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He took out a pen and paper and began to sketch a heart with a torn coronary artery. This was the
damage done by one of the bullets to my father. Some people have told me what his last words were
alleged to have been, but there seems to be no way of really knowing. It is fascinating how people
invent events and utterances in the hope that they will make you feel better. From what I gather, my
father lost so much blood that he could not have survived the car ride to the hospital. I can only guess
at this stage, as there are differing accounts as to who actually pulled him from the scene and who
drove him to the hospital that day. It has made me very aware of how people report things, and how
people will differ when recounting the smallest of events. This is something you need to be aware of
when you hear people stating with certainty what happened centuries ago.
My father’s life ended in violence. This violence destroyed him. When I was twelve and reading
the newspapers from the day following his shooting, I felt that this violence was the only violence that
existed. Only the violence committed against my father had any presence, any meaning for me. Clearly
it was violence that outlived its moment and passed through across the years. What surprised me and
continues to move me to action is that this violence has imprinted itself across my mother and
siblings’ lives, and the lives of you and your brother. Because I was six when my father died, I
remember how, when you turned six years old, you worried for the entire year that I would die just as
my father had died.
Each of us has at the back of our minds the horror of passing before our children have matured to a
position of independence and wisdom. We think of leaving home and not coming back to you. Of
course, this feeling requires a decisive intervention. The short way out of this is to accept that
violence occurred and that violence can reoccur. Accidents happen. Life happens. But it is not
enough. I need to write to you now with all that I can give you and tell you. Even if it only begins to
make sense to you years from now.
I myself did not realize the prevalence of violence in our societies immediately. In fact, it took
years. It kind of trickled into my consciousness.
The broader realization that we are surrounded by violence in the Arab world struck me later—
when I was eighteen and Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. This is when we began to hear detailed
descriptions of violence being committed against people who were like us in the Emirates. The
violence took place in a context that had only been hinted at up until this point in 1990. The rhetoric
of Arab media and schooling had been that the Arabs were one people and one nation, bound by one
language. The Arab world has been gripped by the idea that we are a people of different origins,
tribes, and ethnicities but brought together by speaking the same language. There has been a dream of
uniting the Arab world from Morocco on the Atlantic Ocean to Oman on the Indian Ocean.
The states of the Arabian Peninsula—except Yemen, which has little oil and a large population—
enjoyed an economic boom throughout the 1970s and the 1980s because of the high price of oil and
the immense infrastructure that needed to be built. Throughout the 1980s, however, Iraq was at war
with Iran—in order to prevent the Iranians from extending their influence across the region. This was
seen by many as Iraq defending the Arab Gulf states. Once the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, the Iraqi