UAE National Day Part 2 - The Flag

The UAE Flag

The National, an English-language daily here ran a nice article last week about the man who is credited with creating the UAE national flag:

When Abdulla al Maainah saw details of a competition in a newspaper 38 years ago, he knew he had to participate. The advertisement came out of Sheikh Zayed’s royal diwan, and it solicited entries from artists to submit flag designs. The unification of the emirates was to be announced three months later, and the grand occasion was still missing an official flag.

He recalls the time leading up to the birth of his nation when, aged 19, he submitted his designs for the country’s flag.

“There was a day or two left for the deadline in the ad, and I didn’t have the right equipment. So I rushed out to get what I needed, and in one night I stayed up and drew my designs, and put them in an album and worried about not making the deadline.”

He entered six designs in the competition, which, according to him, drew a total of 1,030 designs. The committee in charge of choosing the winning design narrowed down the entries to six; among them was one of al Maainah’s flags.

“The papers ran the six nominated designs, but back then, all papers were in black and white. So I wasn’t certain that one of the flags was mine. It looked like mine, but there were no colours, so I couldn’t know for certain.”

But back then, al Maainah says, there was no real fanfare to commemorate the occasion. No one contacted him to inform him his design was one of six being considered, and when his design was finally chosen for the country’s flag, no one threw the usual high-honour festivities that we might expect today. He did not even know for sure that it was his design until he travelled down to the Mushrif Palace, where the flag was raised at the announcement of the unification.

“One day after announcing the unification, I was still unsure that it was my design,” he reveals. “None of the announcements were in colour. So I went down to the Mushrif Palace to see for myself. I recognised it right away when I saw it. It was my design. I was so happy. People were excited about the unification, but I was the happiest of all.”

The colours and stripes of the current flag have specific meaning, and nothing in the design came about by accident. The observant eye might notice the colour theme of the flag is also present in most Arab flags, and there is historical reason for this.

“The colours represent the colours of the Arab revolution,” al Maainah explains. He is referring to the Arab Revolt of 1916, initiated by Sherif Hussein ibn Ali, who worked closely with Lawrence of Arabia, against the Ottoman Empire, with the aim of establishing an Arab state that would have spanned from Turkey’s current southern border to Yemen.

The four colours in the flag are known as the pan-Arab colours, and are present in six other flags that represent Arab nations: Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, Sudan and Palestine. Other Arab flags incorporate some combination of these colours.

Rooted in the flag of the Arab Revolt, the four colours each represent an era in the region since the inception of Islam.

Black is for the early years of Islam, which includes the time of the Prophet and the first two caliphates: the Umayyads based in Damascus followed by the Abbasids based in Baghdad. The latter’s rule continued from 750AD to 1258AD, and reached as far west as modern day Algeria to as far east as India.

Green represents the Fatimids Caliphate, which ruled out of Egypt from 909AD to 1171AD over an area that spanned all of north Africa, the west coast of the Arabian Penninsula, the Levant, as well as Malta and Sicily.

Red was the colour of the Ottoman flag. Before unification, the emirates had a red and white flag. White represents both a concept and a historic period.

“White is for philanthropy,” says al Maainah. “It’s for charity and good deeds. The white flag also has its own sacredness. It represents the sovereignty of the state, and gives one a sense of pride.”

Flag graphics from WorldAtlas.com