The Journey From the Old United Arab Emirates To The Modern United Arab Emirates

 The Journey From the Old United Arab Emirates To The Modern United Arab Emirates

The following program is from a national Educational Television Network 

An ET journal a look at the events and issues of the world.

 Today at the wheel of this car is the man torn between two worlds.

 He’s an Arab sheikh who was born in an old Arabia and will die in a new one." He worships Allah loves the desert and is one of the richest men in the world". His name is spy side rules a little kingdom in Arabia called Abu Dhabi 20,000 people in a stretch of sand and salt flats about half the size of Denmark to the tribesmen who follow him everywhere.

He's the undisputed boss his forefathers ruled the desert from the back of a camel. He rides it in a limousine but he remains as they were the center of tribal life. He's the man you serve the man you hunt with and the man you fight for above all. He's the man who leaves wherever Zayed goes his men go to those who don't travel with Zayed come out of the desert to greet him. They all owe their loyalty to him and they all expect rewards from him.

Besides tastes have not been influenced by his money. He likes the simple life to drive himself to go hunting and camping in the desert to be with his people. The Sheikh should be to follow the ways of the old party five or six years ago. The people of Abu Dhabi were sunk in the poverty of a thousand years or more. The 20th century had passed them by today their ruler's ID is one of Arabia's nouveau riche whose acquired overnight a fortune from oil his income could give five thousand dollars a year to every man woman and child in the place enough to make Zayed a multi-millionaire.

Superficially the old customs are Unchanged the tent goes up as it always did the food is prepared as simply as before sides natural pace is leisurely almost ended. Time is about the only thing that deserts been rich in until now time for coffee. The time for talk time made into ritual from century to century from morning till night. These girls will swing their hair these men will chant hour after hour in the desert.

There's no rush at least that's how it used to be but side with his money has begun to learn better in his palace in Abu Dhabi. Zayed had a brother his name was Shack wood and for more than 30 years he ruled Abu Dhabi in poverty and comparative peace jackboots rule was traditional. His word was law but he stayed close to his people anyone was free to talk to him any day in the modulus. The tribal council and as long as they had no money they were all relatively contented and then in the 1960s Abu Dhabi's struck it rich and its trouble started in a year or two.

People were demonstrating about work and wages that’d never had either in their lives before. The grumbles grew as the money mounted because shack wood was a miser all his life he'd been a poor man. Now that he was rich the skinflint habits stuck and like a man who's won first prize in a lottery. He found his money made few friends people began to say his brother's ID would be a better ruler. He had a mind more open to the world. He was generous, he was a man's man but Zayed had sworn to his mother years ago that he would never harm Shaq wood and for five more years he stayed loyal and the people waited the oil flowed. The money poured in the shack but wouldn't spend it. He was paralyzed by habit suspicion and downright fear. He knew the harsh old world of Arabia. He couldn't meet the challenge of the rich new one by 1966.

Just five years after oil had first been found in Abu Dhabi sheik foot swells destroyed him zees sent him into exile and took command himself ready to say farewell to the old Arabia but how was he even with a new ruler. The old light still goes on a timeless patient life dominated by the desert and the unforgiving Sun. Arabia is a land of terrible heat and terrible bareness attractive desert as big as Western Europe. Practically, untouched by the world until a few years ago to anybody who doesn't live there it? Seemed the land of mystery and romance full of the exotic promise of the Vale.

There are still people who think of it as the land of herrings and the Arabians in reality. it's a harsh and lonely place. Only water makes Arabia bearable, where there's water there's life. Waters important the d'Arabian oasis became the direct inspiration of the Muslim idea of heaven and no wonder when you come to the cool shade of the date gardens after the heat and emptiness of the desert. The Oasis seems literally heavenly a place of pure pleasure every well in the desert is like a port . The camel caravans crossed the desert-like ships cross the sea. There are no frontiers no thick's territory no land belonging to anyone.

