I met Abdulkhaleq Abdulla in a café in one of Dubai's gleaming new air-conditioned shopping malls. This being the middle east, I had taken the trouble to dress modestly, although I didn't wear a headscarf or mantoux. Abdulla, a professor of political science at Emirates University, was clad in an immaculate dish-dasha; but all around, girls wandered past with their heads uncovered, wearing crop-tops and skintight jeans. Then Abdulla took me by surprise by shaking my hand—many Muslim men shy away from such contact with female non-relatives.
"I am mighty proud of Dubai. It is a trendsetter for the region. But that is both positive and negative," Abdulla declared, pausing to sip his latte. "There has been an almost complete rupture with the past. Dubai 2007 in no way resembles the Dubai of 30 years ago. This is a city making history."
Dubai is in the middle east, but it could be almost anywhere. Just about the only thing connecting the place to the past is the traditional dress still worn by many locals. The buildings are, by and large, cartoonishly modern. Culturally, it's a chill-out zone compared to the austere traditionalism over the border in Saudi Arabia or across the Persian gulf in Iran.
The rise of Dubai is an extraordinary phenomenon. This one-time backwater is now said to be the fastest growing conurbation in the world, home to a fifth of the world's cranes. It's an estate agents' dream, bursting with new luxury developments—and a magnet for the new international rich. A number of England footballers, including David Beckham and Michael Owen, are said to own luxury homes on the Palms—man-made islands "claimed" from the sea. The world's tallest building, the 160-storey-plus Burj Dubai (left), awaits its topping out—although it may not hold the record for long, because plans are nearing completion for the Al Burj tower, which may extend to over 200 storeys. An underwater hotel is on the way, as is a new airport. The tourists flow in: more than half a million from Britain each year, nearly as many from Saudi Arabia and about 300,000 from both India and Iran. The city is aiming for 10m visits by 2010, up from 3.5m last year. And all this despite having no ancient palaces or ruins—only sun, sea, sand, shopping and skyscrapers. Meanwhile, Dubailand—the middle east's answer to Disneyland—stands as a sort of metaphor for the whole venture: a grandiose deracinated importation of a mish-mash of global brands and ideas called into being by a desert potentate.
Abdulkhaleq Abdulla is troubled by the lack of democracy. "We have been the first in everything in this region except politics: economic progress, social progress, technical progress. It is as if we are sitting on a chair with three solid legs, but one is missing, and it is not comfortable. But there is a carpenter working on it." The "carpenter" in question is the leader of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, son of the state's founder. He rarely gives interviews, but last year told the Financial Times that he wanted to start an "Arab renaissance."
The city's success, most inhabitants acknowledge, is down to the foresight shown 40 years ago by the Maktoum family. In the late 1960s, realising that Dubai had few natural resources, the emirate's leaders took a series of decisions that led eventually to the construction of a deep-water port, Jebel Ali, along with a large aluminium plant. The gamble paid off as the port, the largest in the middle east, helped Dubai establish itself as a crucial trade hub in the region. Today, the port and dry docks are some of the busiest in the world. Dubai has registered a growth rate faster than China and India for much of the last decade, and now has a higher per capita income than Singapore. Its wealth, unlike much of the rest of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other middle eastern countries, is not dependent on oil, which contributes just 5 per cent to Dubai's economy, compared to 36 per cent for the UAE as a whole. At least three quarters of Dubai's national income comes from services such as real estate, tourism and retail. Financial services account for 10 per cent of the economy, and Dubai is at the forefront of modern Islamic finance, thanks to the founding of the Dubai Islamic Bank in 1975, the first fully commercial bank to conform to Sharia principles.
The UAE—a federation of seven emirates, of which Dubai and Abu Dhabi are the most significant—was granted independence in 1971. (The trucial states, as the emirates were previously known, had been British protectorates since the mid-19th century, when the ruling sheikhs of the Persian gulf signed agreements with the British in return for having their shipping protected.) It is now ruled by a supreme council of emirs, or hereditary rulers, who appoint themselves to the main positions. By informal agreement between the emirs, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven emirates and the UAE's major oil producer, is UAE president, and the ruler of Dubai its vice-president and prime minister. But the reach of the federal government is limited, and the emirates reserve considerable powers to themselves, including control over mineral rights.
With their skyscrapers and frenetic wealth accumulation, emirates such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi have become symbols of a kind of aggressive modernity that seems to set them apart from the rest of the region. Yet when it comes to democratic advancement, the UAE conforms to the dismal standards of the middle east. Political parties are banned, and there were no elections of any sort until December 2006, when the emirates' seven rulers picked 6,595 citizens to elect half the federal national council—a toothless "advisory committee." Such calls as there are for reform tend to come from the expatriate population, not all of which has shared in the proceeds of Dubai's growth. Indeed, there is a marked division in Dubai's expat workforce between the wealthy entrepreneurs from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Europe and beyond, and the poor migrant labourers who are concentrated overwhelmingly in the construction industry, who come mainly from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. This latter group—numbering perhaps as many as 250,000—work for pitiful wages in dangerous conditions and live in cramped dormitories on the city's periphery. Their labour is the motor of Dubai's expansion, and yet they do not feature in the story that Dubai sells of its dizzying transformation.
