Live updates: Follow the latest news on US-Iran war
When the Strait of Hormuz tightens, the world feels it instantly. Energy prices spike, supply chains tremble and anxiety travels faster than oil.
However, beneath the noise of the present moment lies something more unsettling: the gap between how this region is often spoken about and what history tells us it has always been.
Long before hydrocarbons, Hormuz was the hinge of a vast, interconnected system. From Basra to Aden, across to Mumbai and Kozhikode and as far as Zanzibar, ports did not rise through conquest alone, nor did they thrive in isolation. They prospered because they enabled the exchange of goods, people and ideas.
Arab dhow captains navigated the monsoon winds with mathematical precision. Indian merchants financed voyages across the seasons. East African traders moved gold, ivory and culture into the same circuits. Persian intermediaries connected inland empires to oceanic routes. These were not primitive outposts. They were sophisticated, interdependent systems built on trust, reputation and openness.
And yet, in the modern imagination, this same geography is often reduced to a caricature. Economies without history. Societies defined only by recent oil wealth and conflicts. That gap between perception and reality is worth pausing on because for many of us, this is not abstract history – it is lived memory.
It certainly is for me. I have just returned to the UAE after spending Eid Al Fitr in India with family. Watching the tensions unfold from a distance brought a different kind of clarity. It reminded me that what feels like disruption often has much deeper echoes.
Along the Malabar coast, from Thalassery to Mahe to Kozhikode, the Indian Ocean was never a boundary. It was a living highway. By the 14th and 15th centuries, Kozhikode was already one of the most cosmopolitan trading cities in the world. Arabs, Persians, Africans and Chinese merchants arrived, and the system held without the need for imperial enforcement. When European powers arrived, including the East India Company, they did not create these networks. They inserted themselves into them.
In that context, our own family stories are beginning to make more sense. Pepper estates stretching from the Malabar belt into Kandy. Traders moving between Mumbai, Kolkata, Rangoon and Sumatra. Stories, some documented and some passed down, tell of African, Arab and Malabari lineages coming together over generations.
None of this is unusual when placed in the context of that time. It is exactly how this region functioned. This is why the Gulf does not feel like a departure – it feels like continuity.
The coastline of today’s UAE, once defined by pearling, trade and seasonal movement, was already embedded in these circuits. Sharjah, for instance, stood as a prominent port and commercial centre well before the rise of modern urban hubs of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
What has happened in the UAE since is not an accident of oil wealth or recent ambition. It is something far more deliberate. It is the refinement of a much older model. One that its founding fathers understood intuitively, and its current leadership continues to execute with clarity, conviction and relevance. It is a model built on openness, which is why moments like this – when Hormuz tightens and the region is viewed through the lens of conflict – can feel disorienting for those who live here.
The lived reality tells a different story. Even amid uncertainty, the UAE continues to function with calm, with safety and with a sense of forward motion that, to an outside observer, may seem improbable. To those on the inside, it is grounded in something deeper than optimism.
History shows us that the great ports of the world did not rise by restricting flows. They rose by facilitating them, especially during a conflict. They rose by creating conditions where trust could compound, where participation was rewarded, where people chose to come – not because they had to, but because it worked.
That is not just a historical observation. It is a strategic principle. It is visible today in how the UAE is operating, not only to withstand disruption, but to shape what comes after.
When President Sheikh Mohamed said that everyone who calls this country home is an Emirati, it was a reaffirmation of the logic that has sustained thriving societies across centuries – that inclusion is not just moral, it is structural. Prosperity follows openness, and geography – when understood well – can shape destiny across centuries.
At a time, when the world is increasingly choosing control over connection, perhaps the more important question is not what is happening in Hormuz but whether we have forgotten what made places like this matter in the first place.
One place has not. At the edge of Hormuz, the UAE has not invented a new model. It has understood an old one better than most and mastered it for the times ahead. What we are witnessing today is not just resilience in the face of disruption. It is continuity.
