The police were there to guard PCL pier (Sheikh Khalifas boat was moored there)

"Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--- and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness---

And Wilderness is Paradise enow."

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Dubai - last November.

Textures here by Shadowhouse Creations and Paul Grand

"A windcatcher (Persian: بادگیر Bâdgir, or Malqaf / Malgaf or "Barjeel" بارجيل in Arabic) is a traditional Persian architectural device used for many centuries to create natural ventilation in buildings. It is not known who first invented the windcatcher, but it still can be seen in many countries today. Windcatchers come in various designs: uni-directional, bi-directional, and multi-directional. Examples of windcatchers can be found in traditional Persian-influenced architecture throughout the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan." - wikipedia

These windtowers are modern replicas at the Medinat in Dubai, but I remember the real things peppering the skyline there back in the early 70's. For me they are the atmosphere of the place and a monument to the ingenuity of the people who have survived there in that heat since time imemorial.

2 textures by Lenabem.... here and here, with thanks as ever.

Dubai, UAE, 2007. The Abra.

EN: Al-Fahidi Fort, built in 1799, is home to the Dubai Museum, and is thought to be Dubai's oldest building.

Located in the heart of the Dubai city, Al-Fahidi Fort is one of the most important historical monuments in Dubai.

In the past the fort was used to defend the town from warlike neighbouring tribes. It has also served, at various times throughout history as the seat of government, the ruler's residence, a store for ammunition, and a jail.

RU: Форт Аль-Фахиди - старейшая сохранившаяся постройка в Дубае. Он был заложен в 1799 году. Мощные стены форта когда-то защищали город и его правителей от набегов воинственных племен и морских вторжений.

Форт входил в состав укреплений, окружавших нынешний район Bur Dubai. До 1890 года в форте располагалась резиденция правителя города. Затем он использовался в качестве арсенала и тюрьмы, а с 1970 года здесь находится Музей Дубая.

Время основания музея выпало на тот момент, когда урбанизация и хлынувшие в страну нефтяные деньги стали стремительно вытеснять патриархальный быт. Создатели экспозиции старались сохранить для потомков уходящую эпоху и через предметы традиционного уклада восстановить атмосферу, в которой жили их деды: бедуины, рыбаки, ловцы жемчуга, купцы.

Copyright PS

Meidan Emam, Isfahan, Iran, 1968.

From back of Ali Qapu Palace if I remember rightly. (See last photo in set.)

Looking towards the Shah Abbas or Imam mosque with its angled alignment, (plan following).

Main square to the left.

Enlarge

Click diagonal arrows upper-right; then press F11 Fullscreen.

© Half the World — Isfahan

From old Baghdad with its hubble-bubbles wafting in Rashid St, and its gold, courtyard mosque by the Tigris, I headed to Tehran, Iran. Then down to Isfahan sitting oasis-like in desiccated landscape. This was months ago, well decades actually, the 1960s still in the time of the Shah.

Fabled Isfahan! Architect Harry Turbott had shown me a photo of a white snow blob, flowing form sitting on a glistening turquoise dome so perfectly matching its tear-drop shape. The snow a moment in time, the dome historically time-lasting. The subtlety of those pure-forms — a memory forever. And Byron, in his “Road to Oxiana” ranked “Isfahan among those rarer places, like Athens or Rome, which are the common refreshment of humanity.”

The local proverb says “Isfahan is Half the World”.

There’s also a poem: “Go to Isfahan to experience the second heaven.”

And Vita Sackville-West wrote in 1925: “In sixteenth century Isfahan Persians were building out of light itself, taking the turquoise from their sky, the green of the spring trees, the yellow of the sun, the brown of the earth and turning these into solid light.”

Only very few of my photos have survived the years, so now some much-belated script to compensate.

On a cold desert plateau, 1500 metres above sea-level, Isfahan developed long ago in a green patch by the coming-and-going, but vital, Zayendah river. Desert mountains in the backdrop, it was located on the main north-south and east-west trade routes crossing Persia, and a branch of the Silk Road. Deep in 2½,000 years of history, but one of an endless succession of invasions, intrigues, violence and complexity, it came to be Iran’s masterpiece, the jewel of old Persia at the centre. From ancient poverty to Royal splendour. It flourished particularly at the end of the 16thC under the Safavid dynasty, when it was made capital for the second time. Can such conflict and contradiction produce resolved development? There are other facets, but my view was as a visiting western architect.

Traditional labyrinth:

Older housing of the region shows a desire for intimacy and enclosure. Alleys double back and end in cul-de-sacs. This can be seen as an expression of Muslim ideas including disapproval of civic ostentation — the beliefs of Arabian-influenced culture stress communal benefits of the city. Thus maze-like streets show lack of European secular hierarchy. Away from religious or royal structures, lanes are narrow, frequently spanned across, and coming to dead-end precincts; all formed by earth-built walls in puzzling layouts. With apparently-spontaneous growth, the homogeneity is an architectural reflection of customary values in neighbourliness. Alley-passages wiggle between dwellings which take air and light from inner courtyards. Quadrangular houses are organised around these courts, so lanes are relatively blank-walled. Housing, tightly-fitted, yet spread out as a jig-saw carpet, results, with accretion over the centuries.

And the old construction is nearly all earth — earth bricks and earth plaster making a continuous unity. The irregular flat-roof forms are fused here and there with strings of brick domes — a line of brown-earth buttons from above. All is khaki, tinting slightly yellowish or reddish. Labyrinth built, labyrinth evolved; chance and randomness; but with this, a humanity in scale, light and shade. The unity emphasises the chiaroscuro play, alternation and choice of sun and shadow, heat and coolness. Diagonal shafts of light stimulate the senses. And dome vaulting produces an undulating sensual rhythm, with openings to let in the daylight. But in the material sense, there was plenty of poverty in those days.

Matched-in, integrated within Isfahan, were caravanserai — inns with accommodation for merchants, animals, and goods — typically around a court, and centre for trade. As well as traveller hosting, these provided an in-between for wholesale merchandise from outside the city, middle-man to the bazaar stalls.

The overall homogeneity is a built expression of tradition, but the commercial and residential areas are kept apart. The vital arteries are the bazaar markets, often doubling as craft workshops, along with street-sides. But dwellings are for the most part accessible only through the narrow alleys. Seen from outside, individual houses are hard to distinguish from one another. It’s the courtyard mosques which serve as more formal points of assembly for the citizens.

Bad-girs and Sabats:

A couple of traditional details: Bad-girs are roof structures for cooling – ancient climate control. They’re in various forms from nipple-shaped, to wind scoops, to tall wind-towers. The few rectilinear towers are much the same as the barjeels of the Bastakiya Quarter, the Barasti house, and the Maktoum Palace, Dubai, that I mentioned in my green Travels book. Such scoops and towers were used through much of the Middle-east.

[My flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/peteshep/633867373/ ]

In twisting lanes of the southern Mediterranean as well as the Middle-east, the Sabat is a structure built between opposite buildings on both sides of the street. It provides passage under to respect right-of-way. Thus it’s a roofed lane designed to shade people in hot areas from direct sun for a short period. Modulated light results, and the construction material enables segued transitions.

Isfahan Dovecotes:

Traditional/vernacular architecture can convey fundamental values. It responds directly to place, and human involvement, organically. It’s local in both spirit and material, evolving in time and place without imposition. It provides a true expression; and is economic in the full sense.

Examples around Isfahan include the old dovecotes. Such pigeon-houses were historically used through much of Europe and the Middle-east to provide perhaps meat, but above all, fertilizer. Hundreds of dovecotes, particularly from the Safavid period, dot fields and orchards in the vicinity of Isfahan — they played an important role in sustaining the hinterland. The turrets built to collect droppings, developed over time as sophisticated architecture. Each tower could accommodate thousands of wild pigeons providing for field manure, as well as for softening leather at the tanneries. Agriculture in the fertile but nitrogen-lacking plains was thereby supported and epitomizes people working with nature in common alliance. A mutualism.

Today, over 300 historic dovecotes have been identified in Isfahan Province, many now registered on the Heritage list. The largest could have 14,000 birds, and were decorated with distinctive red or white bands. The taller towers are free-standing high-rise, over 20m, but many smaller ones are built into gardens, alike in form to rounded bastions. Others brood over the flat roofs of village dwellings.

Larger examples developed as symmetrical sculptural forms — typically as a series of drum shapes — like high earthen pepperpots. Their concentric flower-petal plans show rhythm with a sequence of solid and void comparing with the best architecture of the time. And the interiors are a diffusion of light playing on intricate opening-and-perch designs, accessed by spiral stairs. They’re built from sun-dried bricks and local-earth plaster, with domed cupolas, and honeycomb arrangements. Much of the inner sculpturing is due to the pattern of pigeon-holes above their projecting perches. Evolved craft tradition produced meaningful high aesthetics.

