Kuwait
The small, oil-rich Arab emirate at the head of the Persian Gulf, a land of pearl divers and merchants turned wealthy by oil, of the famous diwaniya gathering, deep hospitality, and a proud, resilient people. The complete guide.
Kuwait is a small, wealthy country at the head of the Persian Gulf, in the corner of the Arabian Peninsula between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, with around four to five million people, most of them living in or around the capital, Kuwait City, on the shore of a fine natural bay. Once a modest town of pearl divers, fishermen, and seafaring merchants, Kuwait was utterly transformed in the twentieth century by the discovery of vast oil reserves, becoming one of the richest nations on earth. It is a hereditary Arab monarchy ruled by the Al-Sabah family, and a Muslim country whose culture is rooted in Bedouin desert traditions, the sea, Islam, and the famous hospitality of the Gulf, expressed above all in the diwaniya, the social gathering at the heart of Kuwaiti life. A striking feature of Kuwait is that its citizens are now a minority among a large population of foreign workers. This guide walks through the land, the heritage, the faith, the food, the festivals, and the customs in turn.
Overview
Kuwait is a small country at the northwestern head of the Persian Gulf, bordered by Iraq to the north and west and Saudi Arabia to the south, with the Gulf to the east. It is a flat, hot, arid land of desert, with little rain and almost no fresh water of its own, gathered around a fine natural harbour, Kuwait Bay, on whose shore stands the capital, Kuwait City, home to the great majority of the population. Counting its many foreign residents, the country holds around four to five million people, of whom Kuwaiti citizens are now a minority.
Kuwait is an emirate, a hereditary monarchy ruled by the Al-Sabah family since the eighteenth century. The head of state is the emir, currently Sheikh Meshal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, assisted by a crown prince and a prime minister drawn from the ruling family. Kuwait has long had the most active elected parliament in the Gulf, though it has lately been suspended. The official language is Arabic, with English very widely used. Islam is the religion of the state and of nearly all Kuwaitis, who are mostly Sunni with a large Shia minority. The economy rests overwhelmingly on oil.
A few deep forces shape life in Kuwait. There is the small desert land on its great harbour. There is the old heritage of pearling, the sea, and the merchant town. There is the staggering transformation brought by oil. There is the diwaniya, the gathering that lies at the heart of Kuwaiti society. And there is the conservative Arab and Muslim culture of faith, family, and hospitality. The sections that follow trace these and walk through the customs.
A desert and a harbour
Kuwait is a small, flat, arid country, almost all of it sandy or stony desert under a fierce sun, with searing summers, mild winters, and very little rain or vegetation, and no rivers at all, so that fresh water was always scarce and precious. What the land lacked, the sea provided, for the country's great natural feature is its fine, sheltered harbour, Kuwait Bay, a deep inlet of the Gulf around which the whole nation grew, and which gave the town its living for centuries.
The very name of the country comes from a word for a small fort or settlement by the water, and from the first Kuwait was a town that looked to the sea. Today the population is gathered overwhelmingly in the capital, Kuwait City, and its sprawling suburbs around the bay, a modern metropolis of towers, highways, and seafront, while the rest of the small country is largely open desert dotted with oil installations, and a few islands lie offshore, including Failaka, with its ancient ruins.
The desert and the bay between them shaped the old way of life: the sea gave fishing, pearling, and trade, while the desert was the home of the Bedouin nomads with their camels and their tents, and Kuwaiti society grew from the meeting of these two worlds, the seafaring merchant town and the desert tribes. Though the old hardships are long gone, replaced by air-conditioned comfort and wealth, the bond with both the sea and the desert remains deep in the national memory. The desert and the harbour are the setting of Kuwaiti life.
The pearl divers and the dhow
Before oil, Kuwait lived from the sea, and its old prosperity rested on two things: the pearl and the trading voyage. For generations the great event of the year was the pearling season, when the men sailed out into the Gulf in wooden boats for long, hard months on the pearl banks, and the divers plunged again and again on a single breath to the seabed to gather oysters in the hope of a precious pearl, a punishing and dangerous life that shaped the songs, work chants, and memory of the country.
