A Field Guide to Locals (Craig's perspective)

[A guest post from Craig]

Laura and I have often talked, with no disrespect, about our need for one of those laminated cards you wear with a strap on your wrist to identify fish when you snorkel or dive—but in our case, we need one for the locals. There are so many varieties of thobes (the robes men wear), abayas (ditto for women), ghutras and agals (the scarf and rope over a man’s head), and hijabs (same for women) it’s hard to tell what’s fashion, what’s tradition, what dress indicates what country you’re from and so on.

I talked about this one day with our Managing Director who runs our office in Abu Dhabi as we walked through a mall. “How do you know what all the variations in headdress and women’s abayas mean?” Amin looked around and said, “That guy’s from Oman. That’s guy is from Qatar. See that guy over there? He’s from Kuwait. That guy there is a local, and he’s single. He’s a bit of a player.” I had to stop him there. “You get all that from a head scarf?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Amin replied. He went on to tell me how the local flipped the sides of his ghutra back, almost like wings (or, one could say, like Farrah Fawcet used to do in the 70s) and that meant one thing that was different than if he flipped only one side. Amin went on to talk about the agals (ropes) on a man’s head scarf and how that might tell you what tribe a man was from, and how you could tell where he was from by the colors of his ghutra. You know what country a woman is from by her abaya or hijab.

This was all very interesting and complicated.

Laura and I are fascinated by the local dress and what all the variations mean, and thus our idea of a “field guide”. Laura, in her own inimitable way, researched online for such a guide, but instead found a half dozen personal sites and blogs that got close. Besides, we’d look awfully silly (and likely foolish) if we were walking around with laminated cards strapped to our wrists and pointing, “Oh, look! A Qatari!” I don’t think that’d go over very well, if you asked me.