Editorial

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

Why Abu Dhabi Has So Much Empty Space

The wide roads and open blocks of the capital look like the luxury of a place with land to spare. They are closer to the opposite — a set of deliberate decisions about planning, land and time, made on an island that was never as limitless as it feels.

The easy explanation is desert plus oil money: room to spread and the means to spread into it. But space is not what a city has — it is what a city decides to do with what it has. Abu Dhabi's emptiness turns out to be almost entirely decided: a modernist grid, a founder who wanted straight roads so the capital could be reached quickly, a land system with no yearly tax and no deadline, a vast greening programme. The room was the plan.

Coffee Began in Yemen

The coffee plant is Ethiopian. But the drink — roasted, brewed, and made the center of a culture — is Yemeni.

Before the espresso machine, before the café, a Sufi in Yemen brewed a bean to stay awake for God. This is the story of how coffee became coffee — from the prayer lodges of the Shadhili order to the Red Sea port of Mocha that named a drink, and finally to the shape the Gulf poured all of it into: the dallah on the one-dirham coin.

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

Why Liwa Is Red

The red of the world's tallest dunes isn't a fact about the sand — it's a record of everywhere the sand has been. A drowned sea, an ice-age wind and a buried green Arabia, all pressed into a single colour.

Everyone knows why Liwa is red: iron in the sand. It's true the way "the Gulf is white to reflect heat" is true — the first sentence of a much longer story. The red is a microscopically thin coat of rust on grains of clear quartz, and where those grains came from is almost impossible to picture from the dunes: the floor of a sea that no longer exists, lifted grain by grain and stacked three hundred metres high.

Kuwait City · Kuwait

Sadu Weaving: The Geometry of Bedouin Textiles

The geometry the Bedouin wove, and the women who carried it in memory because nothing was written down.

On a loom you stake into the sand, Bedouin women wove the interior world of the Gulf — tents, dividers, camel trappings — and threaded through the wool a geometry that carried tribe, family and meaning. A story of Sadu: the patterns and their names, the women who transmitted them without a single written word, and the quiet work of keeping the craft alive.

Baghdad · Iraq

The City With No Ruins: What Is Left of Abbasid Baghdad

A caliph drew his capital in fire, the Mongols erased it, and a video game rebuilt it out of Isfahan and Samarkand. What actually survives of Abbasid Baghdad, where it is, and who else has tried to put it back.

Climb a viewpoint in Assassin's Creed Mirage and you see the Round City whole — double walls, four gates, the green dome at the centre. Nobody has ever seen that view. No excavated remains have been securely identified as any of it. This is what is actually left of ninth-century Baghdad, where you would have to go to stand in it, and why Ubisoft was the second team to rebuild a city that no longer exists.

Baghdad

The Real Jinn: How the Middle East Imagined Them Before Disney

Seven kings, one for each day of the week. A portrait of Fever. Two spirits keeping a bathhouse warm. What the manuscripts actually show — and what the lamp replaced.

Folio 35v of a manuscript in Oxford shows the public baths at Tiberias in cutaway. Upstairs, people washing. Downstairs, two jinn tending the furnace, mid-conversation. It is not what most of the world expects — and it is much closer to what the unseen was actually understood to be for. A long read across twelve centuries of manuscripts, fieldwork, survey data and horror cinema.

Manama · Bahrain

The Sea That Came Before the Oil: The History of the Pearl

Eight thousand years before the first barrel, the Gulf had already built a global economy — out of an oyster, a held breath, and a rope.

Before oil, the Arabian Gulf ran on the pearl: a global luxury trade that raised its cities from the sand, drew fortunes and real suffering in equal measure, and then vanished almost overnight. The story of the industry that made the modern Gulf — and the quiet way it is coming back.

Marrakech · Morocco

Why Desert Architecture Loves Earth Tones

In the deserts of North Africa and Arabia, ochre and terracotta were never a palette choice — they were what the wall was made of.

In most cities, colour is something you apply. In the old desert towns it was something you excavated — the red of Marrakech, the brown of Shibam and the gold of Diriyah all pulled straight from the ground underfoot. From iron-oxide chemistry to Hassan Fathy to the rammed-earth revival in Saudi Arabia, this is the story of a colour that outlived the place it came from.

Sharjah · United Arab Emirates

Sharjah Art Museum: Who Gets to Draw the Arab World

Inside one of the Gulf's first dedicated art museums, the Western Orientalist pictures that once framed the East hang under the collection of the ruler who spent his life writing back against them

In one Sharjah gallery hang the Western pictures that once framed the East — assembled by the ruler who spent his life contesting them. A long read on who controls the image of a place.

Dubai · United Arab Emirates

Why Gulf Cities Are So White

The dazzling white of Gulf cities looks like simple physics — sunlight, reflected. The real story runs through coral, lime, faith, oil and the way traditions acquire their reasons after the fact.

Everyone knows why Gulf cities are white: white reflects the sun. It isn't wrong — it's just one strand of a much thicker rope. Follow it back through coral walls and lime skins, a sustainability code that never mentions colour, and a desert that was never really dark and the tidy explanation starts to look like something we tell ourselves afterward.

Dubai · United Arab Emirates

Hatta: The Valley That Changed Hands

Ninety minutes from Dubai, a mountain town where the same water has shaped human settlement for four thousand years.

Most guides to Hatta list its fort, its dam and its trails. This is the valley told differently — through the single physical problem that has shaped every era of its life. From Bronze Age tombs sited by the water to a mosque timed by shadow to a hydro plant that answers Dubai in ninety seconds, one question runs through four thousand years: where does the water go, and whose turn is it?

The Real Tatooine: Star Wars, Southern Tunisia and the Living Art Beneath the Myth

The Tunisian desert that became Tatooine — its Berber architecture, its vanishing film sets and the living street-art scene painting over the myth.

George Lucas filmed Star Wars across southern Tunisia, borrowing Berber pit-houses and 15th-century granaries as an alien world. But the real story is what's underneath: a living tradition of desert architecture, two millennia of coexistence on Djerba, and one of the most ambitious street-art projects on Earth.