It was a historic and unprecedented agreement. After 18 months of intense negotiations, representatives of the governments of the UAE and France finally agreed the deal to create Louvre Abu Dhabi. It would be the first time the world’s most illustrious museum brand had shared its name, introducing a vision of Abu Dhabi as a capital of culture to rival other world-class modern cities.
At the time, the critics were loud and united in their scepticism but academics and commentators who have studied this region more closely are now telling a very different story about how global cultures can be understood, assimilated and transformed.
Seven years ago, Jean-Robert Pitte offered a personal and shocking summation of the general feeling and reaction in France to the Louvre Abu Dhabi agreement. “Can we really bring culture to camel riders and carpet sellers?” the then president of the University of Paris-Sorbonne opined.
In a statement made at the time, Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, made no secret of the thinking behind the decision to build a cluster of world-class cultural institutions on Saadiyat, the “island of happiness”.
“In all the studies we have undertaken, culture has been shown to be a strong driver of the kind of tourism Abu Dhabi has identified as its primary market: upscale, high-repeat visitation”.
Thanks to the bona fides of the world’s great museum brands, the wow-factor provided by its most feted architects and the pulling power of an unprecedented cluster of new institutions, Saadiyat Island would not only establish Abu Dhabi as a cosmopolitan metropolis, it would also become the cultural capital of a region whose historic cultural centres had traditionally been located in Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus.
By persuading one of the world’s most august cultural institutions to establish an unprecedented partnership with the UAE, Abu Dhabi had embarked on a cultural strategy that had already proven itself with the success of the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
In spite of the many positive precedents, there were critics. For Zvika Kreiger writing in Newsweek and for many of his interviewees, two fundamental questions lay at the heart of Abu Dhabi's decision: "Can culture be bought? And who is really enriched by the process?"
While Kreiger was scrupulous in including the full spectrum of local and international opinion in his feature, Buying Culture [Kreiger's website], the inferences the article drew were clear.
Whereas the opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao had been recognised by critics, academicians and the wider public alike as a game-changing act of cultural genius, Abu Dhabi’s new cultural project was not only the act of a “glittering desert oasis that bears far more resemblance to Las Vegas than to Florence”, it was seen by many in both Europe and parts of the wider Arab world as morally dubious and distastefully nouveau riche.
Kreiger quoted the London-based Saudi columnist Abeer Mishkhas, who "lamented the fact that Abu Dhabi was 'buying the souls' of others rather than building its own identity", and the Egyptian commentator Youssef Ibrahim, writing in The New York Sun: "Even the fabulously oil-rich cannot buy that yearning of the mind and soul called culture with a fistful of dollars."
With no heritage of its own Abu Dhabi, so the popular narrative went, a country that had “gone from barren desert to glitzy shopping haven in the space of 30 years”, would now simply buy a place at culture’s top table by using its petrodollars to import foreign and culturally alien institutions, values and objects from the West.
In 2010, Nicolai Ouroussoff, The New York Times architecture critic, reiterated this view, expressing his concern that "what is being touted as a society-wide embrace of global culture will end up being just another example of cultural colonialism".
Now however, there is a growing sense that there is something more to the Arabian Gulf’s cultural turn than cynical strategic planning and an abundance of cash, a tectonic shift that is not only beginning to attract the West’s attention, but which also offers something new to those who are prepared to listen.
The message, according to academics such as Trinidad Rico, an anthropologist at University College London Qatar, and the museum specialist Karen Exell, is one of a nuanced approach to cultural heritage that involves careful and constant negotiation between the the one-size-fits-all universalism espoused by western institutions such as Unesco and a complex system of values and beliefs that operate at the religious, national, emirate-wide and even tribal level.
“If we put all of our effort into trying to distinguish global versus local movements, however, we will fail,” Rico says. “We don’t want to be Orientalist in this perspective, we don’t want to force this region into being distinct from the West. We will find things that make it distinct from the West but that’s not necessarily how the region sees itself.
“The region has its own ability to decide when it is convenient to be western and when it is convenient to be local and how to marry the two together in a way that is actually coherent and works for them. It doesn’t need to be coherent for the outside. They are the producers and they are also the audience that matters.”
Rico and Exell are the editors and part authors of Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses and Practices (Ashgate, 2014 [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk]), a book that seeks to understand the region's cultural heritage from the inside out. It's a perspective Rico describes as both critical and post-colonial.
“What we wanted to do was to put the book out there as something that might potentially influence how we interpret heritage as it operates in the Arabian Peninsula, while acknowledging the ideological and spiritual context that frames heritage concerns here.”
For Rico, one of the keys to such an approach is the avoidance of what she sees as an outside-in, Islamophobic agenda that defines much of the media’s coverage of heritage issues in the region, a narrative that implicitly associates Islam with acts of cultural vandalism.
“The case of the recent developments in Mecca is the perfect example of this,” Rico explains. “It’s an act of finger-pointing that suggests people aren’t civilised enough to understand their own heritage. It says: ‘How can they not understand and value their own culture? How can they not get it?’”
Although the book considers case studies from across the Arabian Peninsula including Qatar, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula includes three chapters on the UAE written by the cultural consultants Eric Langham and Darren Barker, the historian Victoria Penziner Hightower and Sarina Wakefield, an academic, that provide a multidisciplinary picture of the different levels cultural heritage operates at within contemporary Emirati culture and society.
As the Zayed University anthropologist Jane Bristol-Rhys says: “The contributors capture precisely that which is different about heritage in the UAE. It is not about the past; it is about the present and the future. Emirati heritage is being created now and those of us working in the UAE appreciate just how dynamic and often politically charged the process of creation can be.”
