Archive of documents gives invaluable glimpse into Ajman’s past

By recording details of the births, deaths and marriages of Emirati citizens of Ajman for almost four decades, Abdulghani Bahlooq has built up a vast collection of information about his home emirate.

Abdulghani Bahlooq with some of the old notebooks and records of Emirati poems in his collection. Pawan Singh / The National

AJMAN // With almost four decades of research behind him, Abdulghani Bahlooq, 63, has a vast collection of information about his home emirate.

The Emirati municipality worker has been chronicling details of the births, deaths and marriages of citizens since he was 24 years old.

But his records stretch back farther than that as Mr Bahlooq took up the practice from his cousins, who began collating records in Ajman in 1927.

“I inherited the process after the death of my cousins, who started listing the births, deaths and marriages of residents of the emirate, as well as travel dates of sheikhs.

“I also retain many old documents that contain data and information that is not recorded in official bodies,” he said.

He also has data about residents’ spending habits in days gone by, taken from a local shop’s financial reports.

“My cousin, who was the owner of the shop, used to write down in a notebook what citizens had bought and how much debt they had to pay,” Mr Bahlooq said.

His cousins had recorded the dates of birth and deaths using the Islamic lunar calendar, so when he inherited the records he began converting them into the solar Gregorian calendar.

He did this because grandchildren had approached him wanting to know details of their grandparents’ lives based on the solar calendar system.

On top of his glimpse history of Ajman, he has also built up a collection of traditional poetry.

His notebook contains the only written records of spoken-word poems by Emirati poets such as Rashid Al Khadir.

“My cousins in the 20th century also used to sit with Ajman’s poets and write down their poems with the poets’ names to protect them from extinction,” he said.

“They kept some papers of poetry written by its poets with them.

“I continued this path after them, and I wrote in my own hand 120 poems from Al Khadir, a famous Emirati poet from Ajman, before publishing them in his poetry collections.”

He said that his oldest son would eventually be given the honour of maintaining and updating these old documents.

“If my son is too busy due to his medical studies, then maybe I will give these documents to the Ajman Museum to maintain them.”

Ali Al Matrooshi, a consultant in heritage for the Ajman Tourism Development Department, said that these fascinating documents provided an insight into the lives, finances and social practices of yesteryear.

Mr Al Matrooshi, an author and lecturer in history, genealogy and folklore, said Mr Bahlooq’s documents were invaluable to helping him research his book, History of Traditional Education in the City of Ajman Since the Beginning of the 20th Century Until the Early 1970s.

“In this book, I wrote about the education and teachers. To write the biography of each Emirati teacher I used these documents to find out their dates of death,” he said.

Saeef Al Shamsi, 73, a retired government worker who was a poet and friend of Al Khadir, said: “It is very important to preserve poems of Al Khadir and other ancient Emirati poets because it’s the heritage of the country.”

He added that even though Al Khadir – who died in 1980 – was uneducated and had no knowledge of Arabic grammar, he had written his poetry in both the local vernacular and classical Arabic.

Another Emirati poet, Rashid Al Asri, 73, who used to work as a captain with the Ministry of Interior, said that Al Khadir was one of the best poets in the emirate.

“The thing that made him unique among poets was that his distinctive poetries used terms that preceded his era,” he said.

Mona Abdullah Abdul Hadi, a senior specialist at Abu Dhabi National Archive, said it was essential to preserve such data and poetry because there would be no other record otherwise as it is from a time before official demographic statistical databasing began.

Mr Bahlooq’s efforts go hand-in-hand with the Wathiqati initiative by the Hamdan bin Mohammed Heritage Centre in Dubai that aims to preserve historical UAE documents and has so far collected about 2,000 official and unofficial items.