📜 LEGEND · EXP. Nº3657
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Umm al-Duwais
Umm al-Duwais is a legend from United Arab Emirates and the Gulf, AE — a folk story passed down over generations. This file collects its origins, its meaning and how it has been retold.
Where does the legend of Umm al-Duwais come from?
- Location
- United Arab Emirates and the Gulf, AE
- Kind of legend
- Creature legend
- Coordinates
- 25.205, 55.271
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
What is the legend of Umm al-Duwais?
Umm al-Duwais is the best-known jinniyya of Emirati folklore: a young woman, beautiful and heavily perfumed, with a cat's eyes, one leg of a donkey and the other a sickle, and hands that are a pair of sickles. Her name says exactly that. In Gulf Arabic a sickle is a das, a word taken from Persian, and duwais is its diminutive, so she is the mother of the little blades. Emirati collectors have been writing her down since the 2000s: Hassan al-Marzouqi gave her six of the twenty-five tales in Hikayat min al-Imarat (2006), and Abdulaziz al-Musallam, who recorded her in the field for Kharareef (2007), argued that she is a mythical figure rather than a nursery tale, because so many people relate having seen her and kept away. She appears at night, in lonely places and inhabited ones alike, draws a man who is on his own, and kills him; in one of al-Marzouqi's tales she disappears the instant he speaks the name of God. Sharjah's heritage festival puts her in a haunted house every February, and a novel, a horror film and a generation of Emirati women artists have been arguing about her since.
What is the history of Umm al-Duwais?
Umm al-Duwais is not a story about a place. She is a being, and the Emirati books that collect her file her under kaa'inat khurafiyya, mythical creatures, alongside Baba Daryah who takes fishermen at sea, Umm al-Hilan the envious old woman, Abu Salasel wrapped in chains and the headless camel.
Her name is a description of a weapon. In Gulf Arabic a sickle is a das, a word borrowed from Persian, and duwais is its diminutive. Almost every Emirati account gives her the same anatomy: a young woman, beautiful and heavily perfumed, with a cat's eyes, one leg a donkey's leg and the other a das, and hands that are a pair of sickles. The anthropologist el-Sayed el-Aswad, then professor at United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, gave the same derivation in a study published in Turath, the magazine of the Emirates Heritage Club in Abu Dhabi, in its issue 131 of August 2010.
She entered print late, and that is the honest thing to say about her. The oldest datable printed cluster of Umm al-Duwais tales I have been able to fix is Hassan Abdulrahman al-Marzouqi's Hikayat min al-Imarat, published in Dubai by Nadwat al-Thaqafa wal-Ulum in 2006: 148 pages, 25 tales, six of them hers. Their titles are Umm Duwais jinniyyat al-Imarat, Umm Duwais wal-Marwiyya, Umm Duwais wal-Badawi, Umm Duwais wa-Farhoud, Umm Duwais wa-sahib al-Kabir and Umm Duwais wal-Madhoub. Reviewing the book in Al Bayan on 19 February 2007, Abdulilah Abdulqader quoted the last of them: a man called Tarthouth meets a girl on a dark road who tells him her name is Shams al-Shumus; he answers wallah, by God, and she is gone, because it was not for her to remain in a place where the name of God is spoken. That detail, the invocation that dissolves her, is standard in the Emirati tradition and missing from almost every retelling in English.
The following year Abdulaziz al-Musallam, then director of heritage at Sharjah's Department of Culture and Information and later chairman of the Sharjah Institute for Heritage, published Kharareef: 224 pages of fieldwork among coastal, desert and mountain communities, covering twenty figures. He drew a distinction that decides how this file should be read. A khurufa is a tale told to children; Umm al-Duwais, he wrote, is a mythical figure more than a khurufa, because the accounts of her are not one fixed story but many, and because a great many people relate having seen her and having kept away from her. She is a belief legend with witnesses, not a nursery tale. Al-Musallam later expanded the work into the Encyclopedia of Mythical Creatures in Emirati Heritage (Sharjah Institute for Heritage, 2017, 559 pages), which catalogues thirty-six of them and has since been published in English and translated further.
Timeline: the documented record of Umm al-Duwais
- 2006 Hassan Abdulrahman al-Marzouqi publishes Hikayat min al-Imarat in Dubai (Nadwat al-Thaqafa wal-Ulum, 148 pages): 25 tales taken from grandmothers, of which six are Umm al-Duwais stories. It is the oldest datable printed cluster of her tales I have been able to fix.