Kuwait was also famed as a town of seafaring merchants and shipbuilders, whose graceful wooden sailing ships, the dhows, carried dates, horses, timber, spices, and goods across the Gulf and the wider seas as far as India and East Africa, making the little port a busy hub of trade. The skills of building and sailing these ships, and the courage of the men who crewed them, were a great source of pride, and the dhow remains a beloved national symbol.
From the desert side of Kuwaiti life come the Bedouin crafts and arts that are also treasured, above all the weaving of the women on the traditional loom, the sadu, which produces bold geometric patterns in wool, and the stirring sword dance, the ardah, performed with drums and the chanting of poetry. The work chants of the pearl divers, the poetry of the desert, and the old crafts of sea and sand are carefully preserved as a precious heritage. This world of the pearl divers, the dhows, and the desert crafts is the foundation of Kuwaiti identity.
The coming of oil
The story of modern Kuwait is the story of oil, and of one of the swiftest transformations any nation has known. In the early twentieth century Kuwait suffered a double blow, as the rise of the cheap cultured pearl destroyed the pearl trade and hard times fell on the little town. Then, in the late 1930s, vast reserves of oil were discovered beneath the desert, and after the Second World War the country began to export it in enormous quantities, turning one of the poorer corners of the Gulf into one of the wealthiest places on earth.
Kuwait was among the first of the Gulf states to grow rich from oil, and the new wealth utterly remade the country in a generation. The old mud-walled town gave way to a modern city of towers and highways; citizens gained free education, healthcare, and generous support from the state; and Kuwait built itself into a centre of business, finance, and culture, with a lively press and a flowering of arts and learning that, for a time, made it a leading light of the Arab world.
So sudden was the change that living memory still holds the old world of the pearl and the dhow, and Kuwaitis work to hold onto their heritage and identity even as they enjoy the comforts of oil wealth. The great challenge of this fortune has been its narrow base, for the country depends heavily on a single resource whose price rises and falls beyond its control. This leap from pearls to oil is the central fact of modern Kuwait.
The diwaniya
If one thing stands at the very centre of Kuwaiti social life, it is the diwaniya, an institution found in Kuwait in a form and to a degree seen nowhere else, even among its Gulf neighbours. The diwaniya is a reception room, often a separate building or a tent beside the house, where men gather of an evening to sit, talk, drink tea and coffee, eat, and pass the hours in conversation, and it is the beating heart of Kuwaiti society, the place where friendships, business, and public life are all carried on.
Far more than a sitting room, the diwaniya has long been the forum of the nation, where men of every rank meet on common ground to debate the affairs of the day, from family matters to politics, where opinions are formed and consensus reached, and where, in a country with a strong tradition of political debate, election campaigns are waged and public feeling takes shape. To hold a diwaniya, open to friends, neighbours, and even strangers, is a mark of standing and generosity, and to be welcomed into one is to be welcomed into Kuwaiti life.
The diwaniya carries the deepest values of the culture: hospitality, for the host offers refreshment and welcome to all who come; equality, for within it men of high and low station sit and speak together; and community, for it binds society in a web of regular gathering. Though women have their own gatherings, and the wider world has changed much, the diwaniya endures as the living heart of Kuwaiti sociability. This gathering, found nowhere else quite the same, is at the centre of Kuwaiti life.
Faith and the family
Islam is the religion of Kuwait and the foundation of its values and way of life, and nearly all Kuwaitis are Muslims, the majority Sunni with a large and long-established Shia minority, the two living side by side. The faith shapes the rhythm of the day, with the call to prayer sounding five times from the mosques and Friday the day of communal worship, and it shapes the year, above all in the holy month of Ramadan, with its dawn-to-dusk fasting and its festive nights of family gathering, prayer, and feasting after the fast.
Kuwait observes the customs of the faith, with modest dress and the avoidance of eating, drinking, and smoking in public during the Ramadan fasting hours, yet it has also long been among the more open and tolerant of the Gulf states, with a tradition of lively debate and a place for the many faiths of its large expatriate population. In dress, Kuwaiti men wear the long white robe, the dishdasha, with the headdress, and women the black abaya.
Beneath the faith lies the family, the true foundation of Kuwaiti society, with strong and binding ties of extended family and tribe, deep respect for elders, and a clear sense of the proper order of age and kinship. Hospitality is a sacred duty and a point of great pride, and a guest is received with warmth, served coffee, tea, and dates, and treated with the generous courtesy of the old desert and sea codes. Faith, family, and hospitality together form the moral heart of Kuwaiti life.
