I spent many long years in social and cultural studies and research, sitting with elders across most regions and villages of the United Arab Emirates. Many of those encounters took place beneath roofs made from palm trunks and fronds, where the scent of dates and Emirati coffee filled the air. Those men were gifted practitioners of the literary arts — poetry, proverbs, and deep stories carrying the wisdom and experience of their forebears.
Most of the elderly people I met in the UAE — among my relatives and acquaintances as well — would recite ancient Emirati Nabati poetry without paper or book, knowing it by heart. The verses would flow from their chests spontaneously, as though the poem pulsed with their own heartbeat and breath.
I would ask: "Did you compose this poem yourself?" Sometimes the answer was yes, and sometimes: "I memorised this poem from my grandfather, and he memorised it from his grandfather, and so it has been for hundreds of years."
In those moments I always contemplated this integrated body of knowledge, built on memorisation, transmission, and a physical and spiritual engagement with the text — one that reproduces itself in every generation. This knowledge rests on the body, the voice, the rhythm, the presence of the narrator and the audience. It is living knowledge, built in the moment and rebuilt with every performance.
I often wondered: how can a poem cross all those centuries, from chest to chest, from gathering to gathering, without losing a single letter or a particle of its spirit? How do these men memorise hundreds — indeed thousands — of verses, as though they are engraved within them? These questions led me to think deeply about the nature of oral knowledge and to contemplate alternative epistemologies that differ radically from the Western perspective on heritage.
In the ancient traditions of India, for example, the Vedic heritage was transmitted orally through the "guru-shishya" system (teacher and disciple) for more than 3,500 years without a single word being written down. The disciple would sit before his teacher for years, hearing the text and repeating it until it became part of his very being.
In the "Ifa" knowledge system of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, philosophical and spiritual teachings are presented through stories, proverbs, and chants that priests memorise and pass on orally. These knowledge systems pose a fundamental question: can heritage be living knowledge that is not reducible to the written text?
The UAE possesses an immense wealth of this oral heritage. For centuries, Nabati poetry was recited, memorised, and passed between tribes, carrying stories of heroism, love, pride, and generosity. A poem would leave the chest of a poet in one gathering, be carried on lips from person to person, and fly with travelling caravans to distant tribes — as though it were a letter crossing the desert without ever being written.
Likewise, the maritime chants that resonated along the shores of the UAE carried within their melodies knowledge of navigation, the names of stars, and the seasons of pearl-diving. Every melody held a secret, and every word was a guide to a route or a season. These bodies of knowledge therefore remained alive in people's memory even though they were never set down in books.
In Western philosophy we have grown accustomed to regarding writing as a precondition for systematic thought. We read Plato and Aristotle through their texts and assume that thought begins where the lips fall silent.
But those sessions in those gatherings taught me that knowledge is born in the spaces between sounds — in the pause for breath between one verse and the next, in the glance a narrator casts at the audience searching for a response.
There, where speech stops, true meaning begins. This oral knowledge needs no page to fix it, because it fixes itself each time a chest repeats it and settles in every heart that listens.
Today, as this heritage is revived, we ask: how do we engage with this oral knowledge? Is it enough to record it on discs and in books, or must we preserve its living character — that physical and spiritual relationship between performer and receiver? The greatest challenge is preserving the spirit of oral heritage.
It is possible to record thousands of poems and chants in vast databases, but it is impossible to transfer the feeling that overtakes a listener when they hear a poem from the lips of an elderly narrator — a moment in which the listener becomes a partner in the construction of meaning, interacting with the voice, the rhythm, and the presence.
This is the essence of oral epistemology: knowledge built in the moment and rebuilt with every performance, bound to its social and spatial context — knowledge that is as physical as it is intellectual, as collective as it is individual.
Building a global philosophy of heritage requires opening ears to other ways of knowing — to voices that were never set down in books yet still resound in gatherings, in markets, and along the shores of the sea.
Every one of those voices carries a complete philosophy, a vision of the world, and a knowledge system that deserves to be read, understood, and studied. Its very orality is a virtue, for it pulsates with the life people live in their daily details. Oral heritage is the act itself, the presence itself, the relationship that constructs meaning in the moment of exchanging voice, rhythm, and emotion. The true philosophy of heritage begins where writing stops — and life begins.