There are just the wandering Bedouins and their camel has attached to each other as sailors and their ships bringing their trade to the desert. Marcus, it's a hard life in Arabia and it breeds hard men but it is perfectly adjusted now to the hard land it's lived in as it was in the days of Abraham the father of all the tribes. There’s still a solid biblical rhythm about it if you want to know what the loaves looked like in the Bible parable. Here they are baking in Arabia today just as they did 2,000 years ago on the shores of Ganodi.

The women of Arabia still hide behind the veil as Arabia itself has done for centuries around the coasts. The Arab boats are made today by hand and I and ancient equipment much as they were when the spice trade and the slave trade kept them busy from china to the shores of Africa. To the Arabs, the sea was a source of wealth that the barren land could not provide fishing, curling trading, smuggling, and especially piracy. Arab sailors in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf preyed on the ships of Europe in the Indian trade in the end that piracy was their downfall with a few naval sloops and some of the queerest treaties ever devised by man.

The British Empire imposed on two-thirds of Arabia's Coast the thin red line of peace but neither the Empire nor peace got much further than that the sea was all anybody cared about as long as that was safe. The land could rot and so it did in neglect and perpetual tribal warfare beyond the coast. Most of Arabia lay untouched until 20 years ago. God is great there is no God but God and Muhammad (S.A.W) is His Prophet. The religion of Arabia by tradition is as forbidding as the land. It’s nearly 14 centuries since Arabia was the birthplace of Islam but it's still the home of the most devoted of all the followers of Muhammad (S.A.W).

Islam means submission to the will of God in the desert there isn't much. you can do but submit and pray for God's mercy submission makes everyone equal a ruler like Zayed is no different from other men in the sight of God. He submits like them and wherever he is he prays like them and with them to William and Hamidah. Hello but assalamualaikum. A little law assalamualaikum the Prophet decreed that the faithful must pray five times a day from dawn to dusk. You can pray together or alone with a priest or without one but your submission to God is complete you're his slave and you can count on your fingers like a rosary in 99 different ways. May God be praised may God be praised may God be praised

Oil has ended the centuries of Arabian isolation. oil means my it's worth nearly six thousand million dollars a year around the Persian Gulf Modo Dolan most of the Arabian oil fields have been in production for less than twenty years. Their wealth is cracking the old life of Arabia wide open to most of us. Oil may be just the stuff that drives the car to Arabia. It’s a revolution there isn't a thing it leaves untouched. It makes the desert rich it brings the prospectors of the lawyers and the mapmakers to divide it for the first time in history. Oil brings soldiers to enforce peace inside Arabia frontiers need soldiers to patrol prospectors need soldiers to protect. So the tribesmen who once fought each other and raided the ships and commerce of the world are paid and trained as soldiers to maintain the new law. 

The poachers of a thousand years have been turned in a generation into gamekeepers men are you, sir, .so Pancho hotels are to answer 245 Sat 2 4 or 5 money begins to make. Its mark everywhere Kena the Sheikh gets millions the soldier only a scrap but it buys a new life. Suppose a little to do for a new chain one toad on his hunting trip side chases the desert game with a string of Falcons as long as his purse 20 years ago. He'd probably have gone hunting on foot with only a few birds to help him. Now he takes anything up to a hundred each of sides followers has a falcon to look after they train them stroke them talk to them .practically sleep with that like racehorses they're the pampered darlings of a rich man's camp like racehorses. They cost big money the good bird will fetch six hundred dollars or more imported from Syria or Iraq. It would sell much oil money in Arabia. Now the price is rising every year sure sure sure sure sure sure sure but nothing escapes the touch of money.