Although Bristol-Rhys disagrees with many of Rico and Exell’s statements about the Orientalist and colonial dynamic that can be associated with the importation of western cultural practices, institutions and notions of heritage, all three are engaged in a similar academic endeavour, to prepare younger generations of Emiratis and Qataris for the new cultural ecosystems their governments have invested so much in trying to create.
As well as publishing research into the changing attitudes of different generations of Emirati women and the experience of migrant workers in Abu Dhabi, Bristol-Rhys has also established courses in Emirati Studies and Museum Studies at Abu Dhabi’s national Zayed University, with the express intention of preparing her students for careers in the UAE’s new museums.
“Do Emiratis see what’s going on as an imposition? In 2004-2005, I had students doing research into Emirati reactions to the announcement of Saadiyat,” the anthropologist explains.
“They were interviewing their relatives and people in the malls and [at first] there was a [negative] reaction, but that soon went away. and for many Emiratis, at least the generation I’m teaching, it’s seen as a huge job opportunity. This is a niche job market, particularly for Emirati women, and it’s seen as a clean safe place for them to work.”
In keeping with Exell and Rico’s insistence on understanding the cultural heritage of the region from the inside out, Bristol-Rhys also insists on a more nuanced analysis of the Emirati understanding of both culture and heritage.
“Saadiyat Island is a cultural experiment with a big ‘C’, but there’s culture with a little ‘c’ as well.
“If you think about cultural heritage as the things that are in your culture, that have been in your culture for some time and that you are bringing forward, then one way to think about heritage is as cultural competency,” Bristol-Rhys explains.
“If you are an Emirati you should know enough about your cultural heritage to be perceived by others as being culturally competent. You know how to behave in a majilis, you know who to greet and in which order, who do you shake hands with and who do you touch noses with. For women, it’s the same, but there’s also an emphasis on how you make gahwa, how you serve it, the dates that you serve with it, your conversation.”
For Barker and Langham, the founders of the London-based heritage consultancy that bears their names, there is a direct link between these two notions of culture because, in the emirate of Abu Dhabi at least, “heritage is very much embedded in everyday life and is inclusive, dynamic, participatory and often highly political”.
Basing their findings on audience research and an etymological analysis of the difference between the meanings of the English and Arabic words for culture, thaqafa, and heritage, turath, Barker and Langham conclude that: “The perception of what constitutes heritage is more fluid in the UAE than we have encountered in Europe. While heritage in the West is often perceived as the celebration of moments of a historical or monumental past, heritage in the UAE is more likely to be regarded as part of the experience of now.”
For Barker and Langham, not only does this view of heritage explain why more didactic museum exhibits sometimes fail to capture and convey the nation’s heritage in ways that are satisfactory to local audiences, but it also explains the popularity of activities such as camel racing in the UAE as opposed to folk dances such as tahtib in Egypt and dubkeh in the Levant.
The lessons that Barker and Langham take from their analysis is that for exhibitions and museums to be a success with Emirati audiences, they need to “fuse oral literature, songs and performing and sensory arts to create a more experiential media palette”.
If Barker and Langham’s research has shown the ways in which notions of cultural heritage not only differ between Arabic and English-speaking audiences but between different parts of the Arab world, Victoria Penziner Hightower’s work on the history and representation of pearling shows how these differences in heritage and culture are used by each of the UAE’s seven emirates to express their very different histories and identities.
“Just as we see unity and diversity within the UAE’s political system, so we see that within the national narrative,” the historian tells me.
“In the absence of UAE-wide heritage organisations, each of the individual emirates has worked really hard to create their own story.”
For Hightower, these emirate-level narratives find their best expression in the UAE’s various heritage villages and a generation of museums, such as Al Ain National Museum, that have now become museum pieces in their own right.
“That creates the idea that there are certain plot points in the UAE’s heritage story that everyone can agree on, but that each of the emirates experienced those plot points very differently. The bedouin are very important in Abu Dhabi, but in Sharjah and Dubai, trading is more important.”
As Hightower writes, this “independent construction of heritage narratives” demonstrates why federation has been so successful in the UAE. Not only has it provided each of the emirates with a “way to assert their independent past” but it has done so in a way that “does not disrupt the federal historical vision”.
Hightower’s research not only explores the role of heritage in the construction of emirate-level identities, it also sheds light on the roles played by museums in the construction of a sense of citizenship among Emiratis. As such, the lessons learned from local museums have a direct bearing on the thinking behind the role of the very different museums that are planned for the cultural district on Saadiyat.
“It might be a naive way to think about it, but I do not think that these projects would be supported if they were not of value to local citizens and if you deride the new museums simply as projects for foreign consumption, I think you miss the deeper conversations that are taking place,” Hightower says.
“The rhetoric that’s woven around them is about creating a new type of citizen, one who not only has a firm sense of self, of who they are as Emiratis, but who is also a global citizen capable of engaging in discussions internationally as well.”
For Jane Bristol-Rhys, this sense of cosmopolitanism and hybridity, between the local and the global, the present and the past, should not only inform the discussions that surround the development of the new museums on Saadiyat, but sit at the very heart of contemporary debates about what it means to be an Emirati.
“Abu Dhabi is obviously not afraid of globalisation, but Abu Dhabi wants globalisation on its terms and understandably so. Is that distinct from nation-building? I don’t think so, I think that’s very much a part of nation-building. Just as you are taught as a child to take pride in your heritage, this is something that all Emiratis and future generations will be able to be remarkably proud of.”
Nick Leech is a features writer at The National.