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Sailing The Arab Dhow In A World Of FantasyBy Habeeb Salloum
After introductions, I asked the soft-spoken nakhuda to tell me about his seafaring life and if pearl-diving in dhows was continuing in our times. "Pearl-diving in dhows? Of course not! The youth today are spoiled! All they look for are the pleasures of life. It wasn't like this when I was young." Ubayd al-Muhayri the former dhow captain smiled. When I asked him if he yearned to sail the Arab dhows again, he seemed amused. "Sail again! I am 75 years old. Do you know that pearl-diving was a part of hell?" He continued, misty-eyed, "Yet, for me the old days are preferable. In those days, we did not worry about material wealth. We were content to live on dates and coffee."
Putting his hand over mine, he went on, "It was not like now! In my younger days, the father was the head of the household. Every member of the family obeyed him until he died. Today, the young men want to live in luxury and own fast cars. Fathers to them do not mean a thing. It's only the daughters who still think of their parents." As I bade Abdallah Jassim and the former nakhuda adieu, I thought of my fantasy to one-day sail on an Arab dhow. Ubayd al-MuEQ \O(h.)ayri had somewhat dampened my yearning to sail on these crafts, but not entirely. I had waited too many years to easily be stymied.
The years rolled by and now I found myself in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates' booming economic heart. Along the shores of its Creek, which divides the city into two parts there were moored hundreds of dhows loading and unloading goods but their sails and gear, had been replaced by motors and the other gadgets of our modern age. Alas! The days were gone when the sight of huge fleets of dhows, with their sails bending to the wind, covered the horizon of the Arabian Gulf. Today, one can see these ships only sailing for sport or for the pleasure of tourists.
That evening, my yearnings were to be fulfilled. As we boarded our decked-up tourist craft, anchored on the shore of Dubai Creek, I looked around. The dhow of the bygone years had been transformed into a tourist ship par excellence. Everything was spick-and-span from the white tablecloths and the clean uniforms of the crew to the varnished planks of the deck. It was apparent that the old had been overpowered by the new.
The passengers on the dhow, the majority European expatriates and tourists, seemed happy and content. None, I dare say, cared about the history of ships. Pleasure, not dhows and their history, was on their minds.
In two hours - to me it seemed minutes - as we neared the end of our journey, Akbar, our Indian waiter, bidding me adieu, smilingly enquired, "Did you enjoy the excursion?" "Of course! But it was not like one of Sindbad's journeys", I grinned. He looked at me strangely. Apparently he had no idea to what I was implying. To him, Sindbad and his tales were of no interest. He had come from India to work and make his fortune, then return home and enjoy the offerings of the 20th century. Unlike myself, he was living in reality. |
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"You
want to sail on an Arab dhow? You're lucky today! Talk to him!" Abdallah bin
Jassim, a Dubaian historian who manages the Saeed Al- Maktoum Museum Home,
pointed to an elderly man sitting beside me. "He was for years a nakhuda
(captain) of a pearl-diving dhow - the best skipper in the Arabian Gulf." A
distinguished-looking gentleman, made even more dignified by his flowing Arab
dress, Abdullah appeared to be proud of the former dhow skipper. 
A
tear came to his eye as he reminisced about his youthful years, "I was eight
years old, when my father first took me with him on a dhow. When I turned
fifteen, he took me down some 15 m (40 ft) to the bottom of the sea and taught
me how to find the pearl-carrying oysters in the deep. For a hundred days every
year we worked the oyster beds. Until I became a skipper of a dhow, it was a
harsh life but I was content."
From
the vast amount of adventure literature that I read in my youth, none impressed
me more than Alan Villier's book, Sons of Sinbad, in which he describes
his journey on an Arab dhow from the Arabian Gulf to the East African coast.
Sailing in his footsteps and capturing a bit of the ancient Arab spirit of
adventure became one of my burning ambitious. For years I dreamt that one-day I
would sail on one of these ships across the Arabian sea to exotic lands.
Like
most of the visitors who yearn to sail in these once cherished crafts, I knew
time had passed me by. Yet, I still wanted to taste the pleasure of travelling
the seas on a dhow even if it had to be tourist style.
The
waves of Dubai Creek gently lapped and rhythmically swayed the ship, as, with
Arabic music in the background, we feasted on the tasty Arab food - much
different than the Spartan food of dates and rice described by Villiers in
The Sons of Sinbad. As the cool breezes soothed our bodies, we smoothly
moved along the Creek past dhows loading and unloading goods, as they have done
for centuries. The purr of the motors and the gentle wind lulled us as we sailed
in the shadows of laminated sky-reaching edifices, which would have been
considered magical structures in Sindbad the Sailor's time.
Sated,
I sat back and fantasized about the past while watching an oriental dancer
entrancing the passengers. The heritage and atmosphere of the dhow took me back
to the era of The Arabian Nights and Sindbad the Sailor in whose days
dhows, like ours, brought back from distant lands spices, poetry and romance. On
such a ship Sindbad could very well have dreamed up the unreality and
hallucination of his tales.
