Today, we’re diving deep into the rich tapestry of the United Arab Emirates through the lens of its national anthem, "Ishi Biladi" or "Long Live My Nation." This anthem not only serves as a symbol of national pride but also encapsulates the historical journey of a nation that transformed from the Trucial States into a modern marvel of tourism and culture. We’ll journey there and explore the UAE’s vibrant past, its cultural landmarks, and the remarkable records it holds. Along the way, we’ll meet the creators behind the anthem prove that creativity thrives under pressure. So, buckle up as we take this whirlwind tour of history, music, and a dash of humor, all while uncovering what makes this anthem resonate not just in the Emirates, but across the globe.

1. https://www.khaleejtimes.com/uae/national-day-meet-the-man-who-wrote-uaes-national-anthem 
2. https://www.islands.com/1772450/world-fastest-coaster-thrilling-theme-park-abu-dhabi-ferrari-formula-rossa/ 
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6. https://enhg.org/bulletin/b26/26_02.htm#:~:text=It%20comprises%20an%20unusual%20suite,than%2070%20million%20years%20ago. 
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21. https://web.archive.org/web/20180208122157if_/http://www.albayan.ae/across-the-uae/news-and-reports/2013-12-14-1.2020207 
22. https://web.archive.org/web/20200918175745/https://www.emaratalyoum.com/local-section/other/2010-12-02-1.323878 
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24. https://www.bayut.com/mybayut/uae-national-anthem/ 
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33. https://countrystudies.us/persian-gulf-states/85.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20200403083719/https://u.ae/ar-ae/about-the-uae/fact-sheethttps://web.archive.org/web/20200403083719/https://u.ae/ar-ae/about-the-uae/fact-sheet 
34. https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/pride-of-poet-who-penned-the-words-of-uae-national-anthem-1.293594 

Foreign hello and welcome to the Anthems Podcast. I'm Patrick and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation. Today we are taking a 13,834 kilometer trip.

8,590 miles. I don't know why, but we're in a hurry this time.

So maybe it's just a novelty of traveling through fiber optic cable and arriving in 65 milliseconds that gets us to be in a hurry.

But that means we're traveling over 130,000 miles per second, which is a speed that would likely kill a human in almost all of the situations on the planet. But it's way faster than the fastest roller coaster in the world, the Formula Rossa.

This coaster hits 149 miles per hour or 239 kilometers per hour, and they issue you a pair of goggles before you ride this thing. That means if you knew where it is because it's real, then you knew that we were talking about the United Arab Emirates.

We are in a country that used to be a part of the so called Trucial States, a British name. So spoilers, I guess, mostly because I have not yet taken us into the Middle east properly.

It's a fascinating part of the world and has a long history that we're going to get to take some samples of every time that we are here.

The uae, or simply the Emirates, I'll refer to it in a few different ways, is a great place to go first in this part of the world because they have the most world records of any other Middle Eastern nation.

There are 429 of them in Dubai alone, a place that you've almost certainly heard of if you have access to the Internet and are hearing this show, including the fastest roller coaster, tallest building, largest fountain, deepest pool, and many more I'm going to refrain from listing. It's a pretty amazing place.

It's the result of the government trying to make it a premier tourist destination for the planet, kind of succeeding in a lot of ways.

I can't claim to have a deep knowledge of the Emirates prior to reading for this episode, or really much at all, apart from a little bit about the food, because of course a small but consistent theme creeping into the show from my life is food. Because I love food from all the world's places. So yes, I have had the famed I can't get Kunafa Dubai chocolate and yes folks, it is delicious.

But more importantly, I have had Lamb Uzi at a local halal eatery.

It's a spiced lamb and rice dish that is deceptively simple to make, although it takes a very long time overnight for marinade purposes, but it manages to be an absolutely joyful thing that you get to eat.

I'm gonna have to experience it again soon, but now we're gonna have to go and experience a song My first thoughts on hearing this were that I liked the music, but I wasn't super keen on the lyrics. They felt a little bit formulaic.

But I've listened to it several dozen times since the first one because even in cases like this where it was an easy choice of which version to share, I want many interpretations of the song in my head while I'm learning about a particular anthem. So it has had time to grow on me quite a bit. Most of these do now anyway.

Or maybe I'm just starting to like national anthem music in general now that I'm fairly into the weeds with this stuff. Just like watching camel racing has kind of done. Seriously, I got so sucked into this stuff it's insane. Look it up on YouTube.