[ Video link: www.jadidonline.com/images/stories/flash_multimedia/Pigeo... ]

Wind catchers, pepper-pot pigeon towers, domed and coned cisterns, funnel-wall windmills, and long-line qanats are traditional structures of old Persia.

Town Planning:

In these arid lands, town siting was determined essentially by the availability of water, and it’s not surprising that the architecture should enjoy ornamental water-jets, and peaceful reflecting pools which are often an element in ritual ablutions.

Bazaars were provided for daily commerce, typically stretching along access routes, and craftsmen sell their products on the spot.

But then a town could be fitted out by a monarch as his capital and place of residence, as happened in Isfahan, and the existing plan modified by the creation of avenues and squares punctuated by formal buildings, yet all surprisingly integrated.

Safavid Capital urban design of Shah Abbas, late 16th C: ........... contd >

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Since become a UNESCO World Heritage Site:

whc.unesco.org/en/list/115

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqsh-e_Jahan_Square

www.ourplaceworldheritage.com/custom.cfm?action=WHsite&am...

ArchNet link Maidan square:

archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.jsp?site_id=3944

1001 Wonders world-heritage-tour interactive panning QTime. Allow time to download:

Mosque entry on square at night:

www.world-heritage-tour.org/asia/central-asia/iran/esfaha...

[Note: As well as the Maidan Square being a Unesco World Heritage Site (#115), the Historic Axis Planning of Isfahan is on a Tentative Listing: Click this link and click again for Description, Ref 5176: www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/t5176.html ]

See also 2010 Isfahan Set/album.

www.flickr.com/photos/peteshep/albums/72157625495320685

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Dubai, Taken from boat as we were coming into the port next to Barasti

From right to left: Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo (1861-1945), Salman Bin Hussain Matar (1837-1944), Jacques-Théodule Alfred Cartier (1884-1941), Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair (1844-1923), and Abdulrahman Bin Abdulaziz Al-Ibrahim (1875-1960) circa March 1912.

(Contrary to earlier conflicting accounts about the location of this famous photograph, local historians now believe it was taken during Jacques Cartier's introductory visit to Salman Bin Hussain Matar, the undisputed doyen of the Bahraini pearl industry for more than five decades, in his townhouse on the island of Muharraq by one of Cartier's assistants, while seated outside on the elevated, columned portico (iwan) of the main reception hall in the inner courtyard of the house, since the densely populated, once-walled old Muharraq town, with its maze of narrow, winding streets, was not only the largest urban centre on the small island but also the political capital of Bahrain and the seat of power for the Al Khalifa ruling dynasty from 1810 to 1923.)

(The date of birth of Yusuf Kanoo of 1861 in the caption above is arguably the most accurate of all his purported birth dates, in particular when compared to the other two widely circulated unsubstantiated discretionary dates of 1874 and 1868, the first of which is found in the British National Archives (India Office Records), vaguely based on Yusuf Kanoo's own account, casting doubt on the questionable veracity of the information-gathering methods of the British archival records, while the second is a more recent date, first appearing as the official birth date of Kanoo in the late 1990s; it is important to note that, with few exceptions here and there, prior to the gradual establishment of the modern bureaucratic centralised state system in Bahrain in the 1920s, and the following decades, virtually every birth date in Bahrain and the rest of the basic protection social contract of Arab Gulf polities, where the livelihoods and worldly possessions of the people were under the protection of a specific ruler in a loosely designated geographical area, was usually determined by word-of-mouth discretionary supposition, collective consensus, and, in some rare cases, chronicled by momentous or calamitous events occurring at random during any given time in a certain year, such as warfare, lethal epidemics or destructive natural disasters, the year is typically identified by a distinctive feature or characteristic attributed to the calamity itself, and the person born in the year in question, irrespective of gender, is routinely referred to as "being born in the year of so-and-so" and, at best, by adding the season of birth according to the seasonally unaligned Islamic Hijri Calendar, with this becoming, as time passed, part of the folk memory of the Bahraini people and the Gulf region in general, at a time when a sizeable portion of the indigenous local population was both illiterate and semiliterate, before the government-sponsored formal education system was introduced in the early 1920s and 1930s in the newly formed Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf, for example, when the devastating Spanish flu pandemic reached Arabia as a whole in the autumn of 1919, including Bahrain, resulting in the death of more than fifteen hundred inhabitants in Bahrain alone, the year of the outbreak was called "The Year of Mercy" due to the frequency of funerary prayers and supplications for mercy for the souls of so many victims who succumbed to the disease one after another, an Islamic religious nomenclature once commonly used in the Arabian Peninsula in relation to the catastrophic recurrences of virulent diseases that ravaged the Peninsula, with people in Arabia sauntering through a never-ending cycle of rampant epidemics with very high mortality rates; as one would expect under such conditions, these adversities were not dissimilar to those in mediaeval Europe or in the relatively advanced neighbouring Fertile Crescent, and such was the febrile nature of life in Arabia that people were constantly girding themselves for the worst, in view of the practically complete lack of modern medical care facilities, preventive healthcare, quarantine measures (including immunisation) and public sanitation, with the three modern healthcare facilities exceptions in the Gulf, which were significantly effective, though insufficient, operating chronologically with the opening of each of them, starting with the commercial, for-profit enterprise medical services of the American Mission Hospital in 1903 in Manama, Bahrain, followed three years later by the semi-gratuitous medical services of the chronically underfunded Victoria Memorial Hospital, together with its quarantine facility, in 1906, located near the sea, directly across from the British political agency (now the British Embassy), further down the same long, meandering street as the American hospital, both facilities catered not only to the local Bahraini population but also to those from the eastern and central regions of present-day Saudi Arabia, and finally, in 1914, the American Mission Hospital of Kuwait served Kuwait and its environs of urban and desert sedentary communities, where there was practically a yearly infestation of at least one epidemic, most notably bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, and smallpox, causing numerous fatalities in a short space of time; this was particularly the case within the Arab states along the western coast of the sparsely populated and largely penurious Arabian Gulf and throughout the mostly arid environment of the Arabian Peninsula, excluding a small number of places where there was plenty of water to support sustainable agriculture, including Yemen, in southern Arabia, and large oases such as Al-Qasim, Medina, and Al-Ahsa, during the first third of the twentieth century, before the transformative discovery of oil in the 1930s and 1940s and the subsequent development of an efficient, free governmental medical system funded by oil revenues; however, one of the most noteworthy calamities to leave an indelible mark on the collective consciousness of the Gulf's populace was an odd hurricane of cataclysmic proportions which took place on the 1st of October 1925, dubbed "The Year of the Sinkage", inflicting variable damage to buildings and the surrounding environment, especially vulnerable mud huts with palm-frond thatched roofs (known as barastis) in coastal, agricultural and fishing villages belonging to indigent, toiling fishermen and indentured farmers, were torn apart and interspersed across far-flung distances, and, needless to say; the pearl fishing industry was hit hard during the final weeks of the four-month-long summer pearling season in anticipation of the onset of the dormant winter months for the industry and its ancillary essential sectors in the Gulf, the cornerstone of the region's fragile monocultural economy, with thousands of boats sunk and, tragically, over five thousand lives, predominantly sailors, lost in a single thunderous, foreboding night in the otherwise almost always placid waters of the Gulf; the calamity wrought havoc in its wake, leaving a path of devastation across a vast region, primarily in the central part of the Arabian Gulf, centring on the Bahrain archipelago and the eastern coastline of the Qatar peninsula, coupled with a number of islands and the scantily populated coastal towns and villages along the present-day eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, including Dammam (now a large metropolis) and Tarout Island, well-known back then for its small fishing and pearl diving communities, namely the famous pearl fishing town of Darin and also the nearby farming town of Qatif, where one hundred and fifty people died from falling date palm trees on their homes, in addition to Ras Tanura, and to a lesser extent Jubail in the north, thus the perfectly apt appellation, as these rudimentary speculative and dubious methods were the order of the day, rather than any accurate, bureaucratic official government or religious documentation specifying the exact date and year of birth, with the first large-scale issuance of birth registration certificates in Bahrain beginning in earnest in the 1950s, given the discovery of an officially notarised endowment trust fund transfer deed dated Thursday, the 15th of Rabi' al-Thani 1295 in the Hijri Calendar, corresponding to the 18th of April 1878 in the Gregorian Calendar, the credibility of the two earlier-mentioned alleged dates of birth of Yusuf Kanoo is decidedly undermined, as the respected foodstuff merchant, Ahmed Mohamed Kanoo, and his eldest son, Yusuf, were among the nine legally required consenting male adults who validated the strict transfer of wealth procedure, and since both of the previously stated birth dates of Yusuf Kanoo relevant to the timeline of the binding legal solemnity of such a document are incompatible with the required legal age of the witnesses, it is illogical to say that Yusuf Kanoo was either an undiscerning child of four or a child of ten, which indicates he was a minor in both instances and lacked the legal age and, therefore, full legal capacity, to appear before an Islamic Sharia judge or any other judge of any civil or religious denomination, and it should be clarified that, with the exception of Iran (historically known as Persia), which is still reliant on its own highly precise and unique Solar Hijri Calendar, designed by the renowned Muslim polymath Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), time and age measurements and the foundation for standard civic purposes of all aspects of mundane life, not just religious holidays, worshipping activities, and festivities, were calculated in the Arabian Gulf and much of the Islamic world at that time, according to the purely lunar Islamic Hijri Calendar's dynamic but orderly unaligned seasons of the monthly cycles of the phases of the Moon, in contrast to the seasonally aligned, more dependable Gregorian, and less complex Solar Calendar, and all currently in use others, in a number of Asian nations, such as China, India, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, are regulated by their indigenous hybrid Lunisolar Calendar's overlapping intercalations of both the positions of the Moon and the Sun, in compatibility with the Western globalised economic realities of modern life, in conclusion, as expounded earlier in the text, in the absence of a centralised efficient bureaucratic state system in the late modern period, from roughly the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in Bahrain and the rest of the Gulf, it was a challenging task to determine the precise birth dates of the vast majority of the population, including those of the ruling and mercantile elites, with a few rare anomalous exceptions, mostly among the clergy, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that Yusuf Kanoo, as one of the signatories of the said revealing document, was of the irrefutable legal adult discerning age of eighteen lunar years, marking the adulthood threshold where individuals were recognised as legally responsible for their actions according to the prevailing consensus of the four principal Islamic Sunni orthodoxy schools of jurisprudence since the mediaeval period, at the time, before the partial implementation of more secular, Western-influenced administrative reforms and legislation by the British colonial local authorities in the Gulf in the first third of the twentieth century, the Gregorian solar calendar was steadily replacing the lunar Hijri calendar in daily civic use, among other modernising measures, as part of the British worldwide imperial colonial grafting policy, similar to that of the French and Portuguese but in a less brutal, less culturally imperialist and less bloodstained manner, by paternalistically integrating Britain more vigorously with its racially inferior and inherently less civilised colonies in varying degrees, while taking into account the distinct circumstances of each of the occupied territories according to British evaluation that constituted the British Empire through the self-designated various British classifications of each territory (such as Colonies, Crown Colonies, Charter Colonies, Protectorates, Mandates, etc.) via the subtle influence of cultural assimilation, thus securing the long-term economic interests of Britain, through primarily peaceful persuasion and, when necessary, forceful means, evidenced by the aforementioned administrative reforms implemented in post-World War One Bahrain, where both grafting methodologies were aggressively adopted; these approaches were derived from the ancient yet still-in-use horticultural technique of grafting, in which different strains of plant tissues are united to create a robust, inseparable bond that promotes the optimal growth of desirable traits, mirroring the sophisticated strategies employed by all the major European colonial powers to ensure future dominance over their colonies through cultural hegemony)