 Money changes all relationships when Zayed visits his neighbors now the traditional feast for a visitor becomes an offering to a wealthy benefactor instead unlike many of Arabia's oil millionaires. Zayed believes in sharing his wealth he told me once the oil business is like a lottery I might still be poor and my neighbors might be rich. So we ought to help each other he's already given away millions of sides hosted this feast was one of his poorest neighbors. But now the Zayed has touched his palm with silver wouldn't be quite so cool. I’m admitting you the feast is traditional goat’s meat chicken and rice and when the VIPs are finished the lesser men move in.

It’s always the custom in Arabia for the poor to eat at the rich man's table or rather officers rich man's floor when this lot has finished they'll still be more to come in descending order of rank and ascending order of hunger. It’s not the most elegant spectacle and it's not the choicest food but in a harsh and hungry land, any excuses welcome for a blowout. Especially when it's held for a man with money me one of us and built a Treblinka lumber to mama mother fuck Reese our Lincoln who just took my own and guilty’. Herbert to mama man and a llama dog gulp with us the old Arabia pulls at the heart. A world where Zayed was raised where he always likes to be around the campfire and the cooling of the desert night among his men listening to those endless Arab fairy tales that the audience knows as well as the story of love and beauty and the Thousand and One Night when the hunting silver and the caravans resting.

This is how they've passed the time for a thousand years.yeah Willie what did you hear Cerberus Herman this is old and sometimes beautiful Arabia where time is endless and patience more say but in the human time is money that pulls off the purse strings. This is the Arabia of the air-conditioned desert, the sanitized sterilized caravan of the 20th century with its international Welsh and international accents. You can play fool let's play darts for these people. the old Arabia hardly exists the mystery and the room and saw the harshness and the poverty it's all worn in the oil companies paper see you guys later today.

My Arabia is just another job the fairy tale is over and everyone now will live happily ever after in the dream world of the Arabian Nights. I have ever seen mating well old mother angle to Natesville Salma agha mark. I saw it but in the real world of Arabia tomorrow it's not so easy not even sides best friends can promise him a happy ending to his modern fairy tale that's only just begun .you can't reconcile the old life with a hundred million dollars a year as his brother Shepherd learned. You can't even choose whether you'll have the old life for the new God and the oil business have already chosen for you .from now on you can only try to ride the terrible tiger of the 20th century and wonder if it will not eat you in the end by the International Jets and the local runner buggies. 

The vultures of world commerce descend on sides little kick nip.they're perfectly decent vultures. Just bankers and businessmen doing their job a hundred million dollars a year is a nice piece of the export market to get your hands on. Especially when the place so obviously needs your help.10 years ago when I first came to Abu Dhabi. there was only one plane a week .now there's more than one a day and the old place can't quite cope with the beam everybody knows been quite some improvement here in four years. Since I’ve been here Natalie expects to see some floor shows when I get on into town with some striptease also no that's a little too much in Abba W town.

At first sight, there isn't much sign of change checkbooks static rule left the town nearly as squatted and it always had been and some of these people hardly know yet  what’s going to hit them .now sides ready to spend his millions the alley is too dark and dirty. The beggars wait patiently for the faithful Muslims to do their duties. The Prophet ordained and give them arms .this is what Arabs call the souk the bazaar or marketplace and in Abu Dhabi. It’s Bond Street and Fifth Avenue and the neighborhood supermarket all rolled into one for the Arabs of the desert .it got everything we mean by bright lights and the big city.

 it's not much of place but this is where 20,000 people are going to shares IDEs inheritance of hundred million a year .some of them have got a share in it .already they’ve bought big cars to go bumping over the unmade tracks, big lorries to cash in on the building boom and they've also learned to throw them away like all good modern men. There are four and five-floor office blocks instead of shanty and concrete instead of mud. In the modern world, our world is taking over. I remember for instance not long ago when there wasn't a single Bank is bedeviling. Now these buildings are all banks money in the bank means money to buy with and the beach' daba daba is piled with purchases.