It might seem like a hard left turn topic wise, but that is the point. Sometimes camels are faster than I thought. They hit 40 miles an hour or 60 kilometers, 65 kilometers per hour in short bursts.

Fortunately, I discovered camel racing at a point in history where they no longer subject child jockeys to human rights violations and in instead they have moved onto robot jockeys that are controlled by people remotely as they ride around the outside of the course in tricked out sport utility vehicles. Which might be the craziest part I'd imagine.

It's a sport that, despite being hundreds of years old, or perhaps in part because of it, it's mostly the parlance of people with a bunch more money to spend than I've got. It's also fascinating example of something really old changing with the times eventually.

So where in the world am I going to go if I want to watch it live?

This one is tricky to get a lot of people in the US too, if you're under 40 years old and you haven't paid attention to geopolitical events in the past 30ish years, because the Middle east is a part of the world that gets a Lot of hand waving in the news here. We talk about it enough, but nobody ever talks about where in the world it is. For listeners of my show, it won't be too hard to find.

I could find it because coverage from the second Iraq war, I paid attention to that. It was the first major news event that I remember seeing on live television in one of my friends kitchens.

For people that don't remember this stuff, let's assume we can all find Africa and Madagascar is the large island off the east coast of Africa, south of the equator. It's a pretty big island. From there head north past Seychelles Episode four, then just past the Gulf of Aden.

That's in between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula of which the UAE is a part. It's the large chunk of land that sort of resembles a big chunky ski boot that sits in between Africa and Asia.

Now follow the peninsula's coast along Yemen and then Oman all the way through the Gulf of Oman. And right before you round the bend into the Persian Gulf you reach the coast of the uae. The west, south and southeast borders are with Saudi Arabia.

Oman is to the southeast and northeast with a disputed northwestern border with Qatar. They enjoy about 400 miles of Gulf coast and some disputed islands with Iran and Qatar.

The slightly more than 10 million people that live there are in a country mostly successfully diversifying out of an oil based economy into things like tourism as I mentioned earlier on, and they had at least some people living in it for 130,000 years. The reason that many of them were able to live there was something called an oasis because of the large expanses of desert in the country.

So this month's geology term is oasis. The importance of them is found right in the etymology of the word, because they were called wahi or a dwelling place in the Coptic language. Why?

Because you could get water there and grow things and you could not for many miles around because of all the desert.

There are a few different ways that water is accessible in oases, but they are not always through human means, just mostly through human means because like things like lakes exist and springs.

But the places are vital to trade routes that have been established thousands of years ago and they've been instrumental in shaping regions through the influence of migration routes and sometimes direct military occupation in order to control migration routes. The ones on the Arabian Peninsula tend to be spring fed or through tunnel systems that are dug to tap aquifers.

Despite their importance in the region, oases don't actually figure into where we enter the timeline here. Another thing in nature that was important to the development of the Arabian Peninsula and perhaps present to the timeline are pearls.

But we're not going to get buried in that history with the Emirates because it is a far more important part of Bahrain's history. So we're going to enter the timeline after the turn of the 19th century with more British colonialism.

We haven't been there in a couple episodes at least, but because of the pearl industry, I gotta at least mention the Portuguese.

That empire certainly teed up a lot of the problems that we're gonna kind of ram through going forward in this episode by raiding a bunch of the coastal towns and establishing an exploitive tax system that stayed there for a couple of hundred years. So like a bunch of this stuff, it has a lot to do with them moving on.

The British had been calling the coast coast of the Gulf the pirate coasts since at least the latest 18th century because the Portuguese had left the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula feeling kind of hostile against Western ships in their coastal waters. I'm sure there's a bunch of actual piracy that was happening for sure.

But I'm also sure that the British were not trying to de escalate the situation in a way that made sense to literally anybody but a British guy in the Royal Navy. As such, I'm also sure that a sizable portion of the so called piracy was legitimate defense against British aggression.

What was really happening was the Al Qasimi regime didn't want Europeans doing colonialism in their country because colonialism sucks for your country. And the British didn't want anybody trading with India that they weren't making money from. And modern day Gujarat is close to the Persian Gulf.

For full disclosure, I will say that I have not done any reading at all about India. My knowledge there is also thin. I know timelines are long, much longer in India than they are in my country.