(In light of the fact that Bahrain was the centre of the pearl trade in the Arabian Gulf, renowned worldwide for producing some of the finest natural pearls since antiquity, the small seafaring nation became the haunt for anyone seeking business success in the lucrative, highly sought-after market for natural pearls in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, igniting what might have been an unprecedented pearl mania in recorded history to satisfy the ever-increasing international demand for pearl jewellery, especially among the upper echelons of Indian society, dominated by the British Raj vassal potentates of Hindu Maharajas and Muslim Nawab princes, the feudal successors of the then-defunct once-mighty Mughal Empire, the waning old European royalties, supremely embodied by the doomed absolutist and fabulously extravagant Russian imperial house of Romanov, the vigorous burgeoning capitalist upwardly mobile Western bourgeoisie, and the extraordinarily wealthy urban-dwelling ostentatious nouveau riche American tycoons, primarily of New York, amidst the sweeping American Industrial Revolution, epitomising the opulence and excess of the era known as the "Gilded Age," as in the case of the young French jeweller Jacques-Théodule Alfred Cartier (1884-1941), who opted to bypass the exorbitant prices of the monopolistic Parisian pearl dealer coterie by sourcing pearls directly from local suppliers in the Arabian Gulf, marking the final connection between the international Western jewellery industry, where natural pearls were marketed as luxury finished products in the high-end jewellery stores of major Western capitals and cities such as London, Paris, and New York, and the intricate hierarchical network of interwoven business relationships within the centuries-old, tradition-steeped history of the Arabian Gulf pearl trade, personified by the four transnational Arab merchants, each of whom was associated with Bahrain to a varying degree due to its advantageous economic standing in comparison to its Arab Gulf neighbours in this iconic picture taken by one of Jacques Cartier's assistants and meticulously stored in the photo albums of the Cartier company archives in Paris, along with hundreds of other photographs taken during his several trips to the Gulf and India, as Cartier was keen on photographically documenting as much as he could of all the major events he had participated in during these trips, particularly those from his second extended visit to Bahrain in 1912, and also his handwritten, pedantically detailed travel journal containing vital information about the places he visited and the key people he met in his trips to the Orient and other parts of the world, but let us be clear, this picture for the most part is about the three noted pearl merchants he conducted business with: Al-Thukair, Bin Matar, and Al-Ibrahim, who more or less share similar backgrounds since they all hail directly from the Najd region in central Arabia, taking into account that Bahrain meant a different thing for each of them; for Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair (1844-1923), it was a second home away from home after his beloved birthplace of Unaizah in Najd; however, for the magnanimous and highly esteemed longest reigning doyen of the Bahraini business community for over half a century, the honourable, staid and reticent Salman Bin Hussain Matar (1837-1944), it was his native birthplace, as his grandfather and namesake moved to Bahrain from Najd in 1825, making it his permanent home, and finally, for Abdurrahman Bin Abdulaziz Al-Ibrahim (1875-1960), Bahrain was a worthwhile frequent business destination, situated halfway between his country of origin, Kuwait, on the northern tip of the Arabian Gulf, where his family moved from Najd in the early 1700s, soon after the country was established as an independent sovereign political entity by the Al-Sabah dynasty of the Bani Utbah tribal confederation of Najd, and the bustling British-founded Indian entrepôt city of Bombay, now known as Mumbai, the present financial capital and most populous city in India and the abode of choice of Al-Ibrahim until the end of his life, apart from being his final resting place, the vibrant commercial hub on the Arabian Sea and the main gathering place for Arab traders and their families in the Indian subcontinent for nearly a century, and in many instances, the real head start for a slew of industrious young Arab merchants from the generally inhospitable, population-repelling, and, on the whole, economically deprived pre-oil Arabian Peninsula as for the apparent role of the fourth Arab in the picture as an Arabic-Hindi and English interpreter in this historically significant photograph, the shrewd and influential merchant Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo (1861-1945), whose ancestors originated from Najd, north of the present-day Saudi capital, Riyadh, emigrated more than a hundred years before his birth to the broadly Arab eastern coast of the Arabian Gulf; then after one or two generations in the early nineteenth century, the descendants of those ancestors decided once again to relocate to the pearl-rich island state of Bahrain off the western coast of Arabia near their ancestral homeland in the Najd plateau, central Arabia, following a temporary sojourn on what is now erroneously called the Persian coast, as scores of Arabs from the hinterlands of Arabia did in the past for one reason or another before the creation of today's artificial political borders when the Gulf was an Arabian lake for many centuries, needless to say, Kanoo's role was not just confined to language interpretation; therefore, first and foremost, it is necessary to shed light on his business interests and activities preceding his fortuitous foray into the shipping agency sector in 1911, when he was appointed the Bahraini shipping agent for the pioneering, albeit ill-fated and short-lived first fully Arab-owned shipping and passenger enterprise, "The Arab Steamers, Limited", by the majority of the principal shareholders of the budding company, most of whom were his friends, where he embraced wholeheartedly this unexpected business opportunity that came knocking at his door, as it would also play a pivotal role in shaping his future business career, making him synonymous with the shipping liner and oil tanker industries in the last three decades of his life and, posthumously, the eponymous company he founded up to the present, notwithstanding his involvement in significant business activities other than shipping, including the acquisition in 1913 of the highly profitable agency for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now British Petroleum "BP"), in particular, before the discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932 and the introduction of locally oil-refined byproducts with the opening of the Bahrain refinery in 1936, the paramount byproduct of these in the Bahraini market in the first third of the twentieth century was Kerosene, also known as paraffin, when monthly shipments of thousands of barrels of this essential commodity were imported from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's refinery in Abadan in the northern Gulf used to arrive in Bahrain for local consumption, to be transported by dhow boats from a steamship anchored in deep water in the middle of the sea to the port of Manama (the current site of Bahrain Financial Harbour), a small shallow-water port incapable of receiving deep-draught large ships, then uploaded onto donkey-pulled carts to the warehouses of the nearby seaside landmark building belonging to Yusuf Kanoo in Manama, but after the building was sold, in 1934, the Kerosene shipments were stored in the warehouses of Kanoo's main office building inside the old Manama souk (the future office building of the Y.B.A. Kanoo Group until 2016), for distribution to the local Kanoo subagents, as kerosene oil was indispensable for domestic use as the primary fuel source for lighting lamps, portable lanterns and, to a smaller degree, cooking stoves, since most Bahrainis relied on wood for cooking, while some low-income families used dried cow dung as a cheaper alternative to the more costly wood before liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders were gradually introduced and an electrical power grid was established in the 1930s and the following decades, other oil derivatives, especially petrol and diesel fuel, were less significant products since the country only had two hundred motor vehicles by 1930; Yusuf Kanoo was also the first local merchant to import diesel-electric engines, ice-making machines and mechanical water pumps into Bahrain after World War One, and he became the refuelling and ground handling agent for Imperial Airways' long flights from London, landing in Bahrain en route to Karachi and Delhi in British India, whilst also handling the Orient Express-like, exorbitantly expensive nine-day flight to Sydney, Australia, in 1929, the predecessor of "British Airways", for he was the only Bahraini supplier of petroleum products for almost twenty years, laying the groundwork for the future highly lucrative Kanoo regional aviation ground handling business in the Gulf, specifically in Bahrain and across Saudi Arabia, and his efficiency in managing plane refuelling resulted in his appointment as the travel agent for Imperial Airways in 1937, thus becoming the owner of the first airline travel agency in Bahrain, which ten years later, in 1947, would become the first agency in the Gulf to be accredited by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), among the myriads of products and services he launched in Bahrain and the Gulf as a whole, inadvertently leading to the development of arguably the first local Western-style management-based modern business firm in the Arabian Gulf, with the contemporary state-of-the-art Y.B.A. Kanoo regional conglomerate still maintaining substantially a similar scope to the then-nascent businesses of its forward-thinking founder Yusuf Kanoo in the early twentieth century, most significantly shipping, travel, machinery, and oil & gas, where the company has steadily risen to become a market leader in these sectors across all of its operational markets, achieving this in less than two decades after its founder passed away in 1945, this growth has been evident particularly since the impactful first oil boom in the mid-1970s in its three main regional markets by business size: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, as these new businesses and technologies were briefly touched upon above for the duration of Yusuf Kanoo's fifty-five-year business career, in which he weathered numerous trials and tribulations through an almost unbroken chain of three major global crises: the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, as Yusuf was chiefly a banker and general trader during the first twenty years of his long business career, and as a British-influenced maverick entrepreneur with a global perspective, branching out from the foodstuff business of his father, Ahmed Muhammad Kanoo (1835-1905), one of the major wholesale foodstuff merchants in Bahrain in the late nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century, and the owner of two large mixed-use elongated buildings in Manama built in the traditional Gulf architectural style, primely located close to each other, separated by the existing narrow Al Khalifa Avenue, flanked from the right side of the main building by an equally detached building of similar length but slightly broader width, formerly belonging to the brothers Abdullah & Salman Kamal, constituted the current smaller attached row of buildings consisting of shops, representing a miscellaneous collection of businesses and trades, mostly in the retail sector, owned by several different proprietors, are on the left side of the now covered pedestrian no-car strip of Souq Bab Al Bahrain Avenue, across from what were once customs bonded warehouses, the present-day site of Bab Al Bahrain shopping mall, whereas the left side of the Kanoo building is flanked by another building of the same length belonging to Sheikh Hamad, the 33-year-old crown prince of Bahrain and future ruler, and