The Arabian Gulf was just opening up to the West in the 1970s and no one I met during my first visit to Kuwait as part of an American bicentennial fashion show was more enlightening about the Gulf’s culture than Mahmoud Alghanim—businessman, visionary and political dissident from the country’s most important merchant family—whose death in 2021 was and still is virtually unacknowledged in the media. I find this puzzling, particularly because ABC and PBS MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (combined YouTube below) both featured interviews with Mahmoud at the end of the Gulf War about his ordeal as a POW in which he gave a damning assessment of Kuwait’s rulers.
Perhaps Mahmoud wanted no public notice of his death. He did once close a note to me by saying, “Be humble with what you know.”
I did, however, find this tribute to him on social media: “When you create an Act…You create a Habit…When you create a Habit…You create a Character…When you create a Character…You create Destiny.This Saying is Most Apt for Mr. Mahmoud Alghanim or MMA as we used to fondly call him.Undoubtedly the Biggest Mentor in my Life who shaped me the way I have become today.The Many Memories of Him Remain Vivid on my Mind will ensure that his Legacy will Continue thru out my Life.Rest In Peace MMA…Our Heartfelt Condolences to the Entire Family.”
I was actually in Kuwait around the time of the above television interviews, as an independent journalist on assignment for Newsday‘s editorial pages.. On the day of the last battle at Kuwait’s airport I joined an official British press convoy outside Riyadh en route to Kuwait. I knew then that Mahmoud had been taken prisoner by the Iraqis but was unaware of his current status. I was not in Kuwait long enough to locate him.
We spoke by phone following my return to New York. Mahmoud told me he’d lost everything in the war. That was astonishing to hear because, again, the Alghanims of America for Sale fame were the key commercial family in Kuwait.
What Mahmoud did not tell me at the time was that he had split from his partnership with his cousins, the sons of Yusuf Alghanim, who continued to be in good standing with the ruling political establishment. Some years later, one of Mahmoud’s old friends told me he thought Mahmoud had become a Sufi.
Reflecting on less complicated times, I remember attending a dinner party in the 1970s at Mahmoud’s ultra-modern home in Kuwait and being delighted to see Andy Warhol’s soup can pencil sketches on the wall. One of Mahmoud’s guests that evening was Adnan Shihab-Eldin, a nuclear physicist educated in the 60s at Berkeley who was then Director, Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research and later OPEC Secretary General. I recall Mahmoud’s amusement at Shihab-Eldin trying to exit the party and being somewhat disoriented by the house’s circular architecture.
In the 1970s, Mahmoud hoped to enliven Kuwaiti cuisine, getting restaurateur George Lang of Café des Artistes to advise his Arab Food Services company. There were plans for Kuwait’s first ice-cream factory. And he commissioned New York fashion designer Betsey Johnson to design Lycra/Spandex uniforms for his travel agency.
In October 1976, Mahmoud along with Yusuf Alghanim and a dozen other Kuwaitis established Kuwait’s first independent oil company.
One of Mahmoud’s Kuwaiti friends once described him as the only man in Kuwait with taste. Mahmoud’s aesthetic sensitivity drew him to everything Italian—art, wine, food, furniture, cars. He especially loved Italy’s Riviera— Portofino and Sardinia.
He was charmed by Kashmir in the 1970s and following his visit sent me a Kashmiri shawl that I wore endlessly and while on the road reporting two decades later from a Kashmir then, sadly, very much in crisis.
In the early 1980s, Mahmoud invited me to join him and a few friends on the family yacht cruising the Aegean’s Cyclades Islands of Mykonos, Paros, Naxos, Santorini, among others. The ship was 150’ long and built to resemble an old Arab dhow. One evening we anchored off the coast of Skyros for a beach feast of lamb covered and roasted with branches of rosemary, followed by a quarter-mile swim back to the boat.
My last correspondence with Mahmoud was in 1994. I had faxed him about my scheduled guest appearance on CNN facing off with Indian ambassador Siddhartha Ray regarding the Kashmir crisis, a segment CNN had rescheduled three times in two weeks—and then abruptly canceled advising me that Kashmir was now “a dead issue.”
Mahmoud faxed back: “I stayed up late hours to watch CNN, but no Suzan appeared. I guess too much about Bosnia these days.”
As friends sometimes do, we eventually lost touch as the years went by. . .
Mahmoud Alghanim was a beautifully brilliant and deeply generous person, a man who once might have effectively led Kuwait in a much different political direction.
OSCILLATIONS 