And Gujarat might have been a State about 200 years ago. Probably was, I don't know. I'll get there when we go to India.

The East India Company and the Royal Navy teamed up in order to protect British interests and force a cessation of hostility by stabilizing the situation with a hostile action.

Just a couple of ships of complete slaughter and a prompted action by the Royal Navy and the army when they put more than 6,000 men there via sea and land. Details of that can be heard about on other shows and in other books.

I will note from the perspective of the people that live there, it definitely looked and felt like the British were an invading force because of all the invading that they were actively doing.

Which starts to feel awful. A lot like a union of sorts, if I must say.

I do know that Saad's uncle was Mohammed Abdel Wahab and he was a strong contender for most important Egyptian composer of the 20th century. I'm also pretty sure we will talk about that guy again on this show.

Eventually he relocated to the Emirates for some time and worked with radio stations on national music. I'll note that my sources on Wahab were few and the dates in most of this stuff were vague.

Palestine Hospital actually. After losing a three year battle with an unspecified illness, he left a legacy of hundreds of songs, eight movies and a national anthem.

I have not seen any of his movies, but I have a bunch of his songs in rotation now on my algorithm. You should listen to him. Guy's got quite a voice. It's a shame that I have been unable to locate a copy of him singing the anthem.

Let's talk about a poet.

A note about the word chic is that it is a title that means different things in different cultures in different contexts. Abdullah is an Islamic scholar and sometimes they are given the title as an honorific.

I'm not sure what he's been up to since then because Hassan is alive and well as of this release, but activities have included writing and deep thought because the terms poet and scholar are correct. Descriptions of this man in addition to his work as a Sharia notary and years as an advisor on the Council for Community Service.

They are from a variety of scholarly disciplines as well, including education, Sharia law and contemporary royal history.

Like I mentioned, he is still with us and in fact, after a time jump back to catch up to history, we are going to hear from an interview with the good doctor himself about how he wrote the anthem. The seven emirates that make up the modern UAE are all older than the country itself by at least 100 years.

And by the time oil was discovered in Abu Dhabi later in a decade, the US started to take British contracts out the leaders of the various sheikdoms.

The official historical record states that Britain just couldn't afford to have a protectorate military presence in the area because by this time the presence of a protector had become something that the crucial states wanted to keep.

Actually, the offer for the Emirates to pay the cost of keeping the ships was rebuffed by the Crown and following from that there was a series of events that was super complicated, so I'm just going to say all of it happened and it yielded a draft constitution in what might have been record time. The seven emirates form the uae.

They apparently had Saad compose the anthem and they wanted to make sure they met the constitutional requirements, which do include having an anthem. Initially. I can find no specific information on why they picked the type of anthem they had or had composed exactly what he did.

It's just an interesting moment when people are accidentally direct about what that is. But to be fair, this minister was probably genuine.

They probably genuinely wanted the kids to have something to sing and they were not thinking about geopolitical theory at the time. They moved ahead with the idea and decided that they would use the tune that Saad had composed and have a poet write lyrics for it. Dr.

The minister wanted the anthem in a hurry though, and based on my sources, he didn't really have a reason for that other than, you know, just wanting the decision to be completed. So the poet was given a cassette tape in three days.

Initially he had trouble with the task because they'd never written for existing music before and instead just had music set to what had been written.

But after listening 60 or so times, they were able to produce a song and his wife gave him a no note situation and said, you should just submit that because it's pretty good. And of course that is what the Ministry chose. With that we've got our anthem. We've got more to say about it, but we've got it.

And I can go on to talk about the song itself. Musically speaking, we are a again in the familiar territory of a march like tune in 44 with a major key.

Every time I hear an anthem composed in it, my association between that and an uplifting patriotism are strengthened. It's got kind of a ceremonial brightness to it that makes it feel pretty good.

In a variety of arrangements from solo piano to a full brass military band. A purposeful tune with bold rising lines that does not vary. There is no swing and sway in the purpose driven melody that this song represents.

Solid, confident and finished stuff. I like it. I've got very little else to say about surprises me though, because it almost seems like sod was filling out a form to compose this thing.

It's like Mad Libs for composition for national anthems. Except not crazy like Mad Libs content to get. Honestly though, there are people who are pretty sure that his uncle composed this song.

