Building on tradition at Qasr Al Hosn

Using simple materials and skills handed down through generations, a team of craftsmen from Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority show visitors to the Qasr Al Hosn Festival that building the traditional way has a great future.

Abdullah Hakim Dag works on splitting a palm using his heavy mallet. Silvia Razgova / The National

As he makes his way, calmly, methodically, along the 4-metre palm trunk, nothing distracts Abdullah Hakim Dag from the task at hand.

His job might look straightforward – using nothing more than a metal bar and a piece of wood to split the trunk precisely in half – but that’s because 26 years’ experience is being focused on each swing of the craftsman’s enormous mallet.

“He is our professor of palms,” explains Mohammed Khalifa, an archaeologist and Mr Dag’s immediate boss. The palms all come from Al Ain and Mr Dag can tell, just by looking at the trunks and fronds, the trees that will provide high-quality timber and those that will not.

“Some of the palm trees get too tall and they cannot be climbed, so we cut them down. Some trees fall down, others do not provide nice dates, so we use them as well, all with the permission of the municipality,” Abdullah Hakim Dag explains.

The two men are part of a small team from the historic buildings Section of Abu Dhabi’s Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA), using palm trunks, palm fronds, coral, stone and mangrove poles to demonstrate traditional building techniques in front of Qasr Al Hosn’s walls.

Between them, the seven members have more than 100 years’ experience, and in the case of the team leader, Mohammed Saleh Al Qayed, a direct link to Qasr Al Hosn’s past. Mr Al Qayed’s grandfather worked on Sheikh Shakhbut’s extension of the fort in the 1940s, while Mr Al Qayed’s father worked on Sheikh Zayed’s renovation of Sheikh Sultan bin Zayed fort in Al Ain in the 1980s.

In the demonstration area, the team have constructed a palm – or arish – shelter of the kind originally found all over Abu Dhabi and Al Ain, and a small replica of Qasr Al Hosn’s original coral, stone, and mangrove wood walls using techniques and materials that have remained unchanged for centuries.

While the Qasr Al Hosn display contains areas dedicated to the uses of the nakheel, or palm, and to the weaving of da’an – mats made of palm fronds that were traditionally used to form ceilings and walls – it is the mud pie sarooj display that captures the attention of the crowd.

A mixture of mud, straw, animal dung and fresh water, sarooj was traditionally used to waterproof roofs and as a liner for cisterns, water spouts and gutters. It bears the same name as the Wadi Sarooj in Al Ain, the only source of the mud that forms the material’s key ingredient. “There is no mud in Abu Dhabi,” explains the TCA Abu Dhabi archaeologist Mohammed Khalifa.

After the ingredients are mixed, they are formed into bricks and left to dry for a month before being baked in a kiln for anything between one and two weeks. After firing, the bricks are left to cool, then ground into a powder which is then mixed with water to create the surooj.

The key to creating a waterproof roof is to smooth the mixture by hand and to keep it relatively wet for the two to three days it takes to cure, as Mr Khalifa explains. “If you leave it to dry without water, it weakens, but the more water you add, the stronger it gets.”

Few of the festival visitors realise that the sarooj roof they are watching take shape at the festival is the result of a process that had taken almost two months to complete.

Suhail Al Hendaisi, from Dubai, is impressed. “Many people today are not aware of these things but this is the best way to explain the old ways.”

Dressed in immaculate white robes and proudly sporting a metal-tipped cane, Mr Al Hendaisi is one of the performers of the traditional Al Ayyalah, or stick dance, that takes place twice each day at this year’s festival.

For Mr Al Hendaisi, the artisan’s work is a direct link with the past and a tangible reminder of the way of life and traditions that defined his childhood. “This was my family’s life. Forty years ago, this was everybody’s life in the Gulf.”

The display at Qasr Al Hosn is not just a simple exercise in nostalgia. When not taking part in festivals, the team operate from a workshop at Souq Al Qattara in Al Ain, where they are responsible for sourcing and producing traditional materials that are used in the conservation and reconstruction of historic structures across the whole of Abu Dhabi emirate.

In part, the team’s job is the preservation and communication of skills that are not only part of a very necessary and living tradition, but which continue to sit at the very core of contemporary Emirati national identity.

For Zahra Ahmed Omar, a trainee primary schoolteacher studying at the Emirates College for Advanced Education in Abu Dhabi, it is essential that teams such as the one from TCA Abu Dhabi keep the tradition alive.

“In the past, our parents did this hard work. That is what allowed us to have what we have now. This may be our heritage but it shouldn’t just belong to our past. We need to keep it alive so that other countries can understand who we are.”