In March 2014, Ibraaz and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation launched an online media partnership with Art Dubai 2014 for the eighth iteration of the Global Art Forum.

In this transcription from the Forum, panel participants Hubert Bari, Sheyma Buali and Rolf Killius discuss the end of the pearling industry in the Gulf with a particular focus on Qatar. For several millennia, the world’s finest pearls were fished in the Gulf. Pearling provided work (much of it grueling), wealth and identity. In this discussion Bari dispells both the myths of the how a pearl is created and the popularized narrative of why the Gulfi pearling industry collapsed. Killius discusses the more intangible cultural legacy of the industry such as music and dance specific to the pearl boat workers and communities, which he describes as 'endangered' and in need of regeration and preservation. Buali connects these physical and metaphysical legacies to the historical events and phenomena of the Gulf and wider world – namely the World Wars and economic depression, the discovery of oil, and the labour migration flows.

Shumon Basar: Hello, al-salam alaikum, marhaba, guten Tag. Welcome to day two of the Global Art Forum. Thank you very much for coming. My name is Shumon Basar, I am the commissioner of the Forum. It has been put together by an incredible team that includes our co directors Ala' Younis and Omar Berrada from Art Dubai; Uns Kattan and Miriam Butti; and here in Doha our colleagues at the Qatar Museums Authority, which include Malak Hassan and the Katara Art Centre, and Mayssa Fattouh and her wonderful team. Many others have contributed generously in the last few months or so that we have been putting this together. We are also grateful to the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority, and to The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, and Ibraaz, and the Kamal Lazar Foundation who are very kindly allowing us to be streamed online and translated live here at the back, and the New York Times who are our international media partner. A few words about the Global Art Forum – over the past few years it has been questioning the inherent priority of the middle word in its title and that word is 'art'.

So a few words about this year's edition, which we are calling 'Meanwhile… History'. History is not ultimately the past, it is in fact a portrait of the present moment and a manifesto for the future. Here are a few questions that we are throwing out. Is there history without historians, without documentation, without prejudice? The historian E.H Carr once said that a historian imagines the past and remembers the future. Eric Hobsbawm, also a great historian, once urged that we wage a protest against forgetting. So inspired by these sentiments, 'Meanwhile… History' imagines a timeline of transformational turning points many of which many have been lost, forgotten or erased. And this wonderful title has been given to us by Sophia Al-Maria, who some of you may have heard speak yesterday evening. Yesterday evening we time travelled in Doha's Sheraton hotel back to the first decade of Qatar's nation-building. Over the course of the week, we will continue the time travelling through 778AH to the first week of September 1920 and to 1955 and 1966 via the 'short 70s', which includes four decades of Kuwait's cultural experiments, Iran's art history that has been exported to Dubai and also the lesser known derivative of pan-Arabism, which is being called Pan-Kaffirism. And throughout this journey through time and space and place, we are also thinking about what it means to call something history, whether history is in fact a sort of fiction or fantasy. Before we begin this afternoon, can I please urge you all to turn your phones to silent, thank you. And if any of you care to tweet at all, the hash tag that we are using is #GAF8. Thank you very much. Let me give a brief introduction to our first session today – in the Mesopotamian poem that many of you may have heard of, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the eponymous hero is said to have pearl dived from Dilmun, which millennia later became known as Bahrain. The Gulf was the epicentre for the world's finest pearls for a very long time. This however changed profoundly in the early twentieth century and a great period of economic strife then pursued – an economic crisis, a social crisis and indeed perhaps maybe even an historical crisis. So we wanted to look at the story of this crisis across the Gulf.