which remains in the possession of his descendants from the Bahraini royal family, as the main building is a nearly five-hundred-foot-long three-story building and fifty-five-foot width, one of the largest detached commercial buildings in Manama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while the smaller opposite one, the once seaside building is a two-story over two hundred feet long and also detached as its much larger sister, yet of identical width, with the first floor of the smaller building serving as a private residence for the only surviving male offspring of Ahmed Kanoo, Yusuf, whom he and his two nephews and soul heirs then sold several decades later in 1934 to the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Hamad (1932-1942), coupled with other properties sold to others, the most important being Yusuf Kanoo's own constructed impressively huge two-story building on a plot of land reclaimed from the sea at the turn of the twentieth century, the largest mixed-use commercial and residential building in Bahrain and the whole Gulf back then, the present site of several prime location properties owned by the Bahraini royal family, consisting of the Unitag Group building and its car park, the Regency Intercontinental Hotel's auxiliary Plaza Spa and wellness building at the back, and the adjacent large building alongside it where a number of largely financial firms and banks operate, covering the total three-hundred-foot right wing width of the old building, and at one point facing the old customs house, part of the one hundred and twenty thousand square feet plot of land encompassing the entire incomplete rectangular-shaped semi-bottom square bracket building, including the three-hundred-foot built-up two wings width across the two-hundred-foot length of the semi-courtyard partially unbuilt hollow-shaped space opposite the sea at the back of the property, serving as a docking area for the building, where in the mid-1970s, the Regency Intercontinental Hotel was erected on sea-reclaimed land in front of the docking area, which Yusuf Kanoo sold to prominent Kuwaiti pearl merchant Helal Bin Fajhan Al-Mutairi (1855-1938) in late 1934 for a quarter of a million British Raj rupees, the official currency used across the Gulf as the polities of the Gulf were under the jurisdiction of the British Indian Raj, in a desperate sale transaction to alleviate some of his massive debt incurred as a result of the global crisis of the Great Depression, as with a multitude of merchants across the Arabian Gulf, nevertheless, the present site of the smaller building is the Bab AL Bahrain Hotel, and all of the rented spaces on the four corners of the ground floor of the detached property, as the previous property is also owned by the royal family of Bahrain, located in close proximity to the Bab Al Bahrain archway (Gateway of Bahrain) historical landmark in Manama separated by just a thin aisle pedestrian passage between the two buildings, the upcoming exposition, is partly based on an amalgamation of varied documented materials spanning both local and foreign, including archival sources, notarised official documents, diaries, biographies, and so on, but above all based on the detailed descriptive notarised "deed of gift" of Ahmed Muhammad Kanoo, the father of Yusuf Kanoo, outlining in detail how he gifted specific holdings of his fixed and movable assets during his lifetime to his four adult heirs, these were his four adult offspring, his two sons Yusuf and Muhammed, and his two daughters Latifa and Hussa, where the aforementioned properties and their boundaries were clearly stated, among other heirlooms, leaving no room for ambiguity or obfuscation, dated 5th of Jumada al-Awwal 1323, in Hijri Islamic Calendar, corresponding to Saturday 8th of July 1905, in Gregorian Christian Calendar, penned shortly prior to the passing of Ahmed, stating that the two neighbouring buildings belonging to him in Manama were gifted to his sons Yusuf and Muhammed equally, whereas the large rear building served as the future headquarters offices of the titular firm of the eldest son of Ahmed, Yusuf, he posthumous Y.B.A. Kanoo regional conglomerate was owned by the nephews and heirs of Yusuf, the sons of his deceased younger brother Muhammed, Jassim and Ali Kanoo, and their immediate eight male offspring and their legal heirs' descendants of both sexes, given that Muhammed died soon after his father Ahmed in 1905 of the plague during one of the deadly infectious diseases outbreaks at the turn of the twentieth century in Bahrain, since Yusuf did not have children of his own despite his three successive marriages, the building described above became symbiotically attached to the Y.B.A. Kanoo family business in the minds of many ordinary Bahrainis, especially dwellers of old Manama, for several generations from the death of Ahmad in 1905 to the death of his son Yusuf forty years later on the 21st of December 1945, and then operating continuously from the same premises for the next seven decades, albeit the old traditionally built structure was rebuilt in a Semi-Mediterranean commercial style using modern building materials in the late 1950s, until finally in 2016, when the company moved to a new steel and glass high-rise headquarters after more than a century in the same location, however, with respect to the smaller building, it became solely owned by Yusuf Kanoo, explaining why it was sold by him, as thoroughly discussed earlier, with the two daughters of Ahmed receiving gold jewellery, in contrast to the commonly held, inaccurately long-perpetuated conception that Yusuf Kanoo started from humble origins and died practically bankrupt in 1945, as will be explained further in the text, it should be noted that when Yusuf established the first local bank in Bahrain and the entire Gulf, including Persia (Iran) in 1890, he was venturing into the risky uncharted territory of banking business in the Arabian Gulf at a time when banking was associated, at least in this deeply conservative puritanical region of the Arab world in the local Muslim collective consciousness, with unethical exploitative usury, as the Bank of Yusuf Kanoo remained the only bank in Bahrain for thirty years until the opening of the British-owned Oriental Bank in 1920 (The Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China), the present-day Standard Chartered Bank, having been inspired by the successful banking firms of the British Raj in India, the Kanoo Bank was significantly different from regular commercial banks as it leaned more towards private banking, targeting Bahraini wealthy pearl merchants with sizeable monetary surpluses, some of whom were occasionally in need of significant cash flows for the thousands of indentured workers on their payroll throughout the four-month-long summer pearl diving season in a non-banking-based economic environment, particularly those of the island of Muharraq and its towns where Yusuf Kanoo was constantly courting their goodwill, as they were the real drivers of the fragile local monocultural economy, as with the rest of the region, Muharraq was the most active pearling town in the Arabian Gulf, thanks in large part to having the richest pearl oyster beds in the Gulf in its northern waters, and, as a matter of course, home to the highest number of pearl divers and the largest fleet of pearling vessels in the region, the former political capital of Bahrain and the seat of power of its Al Khalifa ruling dynasty for over a century, and the beating heart of the pearling industry of the tiny archipelago, the most salient of those Muharraq's merchants was the closest, steadfast, and trusted friend of Yusuf Kanoo and chief creditor, referred to earlier in the preface, one who cannot be commended highly enough or quantify his innumerable virtuous deeds, the celebrated, unassuming, and bonhomous legendary philanthropist Salman Bin Matar, who was widely recognised for donating large amounts of rice and dates to the poor in Bahrain during the dire economic conditions of the First and Second World Wars to alleviate the sudden shortages of imported foodstuffs, principally rice, the staple food for the vast majority of Bahraini people regardless of class, stemming from disruptions in international supply chains caused by military operations, and to make matters worse, the economic strife of the First World War was compounded by a virulent epidemic, as in the situation in Bahrain, where five thousand people died from an outbreak of plague in December 1914, as referred to by the British political agent in Bahrain, Captain Keyes, in his correspondence with his superior, Major Trevor, the Deputy Political Resident of the British Residency in Bushehr, Persia (Iran), on the 5th of December 1914 in the following excerpted letter passage: (Divers and coolies continued to leave Bahrain till the outbreak of plague in December when hundreds of Persians also left. Plague further reduced the population by some 5000. There was then a slight revival of trade and the profits in coffee and tea were so good that several merchants took advantage of the cheapness of the labour market to collect stones and build, thus, giving work to numbers of the most indigent. There was also a market for household articles, old clothes etc, and it was not till February that any people were entirely without resources. Two or three merchants, notably Salman Bin Matar, then made large donations of rice and dates, and work was found for some men by the Agency), in conjunction with his bountiful donations in times of economic crises, there was the daily sight of long queues of the less fortunate at his doorstep all year long, both at his winter and summer residences, awaiting alms of the generous distribution of cooked meals made of lamb and rice, since Salman Bin Matar was Bahrain's wealthiest merchant for nearly fifty years and its largest property owner, aside from being its most consequential pearl merchant from the 1890s until his greatly lamented death on the 10th of February 1944, the subsequent concise bracketed excerpt below originates from a declassified comprehensive report compiled by two British political agents, Captain N. N. E. Bray (1885-1962) and Major H. R. P. Dickson (1881-1959), who served consecutively though briefly in Bahrain, whereas the latter would significantly influence the modern history of country's northern neighbour Kuwait as a future political agent, this report offers a glimpse into the mindset of these colonial officers and the prevailing racist climate in the West, as reflected in this extremely subjective observational case study of the people of Bahrain from a British colonial perspective, verifying the typical racist European tropes and stereotypes of how none white people were widely viewed back then, including two opposing lists of influential Bahrainis who played central roles in shaping the socioeconomic and political landscape of the small state, either by aligning with Britain or opposing it, with Salman Bin Matar prominently placed at the top of the Whitelist, this list evidently refers to a group of the wealthiest and most powerful high-ranking Bahrainis who were considered allies of the British, conversely, the Blacklist represents a diverse group of individuals from all segments of Bahraini society, belonging to various social backgrounds, faiths, affiliations, and origins, unified by the suspicion and hostility they faced from the British colonial authorities in Bahrain, for reasons that were not exclusively political, Bin Matar was described in this special 1920 report by the British political agency in Bahrain as follows: quote (1. Salman Bin Matar. A wealthy pearl merchant, very friendly.) a simple yet emblematic description of a man who maintained a modest demeanour all his life despite his immense wealth, dedicating much of his long life to assisting the downtrodden and improving the quality of life of the Bahraini people in general in every way possible irrespective of their race, ethnicity, creed, or colour, in particular, through the introduction of modern formal government education, as he was one of the founders of the first formal school in Muharraq, the former capital of Bahrain in 1919, he was also a