‘[T]his Shifting Present which we Call the Future' 1

At the entrance to the Bait al Banat – the Women's Museum – in Dubai is a display of personal possessions: a pair of glasses, two watches and a pen, donated by a Mr Ahmed Al Hashimi; and a traditional dagger donated by an unnamed individual. Above the display is a wall of photographs: portraits of men and women; groups at formal and informal gatherings; school children; older people in traditional costume; younger women in Western clothes, hair uncovered. Most are black and white, some in faded colour, some sepia tinted, dating back perhaps eighty years (Figure 8.1). Dr Rafia, the museum's Director, told me that people come in all the time to comment on the photos, recognising individuals – friends, family members – and telling their stories. The photographs and the display of personal items are reminiscent of the small display cabinets in Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence, opened in 2012 in the Çukurcuma neighbourhood of Beyog˘  lu, Istanbul, a museum established by the author as the material realisation of his novel of the same name (2008, 2010 in English), which captures through everyday objects the lives of his protagonists, as well as reflecting the social and cultural transformations of Istanbul as it engaged with Western modernity during the 1970s and 1980s. The novel's main protagonist, Kemal, obsessively collects objects that belong to Füsun, the young women he loves but cannot marry. The sense of loss and nostalgia links the personal story to the wider transformations Istanbul was undergoing at the time, and it is this same impulse that has driven many people to collect and preserve the objects of their lives as the Arabian Peninsula undergoes rapid development and negotiates its own relationship with modernity. This is one approach to museums and collecting in the Arabian Peninsula that has been explored in this book, and contrasts with the spectacular new art museums that dominate media attention; both are responses to globalisation.