In Dubai in a few days time we will be continuing this topic with the historian Frauke Heard-Bey, looking in particular at the impact on the area which is now known as the UAE. So it gives me great pleasure to now introduce one of these first sessions to the story of pearling's end. Our guests are Hubert Bari, who is based in Doha as the director of the Pearl and Jewellery and Museum and has worked on various museum projects over the past ten years. He was a lecturer for 25 years at the Natural History Museum in Paris and specialized in mineralogy and exhibitions. His book Pearls (2013) was written for the exhibition that he curated at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha in 2010. Rolf Killius is an exhibition curator and ethnomusicologist, sound recordist, sound producer, film producer, editor and radio journalist. He works in the delivery of music, dance, and other arts events especially related to the Arabian Gulf and south Asia. Currently he is the curator of oral and musical cultures at the British Library and Qatar Foundation Partnership in London, which is creating the digital content for the Qatar National Library. And last but not least, is our host for this session, Sheyma Buali. Sheyma is a London-based independent culture journalist, essayist and researcher. Previously, she worked for ten years in a range of roles in TV, film and documentary production in Boston, LA and her native Bahrain. So will you please join me in welcoming our guests, thank you very much.

Sheyma Buali: Thank you so much, Shumon, for the whole forum and for that nice introduction. I think what we are going to start with today are the myths we want to address – how pearls exist. Hubert has a presentation on how pearls are made.

Hubert Bari: Yes, because before we talk about pearls we have to understand what we are talking about and nobody knows exactly what a pearl is except when the man has to get out the credit card to buy one or when the women are wearing them! So I have brought my oysters to show you this.

SBu: I think part of the myth that we are discussing here is that the pearl is made of dew or sand.

HB: So this is an oyster. An oyster is a bi-valve animal, two shells articulated with a hinge. And when you eat an oyster, usually you kill it just because you open it totally and then it reveals the inner of the oyster. You have the abductor muscle, which allows the oyster to open and close. You have different organs, including the stomach, the liver and so on and you have a sort of crescent organ, what we call the scallop, and this is the sexual organ. It is important to know this. All of this is packed into the mantle of the oyster – it is a sort of skin that covers both valves.

When an oyster is alive, it is always a little bit open and filters the water. On the mantle there are some little hairs pushing the nutrients in the direction of the mouth but sometimes you have little worms that are accidentally swallowed by the oyster – it is not actually dust most of the time, it is actually larvae coming from tapeworms, evacuated by sharks, stingrays and so on. These tapeworms are attracted by the oyster because the oyster is pumping and filtering water and so sometimes these tapeworms go between the shell and the mantle and they become prisoners there. Then they try to get out and by going out, they take with them some cells of the mantle which builds shells and pearls around the larvae. So the formation of a pearl is a biological accident, never provoked by a grain of sand – in 3 million x-rays never have I seen a grain of sand in a pearl, but it is rather a reaction against tapeworm larvae.

So this is how the natural pearls are formed and it happens very rarely – a good pearl is approximately one in every 2000. And this is why some people, such as Mikimoto, had the idea to provoke what is happening by hand and this is the principle of the cultivated pearl – to trigger the formation of a pearl by an intervention to displace the cells of the mantle. To make an artificial or cultivated pearl, you open the oysters a little bit – people often open oysters to find one with beautiful mother of pearl inside, which would suggest that it will make a beautiful pearl as well – and then you take little squares from the mantle of the donor oyster, two by two millimetres, and you inject it inside the actual gonad. You inject this with a scalpel into the gonad and so these cells are displaced, not through the tapeworm but through the hand of a crafting person. These cells will proliferate and form a pearl. The first Japanese men who did this, Mr Mise and Dr Nishikawa, had the idea to also introduce a little bead cut from a shell, usually from Mississippi fresh water muscles. This bead is not what will provoke the pearl, it just allows the cultivator to gain two or three millimetres in diameter immediately and induce the ferocity of the pearl. The pearl is round because the oyster is retracting and opening its mantle nonstop making a sort of belly dancing movement which makes the pearl rotate and they do this because the spherical shape is less harmful for the animal. Once this principle had been discovered for the first time in 1903 it was, of course, a big discovery. It took a few more years to realize a good batch of pearls. In 1909 they were presented to the emperor of Japan.

