Chapter 32 A Book

After Abdullah had left, riding off into the desert with several of his men, great clouds of dust and sand billowing behind them, Amira went back to her tent. To her surprise, she saw a book—The Making of Modern United Arab Emirates—had been placed on her bedside table. Was Abdullah being thoughtful, she wondered, or mocking?

Curious, she flipped through the book. She already knew the basics of UAE's history: its many years of peace, isolated as it was on a remote peninsula, jutting out into the Arabian Sea. While war had passed it by, so had technology, and for centuries it had remained as it had always been, a cluster of tribal communities with little interest beyond their nomadic life of shepherding. Then, in the early 1800s, Sheikh Ahmad al Bakir Ibrahim, the great-great-grandfather of Hashem Abu Bakir Ibrahim, had united the tribes and created a monarchy. He'd ruled the Arab States for nearly fifty years, and since then there had only been peace and prosperity.

None of it told he