Holidays in Kuwait

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Kuwait

The Songs That Told the Divers When to Surface

Before oil, the rhythm of Kuwaiti life was set by the pearling fleet, and the rhythm of the pearling fleet was set, quite literally, by music. Every dhow captain hired at least one nahham, a professional singer whose entire job for the length of the voyage was to sing rather than work the ropes or dive. Accompanied by a double-frame drum called the tabl bahri, brought to Kuwait from India around the 1930s, the nahham's songs were not simply morale-boosting entertainment; specific chants signalled specific actions, from when to weigh anchor to when to trim the sails to, most critically, when divers should be sent down and when they had to be hauled back up before their air ran out. A captain who could not secure a respected nahham was, by most accounts, at a real disadvantage in recruiting a crew.

The voyages themselves ran on a calendar dictated by wind rather than clock. Ships sailed with provisions for up to four months at a time, travelling as far as the coasts of India and East Africa, and were often obliged to wait in foreign ports for the monsoon to reverse direction before they could sail home, a delay that let Kuwaiti sailors pick up new instruments, rhythms and songs from the ports where they were stranded. The tradition nearly vanished with the pearling industry itself after the 1930s, when cultured pearls collapsed the market, but it survives today through groups such as the Mayouf Mejally Diwaniya, which opened its doors to the public in the 1970s, and contemporary musicians like Ghazi Al-Mulaifi, whose own grandfather dived for pearls into the 1950s and who has since built an entire jazz ensemble, Boom.Diwan, around reinterpreting these century-old work songs.

Eleven Hours and Thirteen Minutes

Kuwait's modern economy has a birth certificate accurate to the minute. Oil had first been struck at the Burgan field at 11 a.m. on a rainy Thursday in February 1938, in a gusher so forceful it blew past the drilling mud and had to be temporarily plugged with a sixty-foot wooden pole scavenged from the town bazaar. Commercial development then stalled through the Second World War, resuming only in 1945. On 30 June 1946, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah turned a ceremonial silver wheel at the newly built Mina Al-Ahmadi terminal to open the valve on Kuwait's first crude oil export, loaded onto the tanker British Fusilier in front of British officials and Gulf dignitaries.

The loading itself was recorded with striking precision: 10,567 tonnes of crude were pumped aboard in exactly eleven hours and thirteen minutes, an average rate of 950 tonnes an hour. That single measured afternoon marked the practical end of pearling as Kuwait's economic backbone and the start of an oil economy that would, within a decade, make the country the leading oil exporter in the Gulf, a position it held for roughly ten years before larger producers overtook it.

The Room That Never Closes

Much of Kuwaiti public and political life happens not in offices or parliament chambers but in the diwaniya, a reception room, tent or dedicated hall, usually attached to a family home, where men gather on a recurring schedule to talk, argue and do business, generally without needing an invitation. Formal diwaniyas traditionally convene midweek, often on Mondays and Tuesdays, while informal ones fill up on weekend evenings; a typical gathering starts around eight at night and can run well past midnight, structuring a recurring block of Kuwaiti time that has remained remarkably stable even as the rest of daily life has been reshaped by oil wealth and urbanisation.

The institution's roots reach back to the country's seventeenth-century founding, when ship captains, known as al-nokhatha, used the diwaniya to assemble crews for pearling voyages and merchants closed deals there long before formal commercial institutions existed. Its political weight has only grown since: candidates in Kuwaiti elections campaign diwaniya to diwaniya rather than door to door, since a single influential gathering's backing can shape an outcome. In 2025, UNESCO formally inscribed the diwaniya on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognising an institution that has, by most accounts, been quietly scheduling Kuwaiti evenings for close to four centuries.

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