One of the two inventors, Nishikawa married the daughter of Mr Mikimoto and this is how he took the system and started to produce the pearls. Of course, it is not easy to industrialize the process and we can say that the process really became perfectly organized and successful in 1916 when the first tens of kilograms of pearls started to be shipped everywhere, mostly to Paris first and then New York. So the question is, is it this discovery that killed pearl diving in Qatar and in the Gulf in general? Not really, you just have to do some analysis of the archives to see that the revenue of the pearl in Bahrain in 1900 was going up and in the year 1914 you have the big peak of pearl production which will never be reached again. Why this year? For various reasons – firstly, pearls were very popular in the Art Deco period so there was great demand and secondly, one person – Leonard Rosenthal, a French pearl dealer – could kill the market in Mumbai and have the pearl directly exported to Europe with a much bigger market open for the pearls and there was huge demand. And so logically after that you have the free fall of pearl production in the Gulf – why? Because to reach this point, the divers had to fish enormous numbers of oysters, which couldn't be reproduced in time and so next year there was a depreciation of the oyster bank and the beginning of the disaster. But this disaster has nothing to do with the pearl cultivation because it had only started. After that you have a succession of disasters across the world including the Wall Street crash in 1929, the Great Depression and World War II and after that the industry was really finished. So pearl cultivation is not the reason for the industry collapsing. 

SBu: Alright, thank you. That is a really great chart because the greater markets, both in Europe and the United States, were among the two biggest markets and the pearls had a lot to do with, as you said, the World Wars and the Depression. But then there are also other parts of the world that had really big markets and your work, Rolf, has a lot to do with the migratory flows in terms of the people who made the diving crews as well as the trade routes. Perhaps you can tell us a little bit about the influences, both from the east from India and the west from Africa, as you follow them through your music?

Rolf Killius: How much time do we have for that? Yes, it is a huge theme, maybe I'll show a couple of images in the beginning. Everyone knows the seafront of Doha and I bought this from a library – this is Doha in the 1950s. It was a little village at the time that was world-famous for being a landing point for ships of all countries. And here we have the atmosphere from such a boat. It is much less romantic than it is depicted nowadays. It has to be considered that on one side there was the pearl industry, whilst the other side of the Gulf region was famous for dates as well so the ships came and picked up the pearls and picked up the dates and in exchange they brought the spices from India and the Zanzibar and Kenyan coast. Somebody once said to me in a discussion that it is about the exchange of the people along the water, along the sea. I think when you see Qatar today and when you see the seafront you can see that everything is central to the water, and it was the same in the past. People went to the ocean and they were connected to the coast and India.

Of course we have to understand a lot of pearls were exported to Bombay – there are paintings of Moghul kings wearing all these necklaces and lots of pearls. It was a big business and of course the people working on the pearl boats were involved but got only a small share of this.

SBu: What I also wanted to touch on was the labour conditions of the divers, because this is another sort of romanticization that goes with the pearling era and the history. In reality, the labour conditions were really quite gruelling and perhaps we can talk about the way they were paid – it was a system that meant that they were paid in advance and then had to repay with the quality and amount of catch that they got. But they workers also experienced difficult conditions – the weather, the sea, sea sickness, sharks, dilation of hearts, ruptured eardrums leading to deafness, a lot of blindness and emphysema – my grandfather as a pearl diver actually died of emphysema due to this. I was hoping you could touch on a little of this history of labour conditions?

HB: Firstly, going out pearl fishing was difficult – the little dhow usually had 35 people on board, because for one person going down you had to have the puller, plus the captain, plus the cook, some fishers and apprentices – so it is a lot of people on a very small surface, living together for months. To be part of the team these people had to borrow money so that they could leave money for their families to buy rice and dates and meat to eat. They could pay back this loan to the captain only after they returned back home and the captain had evaluated the crop of pearls and shared this between the people – one half for himself and the second half divided among the others. Most of the time the divers could not afford to pay back the loan to the captain and so they were maintained in a permanent system of debt. This was the way to attach the divers to the captain. It is what I personally would consider slavery, and it was impossible for them to get out of this borrowing principle. This also explains today's system in Qatar of 'sponsorship', which has its roots in the pearling history.