I don't think so. It is not Arab fanfare. And that will not make sense for an undetermined number of episodes. Spoilers in that sentence.

Now, this is a different style of music. It should maybe feel generic to me, but I find myself enjoying anthems more often than not now.

Maybe especially a song that if I heard it and I knew nothing else about it or nothing at all about it, I would think that's gotta be an anthem. With another song in the Arabic language, I am again up against contextualism.

A contextual language which is very different from the language that I speak or languages that I kind of know makes it tough for me to translate things. I am also very much and very clearly not a linguistic scholar, which means that I've got a few translations of the song and I've read a lot about it.

But ultimately I got to pick something that I'm just going to trust.

So I'm going to go with an approximation of the version of the Arabic language Wikipedia article, because based on the edit history, there are several people there that are paying attention. This is another poet that understood the assignment but was given very little time to get it done. What might have been written on Erif's schedule?

It's impossible for us to say, but I bet it would be pretty great.

It's so it should not be a shock that a scholar of Islam was heavily inspired by traditional Islamic poetic meters and wrote something that is very easy to chant, almost close to not a poem. My sources say it's likely informed by Al Ramal or Al Camille meter.

But all looking into that got me was lost in the shocking complexity of traditional Arabic poetic meter. It's like such a rabbit hole. It's unbelievable. Actually. The Internet is an amazing learning tool, but I suffer from fascination stuff.

I'm fascinated by pretty much everything. So I have to like, put blinders on when I'm online because I get lost learning about things.

However, my show would be harder, probably impossible without other people thinking like that. So let's read through the translation and then I'll get into what the doctor is telling us.

The piece is written and sang in Arabic and I am reading an English translation. Long live my country. Long live our United Emirates. You lived for a people whose religion is Islam and whose guide is the Quran.

I have fortified you in the name of God. O homeland, my country, my country, my country, my country. May God protect you from the evils of time. We swore to build and work.

I work, be sincere, Work, be sincere. As long as we live, we will be faithful.

May security last and the flag Live long O our Emirates, symbol of Arabism we would sacrifice our blood for you we sacrificed our souls for you O homeland. We have a direct Like I alluded to before, almost not a poem. It's kind of a stack of declarations.

The nearly not a poem part comes through much more clearly in the translation than it does if you're listening to it sung in Arabic due to the rhyming aspect, but that's only true if you don't understand Arabic, I think is something I definitely understand better if I knew a bunch of different languages, but that's a limitation of this show. As with the composition, it gets a little bit of a checklist vibe for me.

I will say that this is not an uncommon thing in anthems, and it does not automatically make an anthem bad or good or any other adjective. You're allowed to not like these songs because music is subjective.

All I'm saying is that there are anthems we've covered that were winners of contests with very strict checklists and for what had to be left in and out of them that are also songs that I happen to really much enjoy.

To be fair, we also need to understand that our poet was given three days, so he's in a tight time frame here, and he was asked to write a song in the reverse order of how he would normally have done things. There are 10 lines, and we're gonna go tackle it as 10 themes, because I think that's almost gonna work for us.

The piece opens with a strong and direct statement of national pride and unity. I'm going to say again that our writer knew the assignment and applied his considerable skill to writing the correct anthem.

It's a good opening line, actually. Stirring and direct are on my anthem checklist.

Then the second line continues with direct as a theme, but this is pride in Islam and the teachings of the Quran and not the country so much.

It's not a surprise in a very heavily religious country whose official religion is in fact Islam, and where several of the ruling families have very good claims to descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

If you're interested in that stuff, I'm going to direct it to the Wikipedia to start, because that particular lineage is well documented and highly contentious in certain areas and not a topic that I am well qualified to talk about. Regardless, anchoring the country in Islamic tradition does speak directly to core Emirate values and the roots of the people there.

Following this close would lead a more contemporary believer to think of this stuff as blessings, rather than the older sounding fortified that I used but that's the better translation, so I've read, is fortified. But the theme of divine protection is in fact a direct beseechment for follows directly from the religious traditionalism in the previous verse.

Verse 4 continues to imply a strong preference for chantability, but I will say that it works well for me as sung, the verse, coupled with the fifth verse, kind of picking up the theme of divine protector rather than developing on it, are what gets the words formulaic checklist and filler sprinkled throughout.

