2. The Oil Age Arrives

F

rom the nostalgic perspective of the khaleeji— the Gulf Arab

citizen— the pre- oil days were a kind of dreamtime. Countless

generations had lived under the same daily rhythms. Human

contacts were few, and they arrived upon plodding camel caravans or

aboard wooden sailing dhows. The Bedouins’ intricate social codes and

gallant hospitality, perfected and nurtured over centuries, were the out-

come of the sparseness of life and the dangers of the environment.

The Bedouin way of life was romanticized by Wilfred Thesiger, a wan-

dering Briton who accompanied a group of nomads across the drifting

wastes of the Empty Quarter in the 1950s. “To arrange three stones as a

fireplace on which to set a pot was the only architecture that many of

them required,” Thesiger wrote.

They lived in black tents in the desert, or in bare rooms devoid of fur-

nishings in the villages and towns. They had no taste nor inclination

for refinements. Most of them demanded only the bare necessities of

life, enough food and drink to keep them alive, clothes to cover their

nakedness, some form of shelter from the sun and wind, weapons, a few

pots, rugs, water- skins, and their saddlery. It was a life that produced

much that was noble, nothing that was gracious.^1