RK: I think we have to be a little bit careful with the term slavery. Of course, it was well known that the people on the boats were slaves but not everybody was a slave. Especially, as I read in Qatar, most of the people working on the boat were actually Bedouins who were looking for work so they came to work on the seas and later came back and looked after their animals. I think the system on the boat is a typical feudal system – you had the boss, the land owner who was the captain, and of course he was sponsored by some of the traders, who again the captain was dependant on. The people had no other opportunities other than to work on the boats. I just came back from Oman last week, and I met a lot of sons of former sailors in Sur, which was a famous trading point. They told me that many of their fathers worked on the boat and some of them came from Zanzibar, some of them came from Kenya, and most of them today are black Omanis. They say their background is African and some of them still speak Swahili and are proud of this. The poverty was so dire in parts of Africa that some of them jumped the boat in order to escape it. So I think it was a system where the boat owners and the people who were working on the boats belonged together, they were chained together – it was the only work that was there. Maybe at this point we can play some music?

SBu: Yes.

RK: I brought two short films back from Oman and the sons of the sailors actually perform every part of the work on the boat to a sort of music and sing and dance. I was able to film them in Sur. It looks slightly romanticized on the film but still I think they try to maintain their tradition and they are very proud to come from this – they still belong to this sailor community. 

SBu: Perhaps you can talk a little bit about what they are doing here?

RK: Yes. This is a performance in Muscat and in Sur and the people are from Al Dhafra, again in the south of Oman. Here you have a pair-dance which is clearly derived from European pair-dancing, but the musical instruments and the rhythms are African and they still say today that it belongs to the black Omani community in Oman. I want to show this because it is also a good example of where men and women dance together in the Arabian Peninsula, which is something special.

SBu: Can you give us some background on when this developed?

RK: I think these traditions go back at least 1000 years, it is very difficult to tell but that is what people say – it is one of the main cultures from the Gulf region and encompasses Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman on the Omani coast. It probably began in the fifth century when people discovered the monsoon winds going from India to the Arabian Gulf and back again and people were actually able to use these winds to reach the countries in two weeks. I think it began from this time. Every part of work on the boat, as I have said before, is accompanied by a certain music, which was like entertainment for those on the boats. As we heard at the beginning, people spend up to four weeks on the boats and this was the daily and nightly entertainment.

SBu: The music obviously goes with the rhythms that you have to use with the rowing of the actual boat but now this is more performed as a cultural event rather than for seafaring.

RK: I think when we talk about tradition in the Gulf, the pearling is very important. The pearling industry is gone but we still have the culture – the music is still practised here and towards the end of our discussion perhaps I can show some recordings from Qatar as well. The music is still alive, although endangered, but it is still possible to show the music and somehow the music has survived.

SBu: But before that, something really big happened in the Gulf, which is the discovery of oil. We had our path to urbanization through the seaports, through the trade that was going on in the region but then after about 10-15 years we see industrialization because of the oil companies. So you have some folk music which is 20s style music. Can you tell us about how that also has to do with pearling and the seafaring?

RK: Yes, I was introduced to it when I began working for British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership as the sound curator. People said that there were some sound recordings in the library which were originally from the Gulf but that there was no cataloguing. We discovered that we have around 2000 recordings which are on discs from the 1920s onwards and we are presently digitizing all of them. It seems that we have around 300 recordings related to Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman. And something interesting happened – I found an old recording of a person called Salim Rashid Soori. He was Omani but left Oman and became a sailor on a boat bound for India and he travelled and lived there in the 1930s and then in Bahrain, Kuwait and also Qatar. He mainly stayed in Bahrain and Kuwait because they had bigger settlements based on the pearl trade. Then successively the oil was discovered in the 1930s and on top of all this the music culture was developed. So the music was the product of the first entertainer sitting in the cafes playing the oud and the violin and performing different types of drums and for the first time music could be recorded. People had records for the first time and they played it on a thing like a gramophone. Often when people sat together in cafes they would play the gramophone and people gathered around and were able to listen to music that had been produced somewhere else. The south music was produced in Bahrain and in Kuwait and in Qatar as well. Today I have brought a little recording which I did in Doha last November in a little majlis performance room with traditional musicians from Qatar and a singer from Bahrain. There was no difference in the music from Bahrain and Qatar in the past and today they still play together, they visit each other, and they marry each other.