- 19 February 2007 Reviewing the book in Al Bayan, Abdulilah Abdulqader quotes the tale Umm Duwais wal-Madhoub: a girl on a dark road gives her name as Shams al-Shumus and vanishes the moment the man says wallah, by God, because it was not for her to remain where the name of God is spoken.
- 2007 Abdulaziz al-Musallam, head of heritage at Sharjah's Department of Culture and Information, publishes Kharareef, 224 pages of fieldwork among coastal, desert and mountain communities covering twenty figures of the Emirati imagination.
- 3 September 2009 Al Bayan quotes al-Musallam's book at length: Umm al-Duwais is a young, perfumed, beautiful woman with one donkey's leg and one das, a sickle, who appears to men in remote and inhabited places alike, and she is a mythical figure more than a khurufa because so many people relate having seen her.
- August 2010 The anthropologist el-Sayed el-Aswad publishes Umm al-Duwais wa-Simijah: a scientific view of the Emirati folk tale in Turath 131, the magazine of the Emirates Heritage Club in Abu Dhabi, deriving her name from das, the local word for sickle.
- 16 August 2010 Emarat Al Youm publishes Ala Al Sheikh's report on the khararif of childhood and the sea, with an Emirati woman in her sixties, named only as Umm Hassan, telling the story; the piece notes that the name is now thrown at any heavily made-up woman.
- 5 December 2010 The National reports Fujairah's Heritage Village house of horror, where Khalid bin Bashir Ali, assistant stage director at Sharjah's National Theatre, plays her as a hunchbacked hag with a beaked nose and straggly white hair. The beauty, which is the whole point of the tradition, has been dropped.
- 24 October 2013 Covering the premiere of Djinn, the Image Nation Abu Dhabi horror feature directed by Tobe Hooper, The National's Anna Zacharias records a counter-reading: Emirati women students at the American University of Sharjah and Zayed University are re-making Umm al-Duwais as misunderstood or as an avenger.
- 3 December 2015 Khaleej Times reports Hanan Al Fardan's family collection of Emirati stories and notes a detail of transmission that is easy to lose: Umm al-Duwais was told in daylight, not at bedtime.
- 2017 Al-Musallam expands his fieldwork into the Encyclopedia of Mythical Creatures in Emirati Heritage (Sharjah Institute for Heritage, 559 pages), which catalogues thirty-six creatures with their environment, the origin of each name and its sources.
- April 2021 The 18th Sharjah Heritage Days include a horror house inside a palm-frond dwelling, devised by Talal Al Balushi, in which Umm al-Duwais appears with Baba Daryah and Abu Salasel. The festival has repeated it since; the 23rd edition ran from 4 to 15 February 2026.
Is there a rational explanation for Umm al-Duwais?
There is no event here to explain. Umm al-Duwais is not a case with a date, a witness list and a possible mundane cause: she is a figure people say they have met, and the accounts attach to no incident that can be checked.
What the Emirati sources offer instead is a function. Al-Musallam's reading, set out in Kharareef and summarised in Al Bayan in September 2009, is that the khararif work as deterrents: for every moral transgression the popular imagination keeps a frightening creature whose job is to stop whoever crosses the line, and the tales send painful inoculations that lodge at the back of the memory. Umm al-Duwais patrols one line in particular, the man alone at night with a woman he does not know. el-Aswad reads her the same way in Turath in 2010. Neither of them treats her as a report of anything.
The tradition also carries its own off switch, and it is theological rather than empirical: in the tale al-Marzouqi collected she vanishes the instant a man speaks the name of God. A being that cannot survive an invocation is not being offered as an animal or an intruder.
Two things commonly said about her in English I could not stand up. The first is that she is a phantom hitchhiker who flags down cars on desert highways. That telling circulates widely online, but the collected Emirati sources place her in remote and inhabited places alike and say nothing about cars, and I found no report of highway sightings in the Emirati press of the 1990s or 2000s. Searching Gulf News, Khaleej Times, The National, Emarat Al Youm, Al Bayan, Al Khaleej and Al Ittihad returns her name in six of those seven papers, the earliest datable item being The National's of 5 December 2010, and not one of the items is a sighting report. The second is that she is a version of Morocco's Aisha Qandisha. The two figures do share the motif and are listed side by side in Arabic reference works, but I have found no study arguing that either descends from the other, and neither al-Musallam nor el-Aswad makes the claim.
