Sunday 23 / August / 2026
The region has been in the international spotlight since the first Gulf war when Iraq invaded Kuwait. But now we are in the middle of another one and life continues as usual for GCC citizens.
A century ago when the desert sands were aimlessly blowing in the wind, nobody, but the so-called explorers, had any interest in the region. When oil started gushing out in plentiful, the natives started dancing with joy not knowing exactly what the wealth may mean to them. Perhaps it was the ignorance about the rest of the world or plain naivety that made Gulf Arabs think that they would be allowed to live in fabulous wealth without external interference.
Last week, I was sitting in a traditional souk, one of the few surviving marketplace still to retain its old charms, with an elderly man. He was silently tugging his beard looking blankly at the empty space.
He must have been well in his nineties but his brains, when he finally came out from his trance, was remarkably sharp. I asked him a question and when I was beginning to think the man was not in the same world I was, he blinked twice before speaking.
"Do you see that man over there?" He lifted his stick to point to a European coming out of a car.
I looked at the congested parking space to meet the blue eyes of a man who realised he had been singled out from the crowd. There was an apprehensive look on his face as he first looked at me then at the frail old man with a fierce expression on his wrinkled face. I think the stick unnerved him and he took a few uncertain steps forward, smiled nervously at us as if to seek reassurance. I did smile back and nodded my head in greeting but the old timer fixed a stern stare on him.
"I remember a man like him," the old man told me, his eyes following the European as he kept walking away from us," they came over in big vehicles carrying big machines and camped just outside our village."
It was more than sixty years ago, he said, when the Europeans first came to look for oil. He remembered when they polluted an important source of drinking water with "oil mud." The villagers were desperate and were forced to leave their homes in search of fresh water.
"We had to do it because our animals were dying of thirst, the date trees were drying and we had to walk for miles to get water just to survive," he explained further and then knocked the empty chair with his stick which such force that the furniture toppled over with a crashing sound.
That was it. The old man returned to his stance and stared at nothing in particular, completing ignoring me. I thought it was time to move on. The narrow streets of the beautiful marketplace were bustling with European tourists served by Indian traders. The souk itself was dwarfed by tall buildings where multinational companies had offices. I could not help noticing that I was one of the very few nationals walking in the streets. It was then I remembered the words of a British lawyer when I was a teenager, "it is not the Gulf your ancestors knew but what the explorers made it to be."
That sums it up with what is going on in the region now.