I think it is clearly related to the music on the boat though it is more sophisticated and more urban. The music on the boat was more complicated in terms of singing but I think the people liked this little song so they introduced the oud. I think the oud was not introduced in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar until around the 1990s. Of course it was recorded as a very sophisticated instrument because it is mentioned in old manuscripts. They were influenced by music from Egypt because they were listening to Egyptian radio stations here in the Gulf and suddenly they decided they wanted to create their own musical style like this, which is a mix of Egyptian and Syrian influences but with typically Bahraini, Qatari and Kuwaiti rhythms.

SBu: So the discovery of oil sometime after this obviously led to a really big boom in industrialization but you are saying that by then the pearl industry was basically in total decline.

HB: Yes. When talking of this era it is normally propagated that the pearl industry went to almost zero production because the oyster beds were gone, but it is not true. The sea is full of oysters today, so why is it not starting again? After the boom of the oil industry the salaries in this field were much higher than any diver could make so it was really difficult. Today it is really not possible to market a pearl necklace when people know that it represents the killing of 50,000 to 100,000 oysters. We are not in the mood today to sell this kind of production – it is not compatible with the way we hope to deal with the planet. So the rebirth of the industry is absolutely impossible. Most of the market today is based on existing stock. There is one person from Qatar, Hussain Alfardan, who has about 70 per cent of the stock of natural pearls and the market of jewellery is usually through the reuse of old jewellery – you take the pearls out, you dismantle the strand, you mix them with other pearls so you can sort them into beautiful designs. This is how it works and it is a high-end product. Today, a single high quality Gulf pearl necklace is over 1 million dollars. I saw an extraordinary necklace last week in the Doha Jewellery and Watch Exhibition by Al-Majd Company and it was stunning because the price was in the region of 10 million dollars. And the La Peregrina Pearls from Elizabeth Taylor sold some years ago for 11 million dollars. Two strands of the Maharajah Barodatwo years ago, 8 million dollars. Now pearls are becoming something rare and exquisite, more valuable than diamonds almost. Although only natural pearls of course.

RK: Is there a difference between natural pearls and cultured pearls?

HB: Basically they are strictly the same but triggered naturally on one side and provoked by human intervention on the other. It is impossible to make a distinction because they are basically the same except that in the middle of the natural pearls you have a hole, which is the tapeworm, and in the middle of the cultivated pearls you have a sort of phantom, which is the piece of mantle and the bead. But today 90 per cent of the pearls produced are unbeaded, so even with an x-ray it is very difficult to tell the difference, they are equally beautiful. The more beautiful the pearls are today the more likely that you are dealing with a cultivated one. All the pearl dealers will say that they can tell the difference from any distance but I don't believe this at all.

SBu: So the legacy that we have now is more intangible, would you say? Tangible in terms of the stock that we have and intangible in terms of the music that has been left behind.

