The easiest way to steal a pearl is to swallow it,” said Nasif Kayed to a majlis full of expats, seated on white cushioned ottomans at the Jumeirah Mosque Majlis on a Wednesday evening.The audience laughed at what Kayed said next – a discreet aside about how one then had to retrieve the swallowed stolen pearl. Nasif Kayed is the managing director of the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding. He was translating a lecture from Arabic to English on the history of pearl diving. The actual lecturer was the Arabic-speaking man of the hour, Juma Khalifa bin Thalith, author of nine books on Emirati heritage. Thalith even brought with him to the lecture a nose clip (for pearl divers) made from the horn of a gazelle, that was allegedly 320 years old, and cost Dh75,000.here are locals very much around, who have descended from pearl divers and are driven to keeping the tradition from dying out. One such person is Major Ali al Suweidi, president of the Emirates Marine Environmental Group, a non-profit body that works to protect UAE’s marine life. It’s quite a sight when Major Ali, walking around the Ghantoot Reserve near Jebel Ali one minute talking about turtles, shifts to pearling. He stops, fishes out a red silk kerchief, unties a knot in the fabric to reveal a glistening grape-sized yellow pearl. At the eyes-wide-open reaction of an onlooker he laughs, and explains, “I carry it for luck”.While pearl diving in the UAE has all but completely died out, one of the Emirates – Ras Al Khaimah – is creating cultured pearls “much better than the ones in Japan”, Kayed said.