vital member of all the governmental councils and committees of the newly formed bureaucratically centralised, and chronically underfunded Bahraini state, where he unfailingly provided generous financial funding to these fledgling government bodies, both before and after the discovery of oil in 1932, and continued to do so until his death, as evidenced by a short though thoughtful obituary in the declassified British colonial annual archival report of 1944 on Bahrain, the following is the slightly edited bracketed obituary: (The death occurred during the year of Haj Salman Bin Matar, one of the leading pearl merchants of Muharraq, who was well known for his philanthropic deeds. For several years he provided food for large numbers of poor people who were daily fed at his doors. He sat on various councils and committees and was a valuable member of the community), he was also well-known for his significant contributions as the biggest and longest-standing depositor of the Kanoo Bank until its bankruptcy and permanent closure at the height of the Great Depression in the early 1930s; furthermore, he was accredited for waiving all of his large outstanding debts to his local and regional debtors during the decade-long debilitating depression crisis, followed by the conflagration of the Second World War, including, as expected, the debt of Yusuf Kanoo, his lifelong friend and confidant amounting to more than half a million Indian British Raj silver rupees without legal recourse, a considerable fortune in the pre-oil Arabian Gulf, in spite of the constant insistence of Yusuf Kanoo on offering his most prized possession, his mixed-use monumental building, which he then sold to Kuwaiti pearl merchant Helal Al-Mutairi, as previously mentioned, and additional properties comprising the building gifted to him and his late brother by their father, who he sold as above indicated to the ruler of Bahrain, Sheikh Hamad, and a medium-sized date palm orchard within the vicinity of Al Khamis village near Manama, to cover the stupendous debt of Salman Bin Matar, after all the last-ditch attempts of Kanoo, a trustworthy man of impeccable integrity in all of his business dealings, to offer the building among other assets to Bin Matar in exchange for the defaulted debt had failed, thus, upon the arrival of Al-Mutairi at dusk, a good friend of both eminent Bahraini merchants from Kuwait, to seal the critical sale deal of the building on an unspecified day in a cold late December evening of 1934, Yusuf Kanoo, accompanied by his prospective Kuwaiti buyer, walking in the unlit dark narrow alleys of Muharraq, aided by oil lanterns carried by assistants, went to the winter residence townhouse of Salman Bin Matar in the heart of the old town of Muharraq in a poignant final gesture of sincere goodwill to persuade him to accept the building as the least credible rightful legal settlement for the substantial outstanding debt; however, he resolutely declined, a clear attestation to the incomparable altruism and nobility of this exceptional gentleman, demonstrated by being deservedly afforded the appellation 'Father of Orphans and Protector of Widows' by the Bahraini people many a decade before these affairs, an honorific that remained synonymous with him throughout much of his long adult life and posthumously until the present, due in no small part to the cherished memories he represents for a lot of Bahrainis from all walks of life passed down through the generations, as he is unanimously recognised as the preeminent philanthropist Bahrain has produced in modern times, and also as its foremost pearl merchant of the golden age of the pearl trade, interestingly, the preceding debt case incident represents a compelling true moral story seldom seen in our fast-paced, materialistically driven, and consumer-oriented globalised village society in a world increasingly characterised by cynicism, moral apathy, and venal propensity, where meaningless vapid and insipid hypocritical rhetoric about human rights is routinely harangued tediously on the world media, serving as irrefutable proof of the remarkable mutual fidelity and devotion these two friends held for each other throughout their long friendship of over fifty years, lasting from the mid-1890s to their close deaths separated by just well over a year, prompting Yusuf Kanoo, a few months after this defining incident in 1935, to take the necessary precautions to ensure the continuity of his business enterprise for posterity by transferring ownership of his company and all of his remaining properties into the safe and capable hands of his nephews, Jassim and Ali, ten years before his passing in 1945, except for the dear to him 'Anglo-Persian Oil Company' (APOC) agency, now the multinational oil giant British Petroleum (BP), which remained under his ownership until his death, stipulating that the company will continue to bear his name after his death, thereby eliminating any future claims by creditors, and to limit the inheritance to the two brothers as the sole heirs of Yusuf Kanoo and their male progeny, ensuring the smooth transition of the family business in a traditional patriarchal society as a logical consequence, Yusuf died with virtually no inheritance left behind, debunking the notion that his heirs rebuilt his company from scratch, bearing in mind that the previously mentioned nephews at the time of Yusuf's death were middle-aged, well-established businessmen in their own right, owning business interests independently from the firm of their illustrious uncle, and married with grown-up children and even grandchildren, whose pioneering sons, Ahmed, the eldest son of Ali, and Muhammed, the eldest son of Jassim, and their diligent younger brothers, following steadily in the footsteps of their great uncle, Yusuf Kanoo, in the late 1940s, ably taking on the heavy mantle of his, expanding the resilient eponymous company he built almost sixty years prior across the Arabian Gulf, transforming it into the multinational regional conglomerate it is today, the following bracketed excerpt from the declassified 1945 colonial annual report of the British political agency in Bahrain on internal and external affairs of the country and the Arabian Gulf is an edited obituary of Yusuf Kanoo, explicitly confirming his high status both locally and regionally, as the unfounded and nebulous age of Kanoo, stated to have been born in 1874 in the said archival obituary, has been refuted conclusively in the comprehensive and detailed missive above on the different hypotheses about his age, delving concisely into the chaotic rudimentary birthdate documentation methods in Bahrain and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula before the establishment of modern centralised bureaucratic state systems in the region, which commenced in earnest after the end of World War One, (On the 21st December Haji Yusuf Ahmed Kanoo died at the age of 71, (most likely between 84 and 85). His association with His Majesty's Government started in 1898 in the time of the Agent Haji Ahmed bin Abdul Rasool (Al Safar). He continued to serve as Assistant until the arrival of Mr. Gaskin in 1902, and was associated with Major Prideaux and Captain Mackenzie until 1909. He received the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal II. Class in 1911, the title of KHAN SAHIB in 1917 and the M.B.E. in 1919. In 1924, a C.I.E. was bestowed upon him. In 1913, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company appointed him their agent in Bahrain. He received honours from the late King Hussain of the Hedjaz and, also, from His Highness the Amir (Abdullah) of Transjordan (now kingdom of Jordan), who granted him the title Pasha. The death of this well-known old Arab was marked in Bahrain by the closing of the bazaars for one day. The political Agent sent a message of condolence to the bereaved family.), at any rate, the collapse of the only Bahraini indigenous-owned bank during the Great Depression reflects the far-reaching cataclysmic effects of the first economic crisis of the modern economic realities of the ever-increasingly interconnected world of the twentieth century, turning it into a global phenomenon where plenty of financial institutions and businesses irrespective of size were falling prey to insolvency, engendering widespread economic hardship and turmoil; the momentous collapse of Kanoo Bank had a significant impact on the establishment of another indigenous bank in Bahrain, delaying the whole process for a quarter of a century until the establishment of the first commercial Bahraini-owned bank in the country, the National Bank of Bahrain (NBB) in 1957, in view of the modest oil revenues of the slowly gaining momentum new Bahraini oil economy in comparison to the exponentially oil-rich Arab Gulf neighbours of Bahrain, namely Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and to a lesser extent Qatar in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the arrival of the last two crucial newcomers on the oil-producing scene in the Arabian Gulf, the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the Sultanate of Oman, where the former would later become the dominant Emirate of the newest robust country in the Arabian Gulf, and its newly rebuilt capital city, Abu Dhabi, would be proclaimed the federal capital of the seven dynastic Emirates of the federal state of the UAE after independence from Britain in 1971, due to its geographical size and enormous hydrocarbon wealth, not to mention the British loosening of their monopolising grip on the Bahraini local banking sector in the aftermath of the brief but consequential Anglo-French debacle of the 1956 Suez crisis, which was up until then under complete control of the British, symbolised by only two British banks, the formerly alluded to Standard Chartered Bank and the British Bank of the Middle East (BBME), what is now the HSBC Bank Middle East, the second biggest Kanoo Bank depositor was leading pearl merchant Muhammad Bin Rashid Bin Hindi Al Mannai (1850-1934), also from the historic previously walled eponymous town of Muharraq, as Salman Bin Matar, the largest and most densely populated on the island, with an architectural landscape signalised by the few extant buildings of the once-forest of wind towers and sun-gleaming white facades of traditional ornate residential and commercial buildings constructed mostly of coral stone and covered in white lime mortar, forming the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Pearling Path, standing as testament to the prosperous and storied past of the island, when Muharraq was the pearl capital of the entire Gulf, along with the respected merchants and cousins Sayyid Khalifa Bin Abdulghafoor Al Sadah (1839-1912) and Sayyid Abdullah Bin Ibrahim Al Sadah (1853-1932) of the historically seafaring sand spit town of Al Hidd on the southeastern extremity of the island, these key pearl merchants and other business leaders were the primary economic drivers of the local economy and the largest employers prior to the turning point discovery of oil and the following gradual formation of the modern centralised state bureaucratic apparatus system in the Arabian Gulf region; yet, it is a little-known fact that Yusuf Kanoo was also a sagacious and trusted pearl broker, both locally and regionally, acting as a sort of decorous middleman interpreter and poised interlocutor between visiting international pearl dealers and their local and regional counterparts as the socially savvy, energetic, and knowledgeable multilingual comprador Yusuf Kanoo would turn his hand to anything commercially favourable, oddly enough, the majority of those international pearl dealers were French Jews, such as Léonard Rosenthal (1874-1955), Jacques Bienenfeld (1875-1933), and Solomon Pack (Date of birth unknown), who forged not only strong business relations with their Arab counterparts, but also strong enduring friendships in the Gulf and throughout Arabia; two prime examples of these friendships stand out: the first was between Abdulrahman Bin Hassan Algosaibi (1880-1976), the famed transnational, well-travelled pearl merchant based in Bahrain from Najd in central Arabia, and Albert Habib, the affable, fluent-in-Arabic, Paris-based