RK: I don't know. I had this wonderful experience over the last few months visiting some of the musicians from the recordings of the 1970s in Qatar and Oman. I was so amazed by this highly developed music culture, I was surprised by how the people living on the boat could have created such a wonderful musical culture and I was also surprised when visiting Qatar to see that this music isn't everywhere and people are not listening to it. I couldn't see anything – people didn't know about it and people would say it was a thing of the past and that it was difficult to find musicians who still performed this music. Having been in many parts of the world I thought this Qatari, Bahraini and Kuwaiti sea music was extraordinary – it is much more developed than, if I may say this, classical Arabic music. I think it is extremely sophisticated. These people are incredibly skilled singing together and it is amazing music. My hope is that this music somehow survives and that there should be a kind of renaissance of this music. Maybe the pearl industry is gone but I would like to have the culture maintained and I would like the institutions to spring up everywhere here in Doha and pick up this idea, talk about it and propagate it. Next door we have the place where the symphony orchestra rehearses and I have seen them perform and it is a really high standard and there is a classical Arabic music institute next door as well, which is fantastic – but where is the sea music institute here in Doha? So I was a bit surprised not to see that and I just wish that people would be interested in that and especially that young people could have the opportunity to be trained from the people who are still around.

SBu: You are digitizing some of the recordings?

RK: Yes, the recordings we did last November will be digitized as well as the older recordings. We actually record musicians who are still around and we have digitized the recordings from the 1920s to the 1960s so everything will be concentrated on a big portal at the national library so that everyone can access it around the world.

SBu: I think we might have time for a question?

SBa: Hi, Hubert. I find it really fascinating how you began dispelling certain narratives. It seems almost universal now, the first explanation that comes up when you make a search about the story of pearling is precisely this narrative of Mikimoto and the artificially cultured pearl. Why do you think that this narrative has been disseminated and taken up widely when there is clearly proof that this simply isn't the case?

HB: When history is spectacular – like with an activity such as pearling or a battle – it always finishes with the concept of heroes, and even though they were very poor heroes, they are now heroes. Back then they were not heroes, they were just people who wanted to find some money to eat and this was the only possible activity in the Gulf. After the collapse of the industry we made heroes of them – heroes of the nation. And we have to acknowledge to them and it is true that they were really incredible people, but it is a logical evolution. Therefore, everything that is against this tendency of history is demolished by incorrect arguments, as though you need to find someone guilty for the extinction of the pearl diving activities. And, of course, Mikimoto was the first one to be exposed in public and became the anti-hero. Can you imagine, he gave every woman the opportunity to have a pearl necklace on her neck! So he becomes the barbarian.

SBa: That is interesting. As I mentioned at the beginning, one of our sub-themes is historiography and, of course, the fact that there is never a monolithic history, it is always plural. But one of the clichés is that history is written by the victors - in this case you would then assume if Mikimoto and the Japanese were the victors then they would have been the authors of this history, but you seem to be suggesting otherwise. To put it crudely, the losers were the ones writing this particular version of history.

HB: Yes, but they lost because of overfishing, as I said, and because of several disasters and crises around the world. So they are the losers but not the guilty ones.

SBa: Just one last thing – I was wondering what kind of relationship, if any, did Japan have to the Gulf during this period, politically or diplomatically? Were there trade relations?

HB: I don't know about diplomacy relations, but there is one relation nobody knows and it is quite important to say. The oysters producing most of the pearls in Qatar are pink and called tada hadi ata are the same species of oyster used by Mikimoto to do his grafting and culturing process except that they are a little bit bigger. So it could be possible to do pearl cultivation with Qatari oysters – for example, there is a farm in Ras al-Khaimah and there is a project to build a farm with Tahiti oyster pearls as well in Qatar. It is quite strange that we have relations with Tahiti here but the Tahitian oyster is living naturally in the Gulf waters of Qatar and in the Qatar National Museum there is a collection of spectacular natural grey pearls from Qatar.

Audience: I wanted to ask a question in this regard. First of all, I'm learning stories I've never heard before so it is very interesting. And if the cultivation of pearls would be possible here do you think it could be picked up as a business? I'm wondering why not with such a history available. Also, I once read about an Australian pearl producer that produced shaped pearls on demand. Can you tell me how he does it? Don't you think there could be expansion in the pearl production industry here in that way as well, maybe creating a pearl exclusive to Qatar? Are there patenting laws prohibiting doing this?

