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Abu Dhabi

Liwa & Al Dhafra

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About this district

Exhibo editorial

The desert interior — the Liwa oasis crescent along the northern edge of the Empty Quarter, and the wider Al Dhafra region running west toward the Saudi border. Dunes among the largest anywhere, date farms, and a heritage calendar built around camels, falconry and poetry. Two hours and change from the city, and it feels much further.

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The Liwa Desert — place

The Liwa Desert

The northern edge of the Rub' al Khali — the largest continuous sand sea on Earth.

Abu Dhabi

Stories

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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.

A robed, veiled crowd gathered in a red desert landscape in the style of a science-fiction epic — the visual vocabulary Hollywood reuses to signal an alien world.
Editorial

Tunis · Tunisia

Why Every Sci-Fi Desert Looks Arab

From Arrakis to Tatooine, when a film wants a desert to feel ancient, prophetic and alien, it reaches for an Arab and Berber vocabulary — and reveals more about the West that built it than the region it borrows from.

The wrapped faces, the trilling women, the barely-displaced Arabic: cinema's alien deserts keep sounding Arab. But the vocabulary was assembled in the West — from Orientalist painting to Lawrence to Dune — and it says more about who is looking than about anyone being looked at.

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.