Abu Dhabi was built on sandbanks it's never had a proper harbor but that didn't matter much when there was nothing, but a few dates to ship out and a few tins to ship in. now the whole modern world is dumped into the same air conditioners and deep freezers timberland steel cement and typewriters fans and filing cabinets. You name it and you’ll find it here sweeping in like a tidal wave on the old Arabian shore. We call these construction machines they’re also weapons of destruction. They can rip up an old road or knock down an old house even faster than they can build new ones and in Arabia. Now they can and do tear an old way of life to shreds before a new one has properly begun not that many Arabs object.

 In fact, most of them are only too glad to help with the destruction of their old way of life. They can see the vision of a better life in a bulldozer they want a piece of it. Someone who must try to strike a balance between building new and wrecking the old that someone is the ruler sighs. I’d know from experience but if he's too slow to destroy the old world. He may be removed like his brother Shepherd but if he tries to build the new world too quickly. He may destroy himself just as surely life aside has become a perpetual balancing act between the personal leadership of the past and the faceless impersonal administration of the future like Shaq. But he still holds his modulus every day .so that his people can meet him greet him talk to him and complain him in the traditional desert way. The return is unchanged the coffee is served time motion and people seem as leisurely as ever but behind the appearance of traditionally.

 The revolution is creeping in the Majlis doesn't last all morning anymore Zoid can only give his people an hour of his time and even that’s interrupted by the demands of the modern world facilities.

Let us offer black University welcome to the international businessman .welcome to the salesman to the experts to science and high finance may be, welcome to the con men too until his ID learns to pick them from the rest of the course. we all sit down together and of course, they're all equal east and west .the world and Arabia the courtesies of the old world mingling with the business of the new this. we go but it's the newcomers in business suits to get the places of honor at the side and not just because of Arab hospitality demands. They should be favored they're there because they represent power .the power to provide the people of Abu Dhabi with anything.

 Zayed can now afford to buy still the ritual goes on balancing the new with the old the first thing a visitor must do in Arabia is to learn patience. you can sit for hours in places like this and never do anything but ask after each other's health .all in Goodtime and all by the will of God never do today what you can put off till tomorrow never act if you could talk instead the tribesman with a problem comes desired to sort it out to everybody else. must wait for patience and still more patience but now there are a hundred million dollars of good hard cash burning a hole in patients every year that's business, but won't leave it may be the will of God that's given into a Batali .but it's the will of man and especially the will of Zhai. it has to decide what to do with it.

 Now five years after the oil began to flow epidemic of nothing but peace me of changes. Now Zayed has come to power with a plan to make Aberdare be the model state of Arabia with all the paraphernalia of development. in the first few months of his rule, he awarded seventy million dollars worth of contracts and he's out every day to spur on the men who are making him a brand-new kingdom. This will be going on the parchment a mile and the second stage would be done next spring or next summer whenever your highness besides. I would continue our no into the very deep water for the large craters. The lights kilometer people who are the difficulties of California neither Philip terminus definitely be a farm in water .the machines that come ashore on the beach are pounding the desert into new shapes.

 Men who descend from the airplanes are drafting a new world working as a circle. Yes, day-night it’s a world where time and opportunity have changed places yesterday. Time seemed endless and the opportunities few today time is short when the opportunities are infinite for fast me a mile which we have discussed a few in your office. When Miss Degree’s barline engineer was Zoid told me once he didn't know what would happen in 10 years' time. But he felt he must give everything to his people. Now because they'd had nothing for so long schools and hospitals. Wells and houses an artificial deepwater Harbor to replace the Abu Dhabi beach before lane highway and the water pipeline across the desert.

 An airport with a runway longer than London’s .this is just the location of it now you are approximately in this area here direction see are your highness and as we’re going down the road of course. it’ll change everything sides told me that - the first thing to go he said would be the Adams love for his camel .but lots of camel - a vc10 oh he would take very easily four or five big peas tears can't even remember how the dentists are? How long it was pilot minute? American beer of course to all of the DCCC it would take quite a move to one of the difficult things that we don’t know how many air cars will be coming in here. Your highs! and this is one of the things which you yourself will have to sighs how many airlines you’ll permit to come into our dummy and this will of course govern the number of aircraft at any one time.