HB: The ban against cultivated pearls is still valid in Bahrain but not in Qatar. You can, buy, wear and sell cultivated pearls in this country but not in Bahrain. Of course, it could be possible to cultivate pearls but it is not an easy task – it is extremely complicated and the instability of the global environment today with global warming and so on, makes accidents very probable. It is already difficult enough in Australia. Imagine that you have to urgently buy medicine against the infection of your oysters – you don't have time to fill in 200 pieces of paper with customs, your oysters will be dead after a day, you have to hire a jet to get the medicine here. This is how it works and this is not compatible really with the administration today in this part of the world.

SBu: Does anybody else have a question?

Audience: Thanks Hubert, your talk was very interesting and I was especially interested in what you were saying about the importance of maintaining the traditions that went along with pearl diving. But I just wanted your thoughts on the recent resurgence of things like pearl diving competitions, so the actual practice of pearl diving, which you see in Qatar and in Abu Dhabi?

HB: The Qatar Museum Authority has different activities to maintain and save the tradition, first by recording a certain number of documents and things to use for the future national museum. On my side, I'm building a collection of pearl jewellery, spanning from Roman times until Gulf pearls from today (we cannot say if they are from Qatar only that they are from the Gulf). The collection will be revealed in the future national museum – it will be a huge surprise. Also we are documenting all sorts of research on pearls and not only the pearls from here but worldwide because any shell can be infected by a tapeworm and so any shell can make pearls. The snails that French people like me are eating, escargot, can make the most exquisite pearls by quality but the biggest we have found is only one millilitre... It is a fascinating world and so the natural history of pearls is also something which we work on a lot and all of this will be revealed in some years from now.

SBu: I know that in Bahrain, to answer your question also, there are private companies that take you on diving trips and there are a few that encourage people to pick pearls. I have friends who have gone on these trips and they will actually find pearls and you get to keep them because it actually helps the oyster beds to pick up the oysters. Is that true?

HB: I don't know, but I forgot as well that at the Qatar Museum Authority we maintain a fabulous collection of pearling dhows – you can see them in the park of the Museum of Islamic Art. It is a lot of work to maintain them and the tradition of building them as well, so these are our activities in this field.

RK: I think your question was very much about the intangible culture and the museums here in Doha collect and show objects, but I think that you were asking about the actual tradition that people can maintain. I think there is a certain way that young people come together, go in a boat and an actor sailing and walking on the boat and diving and all this, which is a bit cheesy but from the musical and dance side is something that is preserved from the sailors and it is still alive. I think these performances are separate from the tourist performances or showcase performances because it is still done by musicians in their private gatherings. Maybe there should be an opportunity to offer these musicians a forum so that they can perform on a stage – changing it to an art stage but still maintaining their style.

SBu: Are there any other questions?

Audience: I just want to add a comment to answer the previous lady. There are also programmes that we do with the Al-Rayyan TV channel that involve the youth working with the pearl divers. There are two special programs for pearl divers, where we take a lot of students from secondary schools to a spot where we do traditional pearl diving. So there is a lot of activity happening especially with the Rayyan channel – that focus with the youth in regards to all the history of pearl diving. I just wanted to highlight that.

SBu: Thanks.

Audience: You talked about how music came from pearl diving, but where there any other cultural traditions that came from pearl diving?

HB: In poetry, especially Sufi poetry, there are beautiful texts on pearl diving. In Sufi poetry the act of diving is considered so dangerous that is like performing an act to become as close as you can to God. There are beautiful texts on the art of diving and there was a big tradition of poetry from the Red Sea to here.

SBu: Are there any other questions among the audience?

Audience: Did you translate the lyrics from the music they are singing? And is there any way I could see it?

