Abdulrahman Bukhatir has led an extraordinary life. Born in Sharjah in the second half of the 1930s, he travelled to Karachi in 1949 with my late father, Saoud bin Khalid bin Khalid Al Qasimi, where he stayed with his uncle Ahmed for several years. There, he enrolled at the prestigious Bai Virbaijee Soparivala Parsi High School. My father, meanwhile, continued on to Bombay to be reunited with his mother.
Despite the many difficulties he faced, Bukhatir excelled in his studies and mastered three languages. His ambition and business acumen led him to launch venture after venture – even reading about them is dizzying.
Many of Sharjah’s landmarks bear Bukhatir’s imprint, including Bank Street, the Expo Centre, the Marbella and Holiday Inn resorts, and the Oceanic Hotel in Khor Fakkan. He is so central to the development of Sharjah that his was the only non-architect biography featured in Building Sharjah (Birkhauser, 2001).
Perhaps Bukhatir is best known for helping to establish Sharjah and the UAE as one of the world’s leading cricket venues. The Sharjah Cricket Stadium that he built still holds the Guinness World Record for hosting the highest number of One Day Internationals, and much of his memoir, Winning Run, is devoted to the gentleman’s game – its triumphs, as well as its challenges.
What makes the book, published in February, stand out, however, are its personal stories. There is the deep love Bukhatir held for his family, especially his mother, Ghayeh. It was also touching to see the emphasis he placed on educating his daughters as much as his sons. The book is a reminder, too, of how inseparable the history of the Gulf is from South Asia.
Cities and countries cannot rely solely on official government archives and newspaper records to document historic events. To understand a city fully, one must also seek out books written by those who helped to shape it.
As I have written before in the pages of The National, several such works stand out in the UAE, including From Rags to Riches: A Story of Abu Dhabi by Mohammed Al Fahim; The Wells of Memory by Easa Saleh Al Gurg; and Dr Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Ruler of Sharjah’s quadrilogy. Winning Run, the autobiography of Bukhatir, and other books like it are gifts to current and future generations of Emiratis and UAE residents.
There are lessons here for readers interested in UAE history, family business, sports ventures and entrepreneurship. Winning Run also offers moments of humour – such as Bukhatir telling a German cashier he was buying groceries in fours for his four wives, which was not the case – as well as lines of wisdom, including: “Age comes to us all, and what a blessing it is should it find you.”
When someone like Bukhatir, who not only witnessed but helped shape the development of a city, writes an autobiography, he is not simply telling his own story, but that of his hometown as well.
Winning Run is now available across the UAE