Machboos and the Kuwaiti feast
Kuwaiti food is the rich and fragrant cooking of the Gulf, built on rice, meat, fish, and warm spices, drawing on the flavours of Arabia, Persia, India, and the Mediterranean carried in by centuries of seafaring trade. The national dish is machboos, a fragrant dish of spiced rice cooked with meat, chicken, or fish in a well-seasoned broth and flavoured with the special spice blends and dried limes of the Gulf, served at family meals and on every important occasion, often from a great platter around which the guests gather.
Other beloved dishes fill the Kuwaiti table: harees, a smooth, comforting porridge of wheat and meat slow-cooked for hours, especially loved in Ramadan; qouzi, a whole roasted lamb served over rice; grilled and stewed meats; and fish and seafood from the Gulf, long a staple of the coast, eaten with the flat bread, the khubz, baked in special ovens. Dates and the cardamom-scented Arabic coffee, the gahwa, frame every meal and every welcome, offered to every guest.
Food in Kuwait is, above all, made for sharing, prepared in great quantity and served in large dishes set out in the diwaniya, where family and guests gather to eat together as a mark of the host's generosity. Sweets such as the syrupy fried dumplings called luqaimat finish the feast, and the country's large and varied foreign population means the foods of the wider world, especially of South Asia and the Levant, are everywhere too. Rich, fragrant, and made for sharing, Kuwaiti food reflects the country's bond with the sea, the desert, and the wider world.
National Day and the scars of war
The Kuwaiti year is shaped above all by the festivals of Islam: the holy month of Ramadan, the spiritual high point, with its fasting and its festive nights, followed by the joyful festival of Eid al-Fitr that marks its end with feasting, new clothes, and gifts for children, and later the feast of the sacrifice, Eid al-Adha, kept during the season of the pilgrimage to Mecca. A charming Ramadan tradition is Gergean, held in the middle of the holy month, when children in bright traditional dress go from house to house singing old songs and gathering sweets and nuts.
Kuwait's great national days fall together in late February: National Day, which marks the country's independence, and the day after it, Liberation Day, which carries a deeper and more solemn meaning. For in 1990 Kuwait suffered a terrible blow, when neighbouring Iraq invaded and occupied the country for seven months, a brutal time of suffering, looting, and destruction that scarred the nation, until an international coalition drove the occupiers out and liberated the country in early 1991.
That ordeal and that liberation are seared into the national memory, and the late-February celebrations mix joyful patriotism, with flags, parades, music, and festivity filling the streets, with solemn remembrance of those who were lost and a deep, abiding pride in the country's survival and recovery. Weddings and family occasions are great events too, marked with feasting, music, and dance. These festivals, joyful and solemn, are woven deep into Kuwaiti life.
The nation today
Kuwait today is a small, wealthy nation living on its oil, which has given its citizens one of the highest standards of living in the world, with free schooling and healthcare and generous state support, even as the country wrestles with its heavy dependence on a single resource and the need to plan for a future beyond it. As in its Gulf neighbours, a great population of foreign workers, drawn above all from South Asia and the wider Arab world, now far outnumbers the citizens and keeps the country running, making Kuwait a society of two very different worlds living side by side.
In its politics, Kuwait has long stood apart from its neighbours for its tradition of vigorous public debate and its elected National Assembly, the most powerful and outspoken parliament in the Gulf, whose clashes with the government have repeatedly led to deadlock, dissolutions, and fresh elections. In 2024 the emir took the dramatic step of dissolving the assembly and suspending parts of the constitution for a period of years, to review the way the country is governed, so that Kuwait is at present ruled by the emir and his cabinet. Its place in a turbulent region weighs on it, bordering Iraq and Iran and feeling the dangers of recent conflict in the Gulf.
Through it all, Kuwait holds firmly to the heritage built over its history. The desert and the harbour still shape its life; the old world of the pearl, the dhow, and the merchant town remains a proud memory; the diwaniya still gathers the nation evening by evening; and the conservative Arab and Muslim culture of faith, family, and hospitality still orders Kuwaiti lives. Small, rich, and resilient, having survived war and rebuilt itself, Kuwait carries its traditions into a changing future.