RK: The lyrics that I came across are often prayers – they pray to Allah to ask for support in their diving and their work on the boats. Some of them are pieces of classical Arabic poetry that they used for the pearl diving. Some of the music is not from the pearl divers themselves but from the wives and daughters who would stay at home, so they ask god to support their sons and brothers to come back. I think that is a very important genre that should be recorded – women who have created this music. They sing it at weddings sometimes and it was usually performed in the villages left behind. I haven't come across any recordings of that, but it should be done, I think that is very important. It is usually Arabic from the Gulf area, it is not high Arabic. I think that is something special.

SBu: Yes, women had a lot of very particular styles because the trips were four to six months at a time, they were entire seasons. So there was a lot of seeing-off music from the women as well. Is there anybody else with a question?

Audience: Is there any evidence that pearls were traded on the east African, Swahili coast or in the city states there? Because I hear a lot about pearls making their way to Europe and to India and Asia but there is not much mention of the Swahili coast. Is there any archaeological evidence of a historical trade there?

RK: I can't really answer this question because I know that there are influences – Zanzibar was part of Oman until recently. I think there were definitely influences and I know people who have researched on that but I can't answer that question.

SBa: Can I ask the last question? I want to go back to the period of transition from the death of the pearling industry and then the birth of the energy industries. Of course these dates are different in different countries – Bahrain is 1932; I think Qatar is not until after World War II although oil was discovered in the 40s; in the UAE it is much later in 62; and Dubai in 68. It is a long period and I just wondered whether, when the opportunities rose, did the men who were working as pearlers go into the oil industry immediately or was the birth of the energy industry the point where a lot of non-Gulf migrant labour began to come in? I am trying to relate this to our discussion yesterday, which was about 1972-82 and the beginning of the great period of building here. Of course the construction industry in the region could only operate at the speed that it needed to by multiplying its labour force through bringing migrant labour from outside. So I'm just wondering what the history of the shift of industry and the indigenous labour force is.

RK: As I said before, I was recently in Sur where there is the last shipbuilding workshop in all of Oman. I was asking who the people are who are building the ships nowadays and they said a lot of the sailors became carpenters later on. I had the opportunity to visit an old man who is nearly 80 and he told me that when he was ten he went on a boat and became a sailor and then became the master carpenter, and now he has just retired. Then I went to the workshop to look at what the workmen do but I was informed that the Omanis had just recently left for different jobs. The last Omani I think is an engineer and the rest of the people are from Kerala in southern India. The experts are now the Indians and I think it was a gradual process that many people looked for jobs elsewhere. But I think that carpentry was one of the jobs that they took over but maybe it was a gradual process from the 1920s up to the 1960s.

HB: For Qatar we have some data, which was published in this essential book, Sea of Pearls (2012) by Robert Carter. It is a super book and he gives details about the fate of the people in Qatar after the pearl crash, and he speaks about starvation, people dying from hunger and a substantial reduction of the population. People left the country because, as you said, it is only after World War II that the oil industry started to provide new jobs in this part of the Gulf. So it was quite difficult and there are archives as well that are telling the story of riots from the pearl divers in the early 30s. Riots mostly against the food store to get rice and something to eat.

SBu: There were a lot of protests and uprisings in Bahrain as well, pretty much every decade from 1919. They were against the exploitative system but then sometimes they were also about the reforms because, going back to the discussions earlier, the idea of cultivated pearls was completely banned as was the modernization of equipment, because it wasn't natural, so that made the value of the pearls higher, which then feeds back into the exploitation and so on. So there were a series of uprisings and the last one that I ever read about was in 1936 – by then oil had been discovered, the Bahrain Petroleum Company had been built, and there was a full labour force there. There was a definite shift because being a pearl diver barely paid the bills so nobody really wanted to be there whereas there were now jobs on solid ground, in a much safer environment, where you actually got paid a salary much more in line with modern living. So the oil industry definitely did shift the labour force. Thank you all very much and thank you both.

RK: Can I play the last real pearl diver song?

SBu: Our own seeing off music. Thank you so very much Hubert Bari and Rolf Killius.

SBa: Please join me in thanking Sheyma, Hubert and Rolf.