 Really she decides to let it chooses act wish waters sometimes under these new imperatives. Zayed acts pretty hastily and harshly thank you via tiara .we look he dismissed this plan for a new Suki never daddy with scarcely a moment's thought no .but I’ll be on her small scale home. Yes, those show detailed plans. Yes gets bigger tournament. You still be a hospital welcome and emerged under what with all the UH neither what no never take it away and start again. so two months' work is demolished in a moment. he who pays the piper calls the tune in the courtyard of Zayed palace.

 The centuries slide back again a moment ago. Zayed was the modern oil tycoon aloof and decisive. Now he's back in the road of shake the universal uncle to his people the feudal lord with his followers in procession to the daily feast to the tribesmen of the desert. You stood bread and dates in the sand sides table is a revelation it's loaded with more food. Then many of them have ever seen and it really is a table and not just the floor the idea of a free meal for all sides’ followers is traditional and he rarely sits down with less than 50 men. But the forms and the food are new money talks here through waiters in black ties through plates and soup spoons and a whole new ritual of table manners to master like the newly rich in any part of the world.

The Arabs of Abu Dhabi are learning to keep up with the Joneses. Snobbery is the latest local base even good enough key these are our rulers but what's this you know. yes, see that's the door what's that and what's this well the fathers learn new manners .a few of their sons learn new tongues foreign languages and foreign teachers bring foreign ideas that's the ceiling .yes this is the plum tree he has a pencil. Good yes I do know there's a picture sitting well. Oh yeah startup yes that's the window huh that's very nice y'all got this. But the old ways are still the only ways for most of the radius children schools like. This where the boys learn the Holy QURAN by heart hasn't changed in a thousand years.

It’s still the only sort of school. Most kids ever see if they’re lucky enough to see a school at all .there is immense of the old Arabia was always a bit of an illusion in reality. The place was and still is full of desperate poverty and sickness. there wasn’t a single hospital in Abu Dhabi until a few years ago and doctors were hardly ever seen .now there's this American Mission Hospital overburdened overcrowded forced to compromise like everything in Arabia between modern standards and old habits. It’s something that we have not wanted to exist these patients leaning all together. but we’ve been working on it and we haven't come up with a good answer simply because we don’t have enough staff to watch all the doors. we lock the front door and they come in the back door or the side door. so we have gotten sort of used to it over the years. so that now we don't mind it much.

When they're all in there together it's their hard luck if they can’t have privacy. now the personal examination of the doctor and the little children often have diarrhea or fever colds and sores and abscesses such to take care of and then the local Arabs seem to head their share of accidents falling out of a palm tree or off of the camel. There seemed to serve dangerous and they fracture a limb or break a hip nothing amongst all of the people are suffering from. I am that's a run sort of not another from the youngest child to the oldest man with the ailment of Tripoli which is about 99% prevalent. here many of them are suffering from tuberculosis more and more we are detecting this disease as we go on with-you come on Heather come on come on. Heather tells him you need enough establish, were you huh Mike Beth Ninian tradition.

Still throws a veil around the women of Arabia that even the doctor can't quite penetrate his examinations. Here are probing in the dark when you're a doctor .doctor any Syrian eats you had it at the open Minoan wasn't Lee Watson, Oh women are the most conservative force of all. He secluded unchanging uneducated and fatalistic. They accept their lot meekly and they do their duty faithfully as the handmaidens and chattels of men. But for how much longer one even under the thorn bush. The doctor arrives with his medicine and every jabbed with a syringe becomes a sort of revolution.