pearl merchant and nephew of Léonard Rosenthal, who, like many others during the 1930s, struggled with bankruptcy owing to the Great Depression and for whom Algosaibi generously paid his medical bills following a post-crisis malaise brought about by the abrupt price plunge of natural pearls, causing him to lose most of his sizable fortune, demonstrating the loyalty and support of Algosaibi during hardship and adversity, the other notable friendship was between the international pearl dealer, the benevolent Muhammed-Ali Zainal Alireza (1884-1969) of Jeddah and David Bienenfeld (1893-1973), the younger brother of the Jacques mentioned above; Alireza earned the title "The King of Pearls" in the Arabian Gulf during the 1920s and later became known as "The King of Diamonds" in post-World War Two India, when the farsighted Alireza eschewed his pearl trade business altogether after the worldwide collapse of the pearl market in the mid-1930s, as a direct outcome of the Great Depression, impelling him to move aggressively into the diamond trade in India, where diamonds were first discovered thousands of years ago; this opportune move came after his permanent relocation from Paris to Bombay with his small family, just before the German blitzkrieg invasion of France in 1940; Bombay thereafter became his second home after his birthplace of Jeddah, where he lived until his death in 1969 and was laid to rest, it should be pointed out that in the interwar period, Alireza moderately dealt in cut diamonds and diamond jewellery alongside his main pearl business, and this involvement gave him some familiarity with the more stable diamond trade when compared to the recurrently volatile and unpredictable pearl market, unlike some of his pearl merchant peers who emerged from the Depression unscathed or with minimal losses and opted for comfortable retirement, he chose not to rest on his past pearl trade laurels, but instead, in less than a decade of his highly successful business transition, he became the principal diamond merchant in India and one of the foremost in the world in the 1950s, as for Alireza's preceding friendship with David Bienenfeld, who was forsaken and shunned by most of his friends, particularly those from the bourgeoisie French elite, after the loss of his and his family's wealth due to the Great Depression of 1929, except for his noble Muslim Arab religiously conscientious business partner and close friend Alireza, who stood by him and his family steadfastly until the end, Alireza was renowned in the Arabian Gulf for the earlier pearl-related sobriquet, for he was perceived as a bearer of good fortune by local pearling communities, as he, together with his other distinguished pearl merchants' French Jewish friends (typically the family firms of 'Léonard Rosenthal et Frères' [Léonard Rosenthal & Brothers] and the 'Bienenfeld Brothers', operating from offices in the same building on Rue La Fayette in Paris), was responsible for purchasing nearly a third of the per-annum pearl produce of the entire Gulf, spanning from Kuwait to Dubai, in the 1920s, while the remainder was either bought by Indian merchants from the Banyan community, who frequently visited the Gulf many decades before their Western counterparts, or sold directly by Gulf merchants in Bombay, dispelling the recently propagated and deliberately Western media-manufactured myth of imagined animosity between the followers of the two Abrahamic faiths, aiming to give credence to the ongoing destructive colonial legacy of the Sykes-Picot agreement in the modern Middle East, and also in some fringe, largely unrecognised polemical academic Western circles of the intractable ancient discord between predominantly Arab Muslim majority in Muslim-governed polities on one side, and particularly followers of other monotheistic religions on the other, these are Jews and Christians, as Jews, Muslim Arabs, Arab Christians, non-Arab Muslims, non-Arab Christians, and, in some cases, Mandaeans and Zoroastrians, with a special dispensation for Hindus and Buddhists, coexisted peacefully under the collective term of "Dhimmīs" (protected people) status Islamic jurisdiction, derived from the singular dhimmi (Arabic: ذمي) meaning "protected person" this jurisdiction was initially intended according to the Qur'anic text for the people of the covenant or the monotheistic people of the book, specifically Jews, Christians, and Mandaeans, even though these scriptures are Islamically deemed interpolated or corrupted sacred texts before including other religious groups in the aftermath of the century-long Arab Islamic conquests following the death of prophet Muhammad in 632 AD, considering this jurisdiction pervaded throughout the mediaeval Islamic world's golden age, in the 8, 9, and 10th centuries, and subsequent centuries, and even during the two tumultuous bloody centuries of the Crusades, stretching from Muslim Iberia all the way to Central Asia and later centuries in the Ottoman Empire, where tens of thousands of Spanish Jews fled the torturous persecution of the dreadful inquisition court under Catholic Spain after the fall of the only remaining Muslim stronghold of Granada in 1492, the last bastion of tolerance, culture, learning, and diversity in the Iberian Peninsula to the safety of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, as for the so-called friction between Muslims and Jews, it is a newfound phenomenon that began to rear its ugly head when British imperial designs for the Near Eastern legacy of the Ottoman Empire converged with Zionism, a late nineteenth-century Jewish nationalist ideology strongly influenced by emerging nationalist movements in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, and concurrent European settler colonial experiences involving mass displacement and extermination of native populations in the Americas, Africa, and Australia, leading to the portending Balfour Declaration of 1917 and culminating in the genocidal bloodstained establishment of the state of Israel thirty years later, in the years 1947 and 1948, forcibly displacing and ethnically cleansing the majority of the Palestinian Arab indigenous population and their rich deeply rooted and nuanced cultural heritage in its wake (known in the Arab world as "The Nakba," the catastrophe or calamity), with unwavering and unequivocal Anglo-French support at all levels and from the bulk of the Western bloc until the mid-1960s, when the steering helm of the Middle East was taken over by the new mighty American-led Western alliance thenceforth, creating an unduly artificial and ephemeral schism in the primordial cradle of civilisations and monotheism in the fertile crescent and Arabia amongst adherents of two of the three major Semitic monotheistic closely related Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam ever since, but other than the former significant foreign international pearl dealers, there were a number of local exceptions from the Arabian Peninsula during the heyday of pearls in the roaring twenties, represented by none other than the cosmopolitan and multilingual venerable Hijazi (from the Hijaz region of western Arabia) pearl dealer Muhammad-Ali Zainal Alireza, who intermittently resided between Paris and Bombay with his second English wife, Ruby Elsie Jackson (1919-1974), the mother of his three daughters, Aminah, Hafsa and Mariam, his only offspring, and a member of the prominent transnational Persianized Arab trading Alireza family of Jeddah, he was generally regarded for his extraordinary largesse and numerous philanthropic charitable works throughout the Arabian Peninsula and beyond, most notably, his invaluable progressive contributions to the eradication of pervasive illiteracy in Arabia and other regions of the Muslim world through the proliferation of formal modern education for both genders, encompassing the entire twelve-year curriculum, which has constituted his most enduring legacy; strikingly, Alireza established his first formal, comprehensive charitable school, named "Alfalah" (meaning "success" in Arabic), in Jeddah at the tender age of twenty-one in 1905, followed by a similar institution in the holy city of Mecca in 1911 and later complemented by a network of charitable schools for both sexes bearing the same name in Bombay, Dubai and Bahrain in the first three decades of the twentieth century; of these, only the schools in Jeddah and Mecca remain operational, while the others were closed in the 1950s after being superseded by government-funded formal educational institutions; Alireza was also the only merchant from Arabia to own both a flat on the world-famous Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris and a house in the exclusive Cleveland Square in London in the 1920s, and in addition to the aforementioned periodic visits of the Paris-based pearl tycoons, Bahrain was regularly visited by well-known international jewellers, such as the acclaimed French jewellers of the house of Cartier and their representatives, as well as representatives of other prestigious Western jewellery houses, including the American Tiffany & Co, who frequented the Gulf on pearl purchasing expeditions, with a special focus on Bahrain, the regional pearl trade centre, with its exceptionally well-stocked pearl oyster beds, the source of its unparalleled rare-hued coveted pearls, this is attributed by environmental experts to the flow of undersea freshwater springs found in the shallow waters of Bahrain, a phenomenon unique to this archipelago on the western shores of the Arabian Gulf, giving it its then-advanced economic position and international fame; however, of particular significance is that in the early twentieth century, natural pearls were priced internationally in French francs, as Paris was the undisputed international pearl trade centre during the golden age of pearls, when pearls were valued more than fourfold the price of diamonds in world markets owing to their rarity and natural shape, especially after the discovery of the South African diamond mines until the 1929 Wall Street stock exchange crash, precipitating a catastrophic, slow, remorseless onslaught of a global decade-long economic depression, coinciding with the introduction of the much cheaper Mikimoto Japanese cultured pearls and the discovery of oil in the Gulf, beginning with Bahrain in 1932, the Arabian Gulf centre of the pearl fishing industry, and followed in the next few years by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait, supplanting the quasi-feudal industry of pearl fishing's gruelling, low-paying vicious circle of servitude indentured labour, and the time-consuming, with prolonged health risks such as blindness and deafness, particularly for pearl divers, who often had lower life expectancy than the rest of the crew members due to their primitive, sparsely clad protective diving gear, suggesting it gave little protection from the months-long detrimental exposure to the sea salinity and hazardous predatory marine creatures, followed immediately by the Second World War, delivering the final death blow to the already severely weakened reeling pearl industry by the protracted Great Depression, as if the timing of these calamitous events had conspired in a preordained twist of fate, resulting in a disastrous collapse in pearl prices from which it would not recover for several decades, effectively bringing an end to the seasonally highly organised and regimented centuries-old pearl fishing industry with its ancient rich cultural traditions of the in-part husbandry industry of dhow boat shipbuilding and its various supplementary traditional crafts and folklore, featuring boat crew folk dances and the soulful, melancholic sea shanty bard songs transmitted orally from one generation to another, performed by deep-voiced, highly skilled, mostly illiterate singers in the Gulf, this once colossal industry, employing at its zenith in the 1920s around a third to half of the able-bodied male workforce across the Arabian Gulf, has since the late 1990s transformed into an occasional immensely financially rewarding experience resembling a solitary treasure-hunting pastime, on top of being an equally rewarding tourist attraction for some fortunate scuba diving tourists)