The moral reading has been contested from inside, too. Anna Zacharias reported in The National in October 2013 that young Emirati women were remaking her: an animated short at the American University of Sharjah by Majida Al Safadi and Sarah Adel presented her as misunderstood, and Reem Khalid's Loving the Wrong Person at Zayed University turned her into a modern vigilante.
Can you visit Umm al-Duwais?
There is nowhere to go and see Umm al-Duwais, and the honest version of this section says so. She belongs to no shrine, no ruin and no named stretch of road; the Emirati collections spread her across the whole country, and the same accounts repeat in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Arab-settled coast of Iran.
What can be visited is the heritage apparatus that keeps her. Sharjah Heritage Days, run by the Sharjah Institute for Heritage in the Heart of Sharjah, has since 2021 included a horror house built inside a traditional palm-frond dwelling, where she appears alongside Baba Daryah, the ghost who haunts fishermen at sea, and Abu Salasel, the red creature wrapped in chains. Its organiser, Talal Al Balushi, told Gulf News they devised it as a game for children and families, a way of reliving the old stories they grew up hearing. The festival is annual and free; the 23rd edition ran from 4 to 15 February 2026. Fujairah's Heritage Village staged a comparable house of horror in 2010.
The other recommendation is a library rather than a destination. Al-Musallam's Encyclopedia of Mythical Creatures in Emirati Heritage (Sharjah Institute for Heritage, 2017) exists in Arabic and in English and is the single best thing to read on her.
One physical site does get attached to her by present-day tellers: the buried village of Al Madam, in Sharjah's Central Region, roughly an hour from Dubai off the E44. It is worth knowing what it actually is. Visit Sharjah, the emirate's official tourism body, describes it as a public-housing settlement built after the founding of the UAE in 1971 for a Bedouin community and abandoned about twenty years later, the residents driven out by the sand, the desert winds and the long commutes; press accounts count a dozen single-storey houses and a mosque, now half-swallowed by dunes. The official page mentions eerie imaginary tales and names no jinn at all. Access is unrestricted and free, and there is no ticket office, no shade, no water and no supervision; the last stretch is soft sand, so a four-wheel drive and someone who knows the way are not optional.
Sources consulted
- el-Sayed el-Aswad, «أم الدويس وسميجة: رؤية علمية للحكاية الشعبية الإماراتية (Umm al-Duwais wa-Simijah: a scientific view of the Emirati folk tale)» — Turath (تراث), no. 131, Emirates Heritage Club, Abu Dhabi, 2010 academic
- عبد العزيز المسلم (Abdulaziz Al Musallam), «خراريف: رحلة مع الكائنات الخرافية في الأدب الشعبي لدولة الإمارات (Kharareef)» — Department of Culture and Information, Sharjah (224 pp.), 2007 book
- حسن عبد الرحمن المرزوقي (Hassan Abdulrahman Al Marzouqi), «حكايات من الإمارات (Hikayat min al-Imarat)» — Nadwat al-Thaqafa wal-Ulum, Dubai (148 pp.), 2006 book
- عبد الإله عبد القادر (Abdulilah Abdulqader), «حكايات من الإمارات (book review, quoting the tale «أم دويس والمدحوب»)» — Al Bayan, 2007 newspaper archive
- دلال جويد (Dalal Jwaid), ««الخراريف» خيال يبني قيم الواقع» — Al Bayan, 2009 newspaper archive
- علا الشيخ (Ala Al Sheikh), ««الغول» و«أم الدويس» خراريف الطفولة والبحر» — Emarat Al Youm, 2010 newspaper archive
- Anna Zacharias, «The ghost of Emirati present» — The National, 2013 newspaper archive
- Nissar Hoath, «Of jinns, fairytales and folklore» — Khaleej Times, 2015 newspaper archive
- عبد العزيز المسلم (Abdulaziz Al Musallam), «موسوعة الكائنات الخرافية في التراث الإماراتي: دراسة في المخيلة الشعبية (Encyclopedia of Mythical Creatures in Emirati Heritage)» — Sharjah Institute for Heritage (559 pp., ISBN 9789948481348), 2017 book
- Sharjah Commerce and Tourism Development Authority, «Al Madam Buried Village» — Visit Sharjah (official tourism site), 2026 web
- Gulf News, «Sharjah Heritage Days: Have you visited this 'haunted house' in Sharjah?» — Gulf News, 2021 newspaper archive
- Editorial, «Umm al Duwais and the mother of all frights» — The National, 2010 newspaper archive
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-16 · How we verify our content
📎 Source: Enigma Atlas
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