Hey, Bride get did some of it may be still a bit like faith healing. no doctor's skill could have cured this man's tuberculosis. The most that medicine could do is to give him a sort of comfort on the way to death. but if the twentieth-century medicine doesn’t always work it does challenge that submission to the will of God that accepts death .whenever it likes to strike. So Islam itself comes under attack. God's will always seem more flexible when you can meet it with a millionaire's money of yonkers empty estimates forever Davi for the year 1967. the total revenue as estimated is 41million two hundred and 2080 dinars all are looking for the ruler the days are over.

 When he had so little money that nobody cared about how he spent it now? Zayed must have a budget and a British accountant to keep the books development expenditure is estimated at twenty-three million two hundred and seventy-five thousand six hundred and seventy-one dinars ah miss area. I thought you silly martyr every penny is another nail in the coffin of the old Arabia and maybe in the life of Zayed -do you know you haven't included the airport building here? The airmen are building your Lord building hasn't been tendered. it hasn't intended to but you this goes in the lamp centers spare girls in your lump sum of million down here well. when I think this included all the expenditure there are things like the police for instance where it’s impossible to get a true estimate .we to have to wait for the arrival and the of the new people to give us these estimates. I’ve put in a third of a million dinars for them to give them the authority to spend outside side’s office time.

 Still seems endless and patience still comes easily his people have given up their lives to Allah. What God wills they still accept but the signs of dissolution at all-around them like the leisurely old world’s cast-off furniture and the new office chairs that are waiting to take its place .as the officers grow the people seem to shrink. When Zayed was simply the leader of a tribe .these men could meet him every day .now he's the administrator of a modern state. he's forced to shut them out of his life they can only wait .while the world moves in a business suit his well it on fleet .even Zayed is a little less sure of himself we can ask the new questions and make new demands. but who can give him the answers?

You see his hands burn for this year of course. Something very approximate yet for next year’s head like it as precise as possible. but I'm hoping that the exercise in the coming year will give us the material for next year .but at the moment there is nothing to go on from there uncertainty about the new way of life died and his men go back to the desert as often as they can the deserts still home. The place they knew before they were reached and the only place they will really know until the day they die in the desert for a day a week or month. They can go back to their old and simpler ways to a genuine sense of comradeship that the modern world leaves no time for. there are no budgets and civil servants here no plans no figures no complications, no closed offers doors no even see the finish of you know to show my anthem. Then they will have a system we don't code there's the sky the heat the emptiness and the infinity of time that they've always understood out here. They can all be sure that themselves again.

They can relax and be men again or perhaps being only men .they can just be boys. even Zayed the ruler can let his hair down here and be one of the boys fighting a mock battle with his secretary on trips like this. the desert is an escape a recovery of innocence turns to Eden .but like all escapes it’s also an illusion the innocence is lost and will never be recaptured .because the old Arabia of isolation hardship of tribal war in which had flourished has-been swept into the world of last. the unknown land has been more than just discovered it's been uncovered in the past ten or twenty years and dragged naked into everybody's sight of course. This doesn't mean that the old Arabia has disappeared in the space of the last few years. It’s still a hard land that breeds hard people tough individuals like.

 Zayed and as men and some of them still fighting a rearguard action against the assaults of the modern world rival. What all the same at the end of the20th century? Brooks no defaulters herein Arabia one of the last of the lonely layers surrendering it sold in the form. Now on its people will have to face like the rest of us the infinite hopes possibilities and disillusionment of the modern Universal world. this has been any tea journal a weekly look at the events issues and people of the world .today, this is the national Educational Televisionuae United Arab emirates (country) oil .sheikh Zaid bin sultan Hannahan, Zayed bin sultan al Nahyan, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan.Abu Dhabi (city/town/village) Dubai (city/town/village) Arabia Arab Muhammad (founding figure) desert (geographical feature category) a camel (organism classification) USA Saudi Arabia (country) America Sharjah (city/town/village) Pakistan (country) India (country) Syria (country) Iran (country) Iraq (country) Kuwait (country)

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