The two excerpts below are from two different sources; the first is slightly edited, from an archival file of the British colonial Arabian Gulf Residency in Bushehr, Persia (Iran), covering the period from the 1st to the 31st of March 1912, pertaining to the timeline of the visit of Jacques Cartier to Bahrain, a tiny section of the stupendously detailed file consisting of miscellaneous news reports received by the Gulf Residency (the 'Political Diary' of the Residency) relating to various areas of Persia (Iran) and the Arabian Gulf, for each month from November 1911 to December 1920. The reports were compiled by the Political Resident in the Arabian Gulf (Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Zachariah Cox) or, in his absence, by the Officiating Political Resident, the Deputy Political Resident, or the First Assistant Resident. (There are discrepancies between the diary of Jacques Cartier and the said report regarding the exact dates of Cartier's arrival and departure and the unveiling of his unrealised intended final destination on his second extended Arabian Gulf trip) while the second excerpt is a citation from the book "Cartier: Jewellers Extraordinary", by Hans Nadelhoffer, which is part of the author's description of Jaques Cartier's trips to the Orient, particularly to the Arabian Gulf, and his adoption of local business customs and practices during these trips.

The following two brief paragraphs provide a first-hand British archival summary of Jacques Cartier and his travel companions' trip to the Arabian Gulf in March 1912.

