By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 27, 2006

FUJAIRAH, United Arab Emirates -- First were the roads, Fatima Zaabi recalled, ribbons of asphalt that untwined a generation ago across a desert where life and its traditions had changed little in centuries. On those roads came the officials from the government of the newly independent United Arab Emirates. And with those officials, she said, came the doctors and their modern ways.

"It seems that the more doctors who came to town, the more diseases that came with them," she said.

Zaabi laughed, as she often does. It was a response that suggested a lost innocence tinged with pride. There is cholesterol now, she said, diabetes and blood pressure. What about migraines? she asked, baffled at the name.

"We didn't have them in the past. And if we did, we didn't notice them." She glanced at her adoring niece and smiled. "Back then, a woman didn't even know she was pregnant until it was five months and something was moving around in there."

Zaabi, known as Um Eissa, laughed again.

She doesn't know her age. "In the fifties," she said. "Maybe 50, I don't know." For her, age is measured in experience, not in years, and it is experience that gives her perspective. Zaabi is a matriarch, a Muslim, an Emirati and an Arab at a time in her country when all those identities are in flux, amid relentless modernization that began in the 1970s, propelled even faster now by the highest oil prices in history. She remembers what was, sees what is and is left reconciling the two.

Zaabi lives in Fujairah, one of seven small monarchies that make up the United Arab Emirates, along the turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. When she was a child, fishing and farming brought in a few dollars. Today, the annual per capita income is more than $21,000 and nearly 10 percent of the world's oil is within the emirates' borders. There are 88 cellphones for every 100 people.

From beneath her black gown, Zaabi pulled out one of those devices and belted out a string of salutations.

"I'll call you later," she shouted. "I have guests now."

And back she ventured to a reservoir of memory, the relics of another life that she has collected over the years near her home.

"There weren't dishwashers in those days," she said. "It was all by hand, and it was torture."

She pointed to a lantern, obsolete with the advent of electricity. "We used this back then," she said.

Zaabi grasped a hanging bag, woven of palm fronds, where fruit and salted meat once hung, cooled by a breeze. Then she hurried to a sheepskin pouch that, when shaken, turned milk to cheese.

"Beautiful!" she cried out, and she moved on to a saddle, stitched of worn leather.

"You'd put it on the donkey's back and then you would ride," she said -- two days to Abu Dhabi, the capital, or two months across the desert to Mecca, the destination of the Muslim pilgrimage. "Thank God, it's not like that now."

"Sheik Zayed," she said simply. "God rest his soul."

Sheik Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan was the founder of the United Arab Emirates, in 1971, and he presided over the country's modernization until his death in 2004. A simple man, albeit with tremendous wealth, he is remembered fondly here, credited by many with maintaining tradition amid change. Those forces are still at work today -- with the breakneck growth of booming Dubai, where English has become a lingua franca, and with the vestiges of the past in a place like Fujairah, population 130,000, where conversations celebrate the success of Dubai, the U.A.E. capital, and recoil at its materialism, competition and, in the eyes of some, greed.

"This is the bull," Zaabi said, pointing to an animal sleeping in the shade.

Zaabi used to raise the bulls for farming, but no longer. The reasons vary: She said the land has become tired and the water too salty. Her brother-in-law said that when Muslims stopped paying their religious taxes, the rain stopped falling.

Today, the bulls fight. They were once matched against each other once or twice a year, but now they enter an arena every Friday, drawing hundreds of spectators. The fights, no more than a few minutes, are simple: The first bull to turn away loses.

"The battle begins!" shouted the announcer, Mohammed Khamis, plying the middle of the arena with a bullhorn.

Two lumbering bulls entered, held back by four men tugging at ropes that bound the animals. They loosened the ropes, and the bulls locked horns. Clouds of dirt billowed, and the bulls flew around the ring. At one point, they lurched toward the audience, sending spectators fleeing in another cloud of dust.

One of the bulls retreated, the other won, and the next match began.

The bulls have names, often arbitrary. One is called Rose, others Bumper, Spring and Missile. Zaabi never named the animals she bred, and as she has aged, she has ventured to the matches less often.

"I had more energy back then," she said, smiling and flashing her gold tooth.

Despite her complaints, Zaabi remains vibrant, swinging her arms as she walks forcefully, punctuating her talk with a quick wit. She takes stock of today and, every so often, gives thanks to God. Life is easier: There is education, money and work. They once ate fish -- at lunch and dinner -- caught by her father-in-law. Now every meal has "66 colors."

"But you know, back then, even though people might have been ignorant, there was always respect," she said.

"Somebody might study today, they might have money, they got educated in Britain, America and I don't know where else. And then you tell them, 'This is right, this is wrong,' and they tell me, 'What do you know?' They don't give respect."

"She's right about that," interjected Amna Zaabi, her 24-year-old niece, who is studying for a master's degree in information technology.

Respect is a word Zaabi uses often. In a way, it is a synonym for what she imagined once was: simplicity, morality and tradition, the building blocks of religious, traditional movements that have the most sway today elsewhere in the Middle East.

"Now, before a boy gets engaged to a girl, they ask, 'Does the girl work, where does she work, how much does she make?' They don't ask about her morals. Before, that's what they asked about," she said. "The people then were poor, true, but they were measured by their honor. Money has trumped that."

Zaabi married as a girl. She memorized the Koran, but was educated only to the fourth grade. In addition to her seven children, she helped raise the 12 children of her husband's three other wives. As she talked, she recalled an idealized space of another time: When eight families shared meals during the holy month of Ramadan, when she carried her twins, Mariam and Siham, to the family's farm with her husband, when extended families lived together in a few rooms. The old space is gone -- huts of stone and palm fronds replaced by stucco villas. With it went the relations and roles she knew.

"Now the maids do everything," she said. "You say, 'Hello, can you deliver the dinner for me?' "

With long strides, leaning forward, she entered the farm that she has worked for 30 years. She pointed out the date palms and almond, mango and pomegranate trees -- the homegrown fruit her family shared before the chemicals arrived and started producing apples she described as the size of soccer balls. The scent from a cluster of basil drifted along a breeze. Inside wire-mesh cages were 30 goats, a dozen chickens and a gaggle of rabbits. "There's no telling how many there are with them," she said with a laugh.

As she passed by them, her demeanor grew angry.

"No water," she said, shaking her head. "No food."

"Shame on you! You're not taking care of them," she scolded the farmhands. "Can you live without food?"

Amna shadowed her, wearing an expression of pride, respect and perhaps a hint of relief. As she walked with her aunt, she thought about the way life had changed.

"Everything was so simple back then, and everything is so complicated now," said Amna. "We miss that. We're more comfortable now, we have more freedom than before, we can go work with men. We can appreciate the life they had, but that doesn't mean we want it back." She thought for a moment about the change in her city and country. Good and bad, she suggested.

"It's like a weapon -- you can use it to defend yourself, but it can also backfire," she said.

As she talked, Zaabi crouched to the ground and started picking grass to feed the goats herself.

"Take a picture of me while I'm working," she beckoned.

She laughed, and bundled more grass. "I never left the life. Thank God, I never gave it up."

Special correspondent Nadia Rahman contributed to this report.