When I was 14 one of my best friends had his room covered in a collage of Spice Girl pictures loving cut from teen magazines. He was an especially big fan of Ginger Spice.
This is the wall of a dusty storage room filled with old camel videos at a friend’s farm in Ras Al Khaimah. This man, now middle aged, has no reservations in his respect for the animals that defined his career.
Camel owners usually have a small farm, or ezba, where they keep their herd and a few workers who care for the animals when they are away. Every ezba has a little concrete house where family gather to watch live broadcasts of races in distant emirates where men receive guests, particularly in the hotter months when the outdoors becomes impossibly inhospitable.
Wall decoration in these rooms is sparse, as it is in many Emirati homes, particularly because representative art was not crafted in the emirates until modern times and art representing the human form may be considered forbidden in Islam. For this reason, a lot of Emirati homes have a few old black-and-white portraits of male ancestors or photos of Mecca and little else.
At the ezba, family portraits are replaced by photographs of camels. These are not instagram'd selfies of owners and camels or artistic landscapes of camel silhouettes on red dunes. Nope. Instead it's a full body image of the camel from the side, often standing alongside the car it has won.
Also popular is a photoshopped image of a camel in a lush, emerald green field.
(Such photoshop magic is common in the emirates. At photography studios, images of workers are photoshopped into glamourous settings, such as the grounds of the Burj Khalifa. This is the camel equivalent.)
The owner of this ezba has worked full time at the Ras Al Khaimah track for several decades and rather than showcase a single camel, he did a collection of his favourite camels and sheikhs.
