Dubai is routinely described as a city with no history, usually by people who have spent four days in it and never crossed the water. The history is about two kilometres from the Burj Khalifa, it is largely intact, and the most revealing thing about it is how nearly it was lost — twice, on purpose, by decisions taken in living memory.
The neighbourhood that survived by lobbying
Al Fahidi, long known as Bastakiya, was built from the 1890s, largely by Persian merchants from the southern Iranian town of Bastak, who gave it its name. It ran to around sixty houses on lanes narrow enough to hold shade, with wind towers rising above them to pull air down into the rooms.
Half of it was demolished during the 1980s for office development. In 1989 Dubai Municipality planned to clear the rest. It survives because a British architect living there, Rayner Otter, mounted a campaign that reached Prince Charles during a visit to Dubai, after which the demolition was cancelled.
In 2005 the municipality began a restoration programme and renamed the district the Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood. It now holds galleries, small museums, cafés and the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding, established in 1998 under the motto Open Doors. Open Minds., which runs Emirati cultural meals, Ramadan iftars, heritage tours and Gulf-dialect Arabic classes from a wind-tower house.
Take the meal. It is the only place in the city where the explicit purpose of the room is for visitors to ask Emiratis anything they like, and in a country where most visitors never have a conversation with a citizen, that is not a small thing.
Source: Phil6007, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Creek, and the loan that made the city
Khor Dubai is a fourteen-kilometre natural seawater inlet, and the town grew around it from about 1833 — Bastakiya on one bank, Deira on the other, Shindagha at the mouth, with boatyards, pearl divers, fishermen and traders in between.
By the 1950s it was silting up, and a silting creek meant the end of the re-export trade the town lived on. A 1955 feasibility study by the British engineers William Halcrow and Partners recommended cutting a channel sixty metres wide and nine hundred and fourteen metres long from the bend of the Creek to the sea, with a groyne and protective walls.
The dredging began in 1959 under Sheikh Rashid. It cost around £388,000, and Dubai did not have it. The money was raised by subscription from the merchant community as a ten-year loan, repaid out of customs revenues — the deepened creek generating the trade that paid for the deepening.
That is the founding act of modern Dubai, and it happened seven years before oil was found. Port Rashid opened in 1972.
The nomination Dubai withdrew
In January 2012 the Creek was submitted to UNESCO’s tentative World Heritage list under three criteria, as a historic port settlement.
On 30 June 2018, at the World Heritage Committee’s forty-second session in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates withdrew the nomination. Dubai Municipality’s director-general gave the reason as certain developments coming up in the area.
It is the most candid statement any Gulf city has made about the trade-off it is running, and it was made in public at an international meeting. Dubai looked at a World Heritage inscription and the development rights along its own waterfront, and chose the second. Whatever one thinks of that, it was not a decision taken quietly.
Al Shindagha
The response, if there is one, sits at the mouth of the Creek. Al Shindagha Museum opened on 6 March 2023 across three hundred and ten thousand square metres, with twenty-two pavilions and eighty historic houses covering Emirati life from the 1800s onward — the largest heritage project in the city by a wide margin.
Its sections include Dubai Creek — Birth of a City, the Perfume House, and the Al Maktoum residence. Current pavilions cover living off the sea and land, creativity and wellbeing, governance and society, and a children’s pavilion. It opens at ten and closes at eight, with last entry at seven.
It is the correct place to go immediately after crossing on an abra, because it explains the water you have just crossed.
Source: Guilhem Vellut, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
What the Creek was actually for
Pearls. By around 1915, the British colonial gazetteer of the Gulf recorded pearling as the principal or only source of wealth among the residents of the Arabian side. Every coastal town on this shore ran on it.
It ended within a generation. Overfishing began to bite from the early 1900s. Japanese cultured pearls arrived from 1916 and destroyed the price. The crash of 1929 finished the market, and it never recovered.
There is a thirty-year gap between the collapse of the pearl trade and the discovery of oil, and that gap is the most important thing about this city and the least discussed. Dubai spent those decades as a small, poor, extremely well-run trading port that had lost its only industry — and responded by dredging its creek on borrowed money to become somebody else’s port.
The Fateh field was discovered in 1966, roughly a hundred and twenty kilometres offshore. The first barrel was shipped on 22 September 1969. By then the harbour was already deep.
Two buildings worth crossing for
The Grand Mosque in Bur Dubai began as a Qur’anic school in 1900, was replaced on the same site in 1960 and rebuilt in 1998. Its minaret rises seventy metres, it holds twelve hundred worshippers, and it carries forty-five small domes and nine larger ones.
And three hundred metres away, above the shops of the Bur Dubai old souk, is a temple quarter. In 1958 Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum permitted a Hindu temple on the first floor there; the complex holds a Shiva mandir, a Krishna mandir and a gurudwara, and it has operated continuously since.
A mosque from 1900 and a Hindu temple licensed in 1958, three minutes apart, in a trading port that needed both communities. That is the actual history of this city, and it is not in any of the towers.
Read also: Dubai without the superlatives
How to spend the afternoon
Start at Al Fahidi in the late afternoon when the lanes are shaded. Cross the Creek by abra — the crossing takes a few minutes and costs almost nothing. Walk the souks in Deira. Come back and finish at Al Shindagha.
Four hours, on foot and by boat, in a city that everyone else experiences through a car window at eighty kilometres an hour.
Featured Image Source: Delta.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
