Small Sources, Wide Waters: Writing Stories from the Gulf

With Ahmed Y. Almaazmi
Ages 18+
In English and Arabic
 

Engage with the Arabian Gulf as a gateway to a much wider oceanic world. Who carried the letter across the sea? Who waited for the dhow to return? How can a pearl, passport stamp, family photograph, recipe, shipping receipt or school certificate reveal lives shaped by movement across the open waters?

Through ports, monsoon routes, archival fragments and everyday objects, explore the Gulf’s long-standing connections to South Asia, East Africa, Arabia and beyond. Uncover the Gulf as an oceanic archive, where small sources lead to wide waters and traces of the everyday give rise to extraordinary histories.
 

Beginning with an introduction to Indian Ocean history, this course traces how goods and people—sailors, merchants, pearl divers, pilgrims, domestic workers, students—moved across the sea. The ocean emerges not only as a historical force, but as a workplace, a site of danger and a repository of memory.
 

How do we read a photograph whose caption is incomplete? How do we listen to a family story without turning memory into myth? How do we approach colonial archives, travel documents, maps, objects and oral testimony with care? You will learn to read with, against and around a source, asking what it reveals, what it hides and what wider histories it opens. Then you will transform your chosen source into a short piece of historical writing. Moving from source to scene, from question to oceanic context, formulate a framework for a micro-history. Begin with one small trace and follow it outward towards larger histories spanning trade, labour, empire, slavery, citizenship, oil, gender and kinship.
 

These hands-on sessions combine short lectures, mapping exercises, source analysis, guided writing and peer discussion. By the end of the course, you will have developed a source-based micro-history idea, an oceanic context map and a first draft of a short article.

This session is free, and all materials are provided by Sharjah Art Foundation.
 

The Foundation is committed to making its programmes inclusive and accessible. You can arrange for any support needed through the registration form.
For more information, email learning@sharjahart.org, or call (06) 544 4113.

About Ahmed Y. Almaazmi

Ahmed Y. Almaazmi is an Emirati historian and academic whose work focuses on Gulf history, the Indian Ocean World and cultural anthropology. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Tourism and Heritage at United Arab Emirates University. His research examines the circulation of people, ideas and knowledge across Arabia, East Africa and South Asia, with particular attention to empire, science, law, environmental infrastructures and material culture in the wider Indian Ocean World. Almaazmi received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, where his dissertation, ‘An Enchanted Sea: Occultism, Empire, and Society in the Western Indian Ocean, 1450–1750’, was awarded the 2025 AGAPS Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award by the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies.