Una dacha en el Golfo

Emilio Sánchez Mediavilla lived two years in Bahrain with his partner, who was assigned there for work. When he returned to Spain and finished writing this book, he knew that he could no longer return to the place that had been his home, because journalists are not welcome in a country that ranks 167th out of 180 in the elaborate press freedom classification. by Reporters Without Borders. Bahrain is a kingdom the size of Menorca in the middle of the Persian Gulf, between Saudi Arabia and Iran, subject to many of the sectarian and political tensions that are stirring up the Middle East. A Shiite majority country but governed by a Sunni absolutist monarchy, a former British colony, headquarters of the American Fifth Fleet, pioneer in the discovery of oil wells and in the workers' struggle of the Arab world, and the first Muslim country to decriminalize homosexuality; a country whose recent history has been marked by the savage repression that followed the 2011 revolution, which Sánchez Mediavilla rebuilds stopping in London and Berlin to meet with members of the dissent. This is the portrait of a society that combines the most advanced religious tolerance in the Gulf with underground veins of Wahhabi and Shiite rigor; It is a friendly destination for Western expatriates but a hell for Asian workers, subjected to cruel labor exploitation. A dacha in the Gulf dismantles even the iconoclasm the gravity of religion, of traditions, of the profession of journalist. And he does so by constructing a tale brimming with intelligence, with hilarious passages reminiscent of Nigel Barley in The Innocent Anthropologist; a vibrant chronicle, written with clarity, lucidity and beauty, that addresses the geopolitics of the Middle East, but also captures his daily life, made up of personal experiences, discoveries, amazes, perplexities and learning.