Fujairah Bull Butting
If you are coming to Fujairah for a day, make sure it is a Friday so you can experience the ancient sport of bull butting.
It is a laid back spectacle. Get there at four in the afternoon and you’ll think the meet has been postponed. By 4.30 pm, as visitors from Dubai and Abu Dhabi are arriving, the owners will be rolling up in their trucks, salaaming each other and downloading their prize bulls that have been bulked up to weigh over a ton, thanks to a high carb diet of milk, honey, and butter.
What is about to happen has been going on in this suburb of Al Ghurfa for hundreds of years. Bull butting is said to have been introduced by the Portuguese settlers between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Sometime about 5.00 pm, men, women, and children gather around the arena, standing, sitting on mats drinking coffee or watching from the safety of their strategically parked 4WDs.
When the action begins it is difficult for newcomers to tell what is going on as the instructions are bellowed in Arabic through a megaphone. Two men from each end of the arena will lead their bull by the snout, each holding the end of a rope that is threaded through the bull’s nose. There is an arena master who gets the bulls started somewhere in the middle of the pitch but umpiring bull butting is more unpredictable than refereeing a football match. There are no whistles, no scoreboard, no line umpires, no video referees and no cheerleaders.
The Brahman bulls lock horns and pit their strength against each other. The goal of the duel is for one of the bulls to butt the other out of the inner circle. The two bulls are only in the arena for a maximum of 3 minutes before the round is concluded. Sometimes a bull will retreat, leaving the other with a clear cut victory. More often than not it is deemed a draw when there is no clear winner.
Blowing a whistle would be useless for stopping the bout but if the two handlers with each bull do not part their charges because one of the bulls is on a roll, a team of dishdashered men spring into action, sprint across the mud and haul like crazy on a rope that all has the semblance of a tug of war. Pulling these massive mobile magnets apart is no mean feat and sometimes when separated, a rampaging bull might make a final charge and launch its horns at the opponent’s flank.
Fujairah bull butting (mnattah in Arabic) is fortunately not a blood sport that concludes with a 50, 000 dirham carcass in the arena, yet sometimes there are spots of blood appear on the bull’s head. This sport is primarily about the bulls, unlike the Spanish bullfighting in which the matadors skillfully evade and finally conquer their beast.
The cache is a small container near the arena. Please bring a pen to sign the lookbook.