The Gulf has long been seen by the rest of the Arab world as rich in natural resources, but poor in culture. The money from those resources has allowed the Gulf to buy a fair amount of culture, including a homegrown museum of Islamic art in Qatar (with almost the entire collection made outside of the region) and franchises of the Guggenheim and the Louvre in the UAE ,as well as creating powerful multi-media companies such as Saudi owned Rotana.

All these developments tend to obscure the local artistic developments. Saudi has recently produced its first fully local music video (article complete with youtube-cheezy-goodness) to accompany the pop-nasheed style of other khaleeji artists such as Ahmed Boukhatir. Most of these videos are a bit more wholesome than their sharqi/masri counterparts, although no one can compete with the Iraqis for wacky videos (I do love me some oranges…). Even some of the popular music groups feature artists that would probably never had a chance in other regions of the Arab world like Ahlam, Miami, or Guitara due to their lack of media polish. The long recognized master of Gulf popular music, Mohammed Abdu, just released a spectacular concert recording Al Amaken (which was recently reviewed on NPR).

It is not uncommon for radio stations in the Gulf to have call in poetry shows and there is even a high-budget poetry game show (very interesting article) on TV produced in the UAE. Some are starting to push back against the condescension of other Arabs and argue for the equality of Gulf culture.

Plus, I don’t know about you, but I look smoooooth in a thob.

Related posts:

1. May’s Shameless Attempts to Keep “Culture” Alive in the Gulf: The Series
2. Keeping Hope Alive in The Gulf
3. MTV Arabiya 2007
4. Kabob Gulf Update
5. An Arab American Renaissance?