjah collection, in a kind of Europe-wide recycling of orientalist images.Probably more interesting for foreign visitors to the Sharjah Museum, many of whom will have already seen such orientalist work at home, are the Museum's own exhibitions, on a recent visit given over to a travelling retrospective of work by the Sudanese painter Ibrahim el-Salahi and the annual exhibition of the Emirates Fine Arts Society, its 30th, giving an opportunity for contemporary Emirati artists to present their work in a museum-quality group show.The El-Salahi show, curated by Salah M. Hassan of Cornell University in the US, was co- organised with the Museum for African Art in New York, and it displays an overview of the career of this major Sudanese artist. El-Salahi, born in Omdurman in 1930, studied at the Slade School in London in the 1950s, before returning to the Sudan to take up a position as head of the painting department at the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum. He later fell victim to the regime led by general Gaafar Nimeiry in the 1970s, being imprisoned for a period. The work he completed on his release in 1976, works on paper in prison notebook form, is among the most striking in the present exhibition, with El-Salahi himself providing an hypnotic audio commentary. *** According to the account in his travel book and autobiography Arabian Sands, it was after having despaired of a career as a British political officer in Africa that the British writer Wilfred Thesiger decided to accept a proposal to investigate locust movements in the "Empty Quarter" of the Arabian peninsula, a vast area of desert stretching across what are now Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The main attraction of the job seems to have been the opportunity it would provide to travel with the local Bedouin, Thesiger writing that "in the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilisation; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance." There was also a severe moral code, since the Bedouin "are merciless critics of those who fall short in patience, good humour, generosity, loyalty or courage. They make no allowance for the stranger. Whoever lives with the Bedu [Bedouin] must accept Bedu conventions and conform to Bedu standards." Arabian Sands describes two crossings of the Empty Quarter, and these are mapped out in the exhibition on Thesiger housed in the recently restored Jahili Fort in Al-Ain in the desert south-east of Abu Dhabi. Thesiger had apparently staggered into what was then the capital of the eastern province of the former "trucial state" in 1948 after his second crossing, where he was welcomed by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, at the time the area's governor. The two men became firm friends, Thesiger writing of Zayed that "he had a great reputation among the Bedu. They respected his force of character, his shrewdness, and his physical strength." Sheikh Zayed later became ruler of Abu Dhabi in 1966, and, after the formation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971, the country's first ruler. In Arabian Sands, Thesiger also describes his friendship with Salama bin Kabina and Salim bin Ghabaisha, who accompanied him on his travels in the Empty Quarter. "He was about sixteen years old," Thesiger writes of Salama bin Kabina, "about five foot in height and loosely built. He moved with a long raking stride, like a camel, unusual among Bedu... He was very poor, and the hardships of life had marked him, so that his frame was gaunt and his face hollow." One of the discoveries reported on in the "Mubarak bin London" exhibition in Al-Ain is the tracking down of Salama bin Kabina and Salim bin Ghabaisha, who, now old men, are interviewed on film about their original meeting with Thesiger. "I had come to a watering hole to exchange a camel," bin Kalima says, "and the Christian asked me if I would come with him to help him study plants." "We said he was a 'Sheikh Mubarak' from the north," presumably to allay any suspicions. "He was dressed like a Bedu and spoke Arabic. But you could tell he was English."Aside from this fascinating film testimony, the exhibition contains many photographs taken by Thesiger of his travels in the area in the 1940s, most of them provided by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The great theme of Thesiger's books -- the passing of an older world in favour of an inferior modern civilisation -- is amply reported on, Thesiger adding of his friendship with bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha that "had it not been for them, the desert would have been as meaningless for me as the Antarctic." In Arabian Sands, Thesiger describes leaving the Trucial Coast, now the UAE, in the early 1950s, feeling that he was "going into exile" and that bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha, their traditional way of life threatened by economic and social change, were in danger of being driven "into the towns to hang around street corners as 'unskilled labour.'" Modernisation would mean corruption, he writes, with the Bedu, like the contemporary West, "leading their lives at second hand, dependent on cinemas and wireless." He says something similar of life in the marshlands of southern Iraq, the subject of his later book The Marsh Arabs. "When I first went to Iraq in 1950, the Basra oil fields had not yet opened, but by 1955 they were in full production and money was pouring into the country." Slum districts were appearing around the larger towns, especially around Baghdad, in the ensuing scramble. "It is easy enough to leave tribal life and go to a city," Thesiger comments. "But it is almost impossible for the down-and-out to return to his tribe." Thesiger died in 2003 at the age of 94. Had the curators of the Al-Ain exhibition on his life thought to include them, it would have been fascinating to learn his views of the transformation of modern Abu Dhabi.