A lot of what I read about this song, Evils of Time is a nice touch, though it's a great line, and protecting a nation from the ravages of the ages does seem different from fortifying it or strengthening it with divine power, which is where I run into the complications of a language that I'll get better with, because there's a bunch of Arabic countries, but this is only number two for me.

Onward to line six and a theme that we see again and again in an anthem, but is also one of the things that make this song work as well as it does literal nation building through duty, labor, and the sheer will of national effort.

The general consensus in my reading is that sincere is the right translation, but it feels kind of like a stodgy descriptor of the diligence that the vocal tone implies. That is, I think, the very first time that I've used the word stodgy as a descriptor of anything mildly fun.

It's not the wrong word, though, because the seventh verse takes a stab at loyalty, which is again not uncommon for anthems, since it fits well in the generally nationalistic intent of the things. But reinforcing devotion, despite being on theme, is something that maybe you shouldn't use the same phrase again twice to do again.

It actually works here in a lot of ways. It adds to the rhythmic chant available in this anthem, and it drives the verse along. So it sort of.

It sort of does what it's supposed to do, but you know, it's the same thing. Then a swing even deeper into anthem territory as the song asks for safety and the flag.

There are good terms for the medium, since the flag really means patriotic spirit and safety is peace.

That leads well into regional identity in the penultimate theme, symbol of Arabism, in case we've gotten lost here, even though I think this is the line that lacks the most in the song, it's a short, declarative statement, and according to the people that can read Arabic, it just sort of states in abstract and has no contextual grounding all in all, I I think Ishi Beladi it finishes strongly though it's an anthem territory. The last verse is a great sacrifice that has been made and will be made in the name of the nation.

A lot of western listeners will balk at the talk of violent sacrifice, but come on, anthems exist at all is a pretty western concept, and lots of these things are full of violence. Where do we get to? France?

Someday I'll write something that addresses anthems in a more general sense, but I'm not there yet, so we're putting a large pin in that statement. As far as violence, like I said, this is nothing. Wait, we don't spend time glorying in violence on the anthems podcasts.

But as far as violence goes, I've got no choice but to talk about the current anthem. And it's not even close to the worst that we've read so far. And you know there's more violent ones coming.

At least I think not yet, because a lot of what I do is asynchronous. Overall though, we're gonna get back on track here.

Overall, I don't dislike this, even though I recently said on a CAN fundraiser live stream that it is my least favorite anthem so far. But I think I'm just starting to like anthems. It's also early days. There's more than 160 of these things to go, so I've got some time.

There's gonna be bad ones, there's gotta be. But perhaps more importantly, my taste and knowledge are growing constantly. I try to make that a point. I'm understanding anthems better as I learn.

So this goes on the list as far as good anthems go, despite me thinking it's mid level inspired and it but it's exactly what it's supposed to be stuff. The slight emotional distance and historical feel of the anthem gets pretty right for the uae, despite the criticisms that it brings.

Maybe that's what we want in an anthem.

Sometimes you can consider that during the credits the writing, recording and production for the show are done by me and I wrote and played the theme music. The music was used with my permission. Unless otherwise noted, the anthems I play are public domain.

It's clipped out of a publicly available television clip that celebrates Independence Day equivalent in the uae.

My sources are contained in the show notes and the most direct way to get to those Show Notes is anthems podcast.com I can be found on Facebook and WhatsApp, although WhatsApp I've never been contacted on ever.

As the Anthems podcast I was thinking about the whole social media thing and maybe someone could reach out to me and let me know which network it would be good to get this show onto. Someone else definitely knows more than me about this so drop me a line. Until then.

My advertising budget is limited so I am asking you to help me get the episodes onto whatever platform you can with the hashtag anthemspod. Think Instagram, Mastodon, Blue Sky, Twitter or any of the other ones.

All you cool kids around that I have no idea about because I'm a guy in my 40s in the US.

It'd be cool if you shared this content with others and perhaps it will somehow lead to lingering human rights issues in a post child camel jockey world getting dealt with.

Maybe you are forced to confront whether or not you think color is real by somebody and you have been frozen by the because the answer you have involves some really complicated thoughts about quantum chromodynamics and it's impossible to have that conversation in the time that you have been allowed. So you settle for recommending this very episode of the Anthems podcast. I would take that.

But even if all that happens is that you listen to one more of these shows, I sincerely thank you for your time and I'll see you somewhere soon. Somewhere different.