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Abu Dhabi

Red sandstone inselbergs rising from the iron-stained valley floor of Wadi Rum, southern Jordan — the desert used as a stand-in for Mars in The Martian and other films.
Editorial

Amman · Jordan

Why Wadi Rum Keeps Playing Mars: A Desert That Is Right About the Wrong Planet

A valley in southern Jordan has become cinema's favourite Mars — not because it is like the planet, but because it looks like the one we carry in our heads.

Put Wadi Rum beside a rover photograph and you can't tell which is Mars. But the desert shares almost nothing with the real planet except its colour — and lately, the illusion has grown powerful enough that real space missions have come to Jordan to rehearse.

A full moon rising over dark water on the Abu Dhabi coast, a single bright disc against a black sky.
Editorial

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

The Word for Beautiful Was the Word for Moon

The moon has been the measure of a beautiful face in Arabic verse for fifteen centuries — but beauty was only one of the things that light was ever asked to carry. A history of one disc, from a pre-Islamic ode to a glowing sphere over an Abu Dhabi harbour.

Ya qamar — you moon — is the oldest compliment in Arabic, and almost nothing about it means what we assume. The moon it praised was not always a woman, not always even a kindness, and in the end not only about beauty at all.

A large landscaped roundabout in Doha, Qatar, with a monumental sculpture on its central island and multi-lane traffic circling it against a backdrop of West Bay towers.
Editorial

Doha · Qatar

Why Doha Is Full of Roundabouts

An old circle at a crossroads, sharpened by British road engineering, became the way an Arabian city found its way and remembered itself — and it took the bulldozers to reveal it.

In a city where a landmark was more useful than an address, Doha's roundabouts became its navigation, its landscaping and its national image all at once. Now they're being torn out for signalled junctions — and the affection for them arrived, as one scholar put it, only posthumously.

Sunlight falls in scattered points through the perforated dome of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Jean Nouvel's "rain of light," onto the pale stone of the museum's interior.
Editorial

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

The Universal Museum, Rebuilt on Arab Soil

How Abu Dhabi took one of the West's most contested ideas — the museum that claims to hold all of humanity — and moved the question of who gets to frame the world

A portolan chart in the floor, three ewers without a hierarchy, and a $450-million Leonardo no one has seen since it was bought. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a French–Emirati experiment in what the universal museum becomes when it is rebuilt from a different centre — and whether that moves the centre, or merely moves the Louvre, is the question the building leaves open.

An Arabian oryx, white with long nearly straight ringed horns and dark facial markings, standing in pale desert sand.
Editorial

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

The Animal We Drew Everywhere Once It Was Gone

From Neolithic rock to airline tailfin — how the Arabian oryx vanished from the desert, came back from nine animals, and multiplied everywhere as a symbol in the very decades it was gone.

The last wild Arabian oryx was shot in 1972. By then it was already a picture — carved on Bronze Age tombs, mistaken by the ancients for a unicorn, praised by poets as the eyes of the beloved. This is the story of an animal that went extinct in the wild and was brought back from nine survivors, and of the strange gap between the creature and the emblem it became: fast, sharp and ascendant on a nation's tailfin, while the animal itself survives by standing still in the shade.

A host pours Arabic coffee from a dallah into a small handle-less finjan cup in a majlis
Editorial

Riyadh · Saudi Arabia

The Coffee Ritual That Ran the Desert

A cup of coffee in the desert was a contract, a test, a truce, and a promise of protection — a whole social order in the tilt of a small white cup.

Among the Bedouin of Arabia, serving coffee was never just hospitality — it was a code. The order of the cups, the amount poured, the shake of the wrist that says enough: a whole unwritten language for turning a dangerous stranger into a guest, and sometimes an ally. The story of Arabic coffee as the social law of the desert — and how it lives on in the region's museums and art.

Aerial view of central Abu Dhabi showing its wide arterial roads and rectangular superblocks, towers lining the perimeters with lower buildings
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.

The deep rust-red mega-dunes of the Liwa crescent in the Empty Quarter, rising in smooth ridges under clear sky, with a thin line of green date palms at their base
Editorial

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.