Ahmed Al-Mokarrab

By Andrew I. Killgore

Economic prospects and conditions for the future were bleak when the Ambassador to Washington of what was to become the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was born, shortly after World War II. The traditional pearling industries of the Gulf had been wrecked by the introduction of Japanese cultured pearls in the early 1930s. The subsequent World War II period had been hell for Iranians and Arabs alike on their opposite shores of the Gulf. Everything was in miserably short supply in the neglected backwaters of the then still almighty British Empire.

Sharjah, where Ambassador Ahmed S. Al-Mokarrab was born, is now one of the seven constituent Arab sheikdoms making up the oil rich UAE. It was certainly no exception to the general picture of stark depression. Even the most imaginative reader of A Thousand and One Nights, with its magical tales of pauper turning into prince, could not have dreamed what the future held for those seven emirates. Perhaps great wealth might have been imagined, but few people could have dreamed that one day the inhabitants would enjoy an easy familiarity with Geneva, Paris, London, and New York. But that is what happened.

In the mid-1950s the Arab states of the Gulf were poised for decades of meteoric development fueled by gigantic reserves of petroleum. Ahmed Al-Mokarrab was then a schoolboy. The leaders of his country were preoccupied with finding enough talent in a still underdeveloped and extremely conservative Muslim society to direct the coming changes, while maintaining the traditional religious and social values of Islam in the fundamentally altered world to be.

After finishing high school in Sharjah he went off to Kuwait where, in May 1970, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Kuwait. After a course of diplomatic training in Abu Dhabi, capital of UAE, he was assigned as Third Secretary in his country's embassy in Beirut. There he met and married his Lebanese wife. They now have a 12-year-old son and two daughters, aged 8 and 4.

In Beirut Ahmed Al-Mokarrab's diplomatic career began to take off, as the UAE's trade, diplomatic, and economic presence in world affairs burgeoned. From Third Secretary in early 1972, he was promoted to First Secretary and then to Minister within two-and-a-half years. In 1974 he was named UAE Ambassador to Japan. Quick intelligence, excellent language skills, and a particularly winning personality were keys to his rapid advancement.

Sent to Washington in 1981

Nearly six years ago, at 34 years of age, Mr. Al-Mokarrab became UAE Ambassador to Washington, perhaps his country's premier diplomatic assignment. His high-speed career advancement paralleled the feverish pace of development in every field in his home country. There schools, university faculties, modern houses, high-rise office buildings, factories, and lush parks, farms and fields had arisen on lands that were barren salt flats only a decade earlier.

Other able young men and women were returning from universities in the Middle East, Europe, and the US to staff the government, run the banks, manage the factories, and invest billions of dollars from up to two million barrels per day of petroleum exports. Somehow the bedouin-based sea-faring culture almost overnight had produced brains and ability when these were needed on a massive scale.

The conservative Islamic society from which Ambassador Al-Mokarrab stems has proved to be both stronger and more flexible than might have seemed possible only a generation ago. Although skeptics predicted that the seven sovereign components of the UAE would prove too disparate and fractions to hold together, internal cohesion has in fact endured. Western technology was absorbed by a deeply religious people without lessening their submission to the will of God (the literal meaning of Islam) and their deep devotion to a kinship and family-oriented way of life.

Ambassador Al-Mokarrab is old enough to recall personally the period of poverty in Gulf lands that folled the decline in pearling and preceded the rise of oil. His is a family of distinguished lineage which has long played a leadership role in Sharjah. His cousin, Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammad al-Qasimi, is the current ruler. The Ambassador accepts with equanimity and becoming humility the fantastic changes in his homeland during his lifetime. His is the same peculiar serenity that characterized his ancestors' acceptance of the vagaries of the desert, where four inches of rainfall in a year was the margin between comfort and hunger.

It was good preparation for the present Gulf environment, where fluctuations in rainfall played in the past. As history has proved, however, changes in the physical environment, no matter how sudden or violent, leave essentially untouched the religion, culture, and outlook of Ambassador Al-Mokarrab's people, who for centuries have thrived on challenge and change.

Andrew I. Killgore, former US Ambassador to Qatar, is President of the American Educational Trust.