Saloons in the Gulf

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an article in the Kuwait Times entitled When a Saloon Isn't. As the author rightly notes:

The word ‘saloon’ to an American immediately conjures up images of the Old West, of John Wayne movies and gun fights at the OK Corral. Watch any of the Hollywood Westerns from the 1950s and 1960s and you will see the word ‘saloon’ flash across the screen each time Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood walked into a bar. Saloons have a very rough, low reputation. They are the places where cowboys caroused, swilled beer and mingled with saloon girls (aka prostitutes).

So it’s ironic whenever an American arrives in Kuwait that they find saloons on almost every corner - but not a drop of legal alcohol to drink.

When I lived in the Gulf, I also frequented a local "saloon", and went in on most of my days off to get my head shaved and my beard trimmed. Most of my favorite memories of my time in the Gulf are of being in that barber's chair, while some Pakistani guy with whom I could barely communicate held a blade to my scalp or my throat. (If we're being quite honest, that took some getting used to, but it was a pretty good experience for me.) Being able to read Arabic myself, I eventually got a good enough look at the little wood carving, but didn't know what it meant. So, when I saw the article, I was naturally intrigued. When you zoom in on the wood carving, you can see that it reads:

That's "صالون الفطيم", or "Saloon al Futtaim". As far as I can tell from some casual Googling, "al Futtaim" is a family name, but Wikipedia, the undisputed source of all knowledge, confirms that "saloon" is the South Asian word for a barber shop, potentially derived from the French "salon" or "sala". Isn't it interesting what you find out several years after the fact?

UPDATE: The Kuwait Times published another article about barber shops on Friday.