A young Frenchman, Monsieur Jacques Cartier, arrived with two companions, Monsieur Maurice Richard, also a Frenchman, and Mr. J. S. Sethna, a Parsi Indian by the Arab Steamer "Tynesider" on March 13th. They came to the Agency to get an order of exemption for the quarantine at Kuwait. When they learned that this was impossible, they determined to stay in Bahrain until the "Tynesider" returned from Basra. They were put up by Haji Mugbil Al-Thukair to whom they brought recommendations from Bombay Arabs. They left for Bombay on the return of the ship on 1st April.

Monsieur Cartier represents the firm of Cartier of Paris and London (175 New Bond Street) and his visit was professional. He cultivated the acquaintance of the local Arab merchants and is said to have brought pearls to the value of Rs. 25,000. He informed the Political Agent that he might return to Bahrain for the pearl season of 1913. Others say that his companion, Mr. Sethna previously dealt in pearls on his own account and will be sent to work for the firm here.

The edited citation below is from the book "Cartier: Jewellers Extraordinary" by Hans Nadelhoffer.

Jacques Cartier was the firm's special expert on pearls, and it was he who accompanied the sales assistant Maurice Richard on various journeys to the Arabian Gulf and to India. In accordance with Oriental custom, he would sit cross-legged in his negotiations with local traders, and he learned the customs, languages, and habits of the various nations that he visited. Two of his journeys were recorded in the form of a diary and various other reports.

www.google.com.bh/books/edition/Cartier/xnKpjh1gk

Breakwater Restaurant, Abu Dhabi

Nokia Lumia 1020, test shot #7

I took this photograph at now abandoned Breakwater Restaurant in Abu Dhabi, a once popular tourist spot with a great view of Corniche skyline. I'm guessing they are about to knock it down to build something 'shinier' on its ashes. Shame; I really liked this place. That's just how we do things here in Abu Dhabi.

Tech talk: this shot is a combination of 5-stop HDR (-2EV through +2EV) combined with digital blending for certain areas in this image. I snapped 3 handheld, bracketed exposures because I was without the tripod. Oloneo PhotoEngine's 'auto-align' feature worked really well and I was able to produce a clean looking HDR image at 7k horizontal resolution. Digital blending was needed to remove some nasty HDR ghosting on the branches of the palm trees. Final grade was done with Topaz ReStyle. There was no noise removal or sharpening performed on this image as I found it to be very clean and sharp.

EXIF: 1/100 sec, 1/1200 sec, 1/250 sec, f2.2, ISO 100, Daylight White Balance.

#lumia #lumia1020 #nokia #wp8 #windowsphone #microsoft #pureview #pureviewclub #abudhabi #bluehour #uae #mobilephotography #digitalblending

Dubai UAE

November 22, 2015 at 07:04PM

This is Barasti Bar. This bar is located at the beach, near Mina Siyahi Hotel in Dubai. This place is quite famous, I think, anyone who visited Dubai (and likes to party) would definitely know the place :) They have a restaurant and a grilled buffet as well and at night, there is a live DJ that plays mostly electronic music. Really nice place to just chill and hang out.

Gear: Canon 7D + Sigma 10mm f2.8

Settings: f3.5 | 1.5 | ISO 200

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This is the most recent full photo I could find of Bahrain Island taken by the NASA astronauts using a Hasselblad camera with a 250mm lense - wonderfully clear - you can see the reef area over to the East of Sitra - that is where quite a few photos of me were taken when we went out for an overnight trip in a small dhow with only sail power - and we slept on one of the sand islands - which had one small Barasti hut in the center, and from memory, the island was only about 50 meters wide - you can find a photo of me - and the tiny dhow - at: flickr.com/photos/knightrider/5664787/

Photo courtesy of NASA Johnson Space Center - if you want to go look for more, you can find them at: eol.jsc.nasa.gov

The image you are looking at here has the following ID at NASA: scanned_highres_STS078_STS078-748-11.JPG

If you want the full NASA info on this shot (taken 270 km above Earth) go to:

eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/photo.pl?UID=SSEOP&PWD...

www.visitabudhabi.ae/fr/what.to.do/art.and.culture/archit...

Scarce supply of timber and the harsh climate defined the rudimentary design and materials used to build the early dwellings in the emirate: a barasti made of palm fronds or houses made of sun-dried mud bricks with roofs made of palm tree leaves, not to mention the Bedouin tents.

Elements of both ventilation and privacy, however, became commonplace in the subsequent architectural forms in Abu Dhabi. The wind tower was a dominant feature amongst houses - as it was in most Middle Eastern and Persian states – due to the very hot and humid summer months. A wind-tower functions like a natural cooling system that allows hot and dense air to escape while trapping the cool air underneath. Furthermore almost every house in the early- to mid-20th century Abu Dhabi “has a courtyard, separate cooking section and meeting rooms.” Indeed most Arab houses – even today - are built with a courtyard where children can play as well as with elaborate men’s guest rooms, which are designed so that male visitors are unable to see or meet the female members of a family. “Exquisite wooden lattice work and embellished wooden entrances” likewise formed a distinct element of architecture in Abu Dhabi in the past.

The last quarter of the 20th century witnessed a rapid change in Abu Dhabi’s architectural form. Houses made of mud-bricks and palm fronds have been replaced by glass-covered high-rises with very modern or Western orientation. Nevertheless several landmarks, besides the heritage sites, have been trying, with considerable success, to preserve the unique Arab-Islamic architecture within the emirate. These include the Emirates Palace as well as the newly constructed Sheikh Zayed Bin SUltan Al Nahyan Mosque.

La ventilation et l’intimité ont ensuite trouvé leur place dans les formes architecturales d’Abu Dhabi. La tour des vents était une caractéristique dominante des maisons – tout comme dans la plupart des États du Moyen-Orient et de la Perse – en raison de la chaleur et de l’humidité des mois d’été. Une tour des vents fonctionne comme un système de refroidissement naturel permettant à l’air chaud et dense de s’échapper, tout en retenant l’air froid dessous. De plus, presque toutes les maisons du début et du milieu du XXe siècle à Abu Dhabi « ont une cour, une partie cuisine séparée et des salons ». En effet, la plupart des maisons arabes, aujourd’hui encore, sont construites avec une cour où les enfants peuvent s’amuser et incluent des salons élaborés réservés aux invités masculins, de façon à ce que ces derniers ne puissent pas voir ni rencontrer les femmes de la famille. « Un treillis finement ouvragé et de magnifiques entrées en bois » constituaient également un élément distinctif de l’architecture d’Abu Dhabi autrefois.

Durant le dernier quart du XXe siècle, cependant, on a assisté à une évolution rapide de la forme architecturale d’Abu Dhabi. Les maisons faites de briques crues et de feuilles de palmier ont été remplacées par des buildings recouverts de verre au style très moderne ou occidental. Outre les sites du patrimoine, plusieurs lieux ont essayé - et ont remarquablement réussi - de préserver l’architecture islamique arabe unique au sein de l’émirat. C’est le cas notamment de l’Emirates Palace et de la toute nouvelle Grande mosquée Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan.

www.visitabudhabi.ae/en/

Abu Dhabi, Trucial States (now UAE). Example of a local barasti built house. This was before any development and any proper roads. There were no cars, only four wheel vehicles were able to operate in the desert terrain.

[Note - the first car to arrive in Abu Dhabi was a VW Beetle, fitted with special 'balloon' tyres to enable it be driven in sand. The car was driven overland from Saudi Arabia and arrived early 1964 ]

Na pooch aalam-i-burghaste talai Aatish; Barasti aag jo baaran ki aarzoo karte!

Abu Dhabi, Trucial States (now UAE). In the days not long after oil had been discovered and virtually no development had taken place. Most of the houses were built of, or used barasti (Palm tree branches/fronds) in their construction.

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Yacht

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Carles Gutierrez, Maria Ortega, Georgia Jorba, Borja Jiménez

The police were there to guard PCL pier (Sheikh Khalifas boat was moored there)

Dubai, UAE

A example of a local barasti house, showing a wind tower.

[Note- Date palm-frond, or barasti, houses are usually built on a wooden frame made out of mangrove poles, split-palm trunk or any other available wood. The palm fronds are used in two forms, either as straight poles (approximately 1 m long) stripped of their leaves used for creating screens or with the leaves still on for roof thatch. The shape of palm-frond houses varies from square or rectangular flat-roofed buildings to triangular tent-like structures. Some of the barasti houses have a wind tower built of the same material, allowing the prevailing wind to be channelled down into the house, creating a simple form of air-conditioning. ]