Ali Al Saloom is on holiday, so for the next two weeks he will
share various facts about the UAE. His biography will resume
next month. You can take the Bedouin out of the desert, but you
can't take the desert out of the Bedouin. My generation has
never lived in the desert for long stretches of time, but many
of us have farms of varying sizes in the oases spread around Al
Ain, Liwa and Fujairah. Obviously, the life we experience on our
farms now is way different from that of our ancestors. I
remember stories of desert life told by my grandparents,
parents, uncles and aunts. My paternal grandfather was a
mutawwa, a teacher of the Holy Quran. He travelled by donkey
along the Gulf coast from what is now Saudi Arabia to the UAE
teaching the tribes and tiny settlements along the way. Most
people think of camels as the ships of the desert, so you may
wonder why my grandfather used the donkey as a means of
transport. That's because not all of the Gulf region is desert.
The topography comprises the salt flats along t