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An Emirati-Kuwaiti historian is urging the UAE public to make their voices heard for a community project chronicling life during the Iran war for future generations.
Shatha Almutawa, founder and director of Kutubna Cultural Centre in Dubai, wants to share the stories of resilience and solidarity of people from across society who have been grappling with the everyday challenges of the conflict.
More than 60 applicants have already answered the call to document residents' experiences. They will be trained to carry out video interviews to form a clear picture of the UAE in unprecedented times.
The initiative will be overseen by Kutubna, a bookstore and cultural space founded in 2024 that showcases Gulf artists and writers.
The UAE faced a barrage of daily missile and drone attacks from Iran after the war broke out on February 28. The US and Tehran this week agreed to a fragile two-week ceasefire.
The attacks martyred two UAE Armed Forces personnel and a Moroccan civilian contractor. Ten civilians were killed and more than 220 injured.
The conflict has also caused widespread disruption to air travel, affected tourism and led schools and universities to switch to remote learning, with summer exams cancelled. People have been dealing with mobile phone alerts warning of incoming threats.
“Historians now want to understand everyday people's lives, how people were living, what they were doing, what they felt, how they thought, things like this,” said Dr Almutawa.
“Now we're living in a historical moment. The world is changing as we're living in it right here.”
Important lessons
Another driver for the project is her children. Dr Almutawa wants them to understand the decision she made to stay in the country, and how they felt safe throughout.
“My children need to know what life felt like in these moments and how happy they are right now being here, even though we're in a war,” she said.
“I think it's important for everybody to be able to share their stories, to process what we're going through together. And to keep what we believe is important – our values, our culture, what we cherish.”
She added: “We're still living in the community. We're still doing art. We're still reading and writing and teaching [though] we might have to modify our routines.”
Recording war experiences
The initial phase of the project will last two months. Those interested in sharing their story will be able to register their interest in two weeks, when interviews start.
Mahnaz Fancy, who works with the UAE Ministry of Culture, has joined the project to share her story as an interviewee. She says it is “perfectly aligned” with her projects at the ministry, which focus on “building a national policy for the UAE that links culture to resilience”.
“This project is essentially a call for creatives and the storyteller in all of us to collectively make sense of this moment in time,” she told The National.
“There has been a wide recognition that, culture is more than just economic value, and this feels particularly important here in the UAE, a young country and an emerging cultural sector.”
Community archives' importance
Dr Munther al-Sabbagh, assistant professor of history at Zayed University, told The National that archiving is “preserving historical memory” in a time of fake stories and AI-generated content.
“It's good for society, especially for building social cohesion and allowing people the space to talk about what is happening right now,” Dr al-Sabbagh said.
“Society usually moves on very quickly. And there tends to be a process of forgetting that is facilitated by the lack of documenting the present,” he said. “Community archives have tended to focus on mass voices, of everyone, which includes people who are frequently not heard.”
Dr Almutawa aims to empower people to share their stories, so that the narrative is more realistic and human-centric.
“We now know that ordinary people have the power – to preserve our own voices, our own stories, our own narratives. We can give the world a representation of ourselves that we approve of rather than letting the world decide how it presents us.”