So how has Dubai managed to turn itself in less than 50 years from an insignificant trading outpost to a self-proclaimed Arabian powerhouse? I became intrigued by this question while making a difficult journey to Iran last year. If you think of the middle east as a large and quarrelsome family, then Iran, where some members of my family live, is the cheeky cousin who pokes his western neighbours with a stick and runs away chortling. Dubai, by contrast, thinks of itself as the the sensible one, the peacemaker who wants—and is getting—respect for its place in the new middle east power order. What I wanted to find out, when I returned recently, was how Dubai had pulled off this coup. How has Dubai managed to rise as it has done without blowing apart like the shah's Iran, or attracting the predatory interest of a neighbour like little Kuwait?
I put this question to Jean-François Seznec, one of America's leading specialists on the UAE, who has been visiting for the last 30 years. He said that Dubai has consistently confounded the doomsayers, who have been prophesising that it would not sustain its success. Instead, he noted, Dubai "has turned every potential problem into an advantage." Its proximity to Iran, for instance, means that it has become a safe haven for Iranian entrepreneurs and their cash, and it now enjoys a booming import-export trade with the country. Many middle-class Iranians, including my half-sister and her husband, live and work here, in conditions of relative freedom. She doesn't have to wear a headscarf; he can drink beer. These things may seem trivial to westerners, but they are valued by the many Saudis and Iranians who buy themselves modest villas in Deira or the Emirate Hills, where you are just as likely to hear Farsi being spoken as Arabic.
Seznec agreed that there is no intellectual freedom in Dubai, but called the country a "benevolent dictatorship" where the sheikh exercises power justly. He did not think that meaningful political reform was on the cards. "Go beyond a certain line, and it will get nasty. It's the same all over the region."
All the intellectuals and activists I interviewed in Dubai had been arrested or threatened with arrest for daring to voice dissent. One such person was the city's only woman activist, Sharla Musabih, whom I met in a homely terracotta-coloured villa, covered in purple periwinkles. Inside the high black gates was a dusty courtyard, filled with cots, industrial sacks of rice and children's toys. This is the city's only shelter for women fleeing violent marriages. Musabih, a softly spoken American who has been married to an Emirati for over 30 years, told me about Dubai's social problems while sipping a cup of chai. During our conversation she was clambered over by an autistic child with no speech, and took several calls from desperate women fleeing their husbands, all of whom she told to come to the shelter immediately.
"I would say we are suffering growing pains and culture shock," Musabih said. "Our country has grown so fast. We have built our economic infrastructure but not our social support. And that's understandable, because we've gone from illiteracy to education in 20 years, and it is hard to jump into the modern world." She noted that social services, and other support services such as therapy and psychiatry, are almost non-existent. Her job, she said, is to get a country developing at breakneck speed to slow down and put in "soft" infrastructure. But she told me that she loves her adopted country and believes that the "very top people in government" are basically on her side.
Afterwards, I walked in the midday sun to the highway, where I caught a taxi back to the centre. At 48 degrees the heat was unbearable. Everything in Dubai is air-conditioned. But the climate itself has not escaped the government's attention. When I met the head of Dubai's tourism department, Mohamed Abdul Mannan, he told me proudly that the country is working on lowering the temperature by planting trees and grass. "8 per cent of our landscape is green now. Remember Katharine, this was once just desert, all of it. Look what we have done."
What did Mannan consider to be the secret of Dubai's success? "We are very strict on security. We know that if anything happens it will have a cascade effect on the destination." I asked him why people come here, rather than to Bahrain or Qatar. "Dubai people are very tolerant because they were traders. We celebrate Christmas here, and Indian ceremonies too. Ideologically, we do not impose our views on other people."
But al-Roken does not propose a return to tribal politics, a purification of Dubai by expelling the expats. He believes the only cure is a slow move towards political reform. "The tribal way of governing the emirates may have been successful, but it cannot stay like that. We had a quasi-election in December 2006, but it was too little too late. We need a stronger legislature." He believes that expats should eventually get the right to nationality—a proposal strenuously rejected by the government.
After our conversation, Al-Roken and I travelled down in the lift together. It was time for lunchtime prayer. He walked out, melting into the crowd of Arab men, and was soon gone, a reluctant revolutionary in his own land.
Later, still searching for a clue to the path that Dubai may end up treading, I called on one of the few women academics operating in the UAE, Ebtisam al-Kitbi. She said briskly, "I don't think the Dubai vision is to make it a place for politics." The locals want investment and liberalisation, she said, but they are not crying out for change. "They don't even know what democracy is." Change will come when the expatriates rise up. As for the sprinkling of female ministers in the UAE—there are four women in the cabinet, a fact much praised by the west—she was dismissive: "Governments pick up on what they find easy to implement. We are not talking here about permitting political parties, or bringing in accountability, or about the separation of powers. We are just talking about the feminisation of dictatorship." She, too, feels that much has been lost in the rush to modernise. "There is no limit here, I don't know what the model is. All these people have flooded in, from all over the world. We are all afraid of losing our identity."
This is, perhaps, Dubai's Achilles heel. Islamic fundamentalism, the most corrosive form of identity politics, has failed as yet to make an obvious mark on the emirate, and there have been no serious terrorist incidents. But one UAE national piloted the second 9/11 plane, and American investigators say they have evidence of bank transfers between the UAE and Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 ringleader. Some American security specialists criticise the UAE's tolerance of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and mutter darkly about the Bin Laden construction company that has built many of the tallest buildings in Dubai (although the Bin Laden family is said to have cut off all ties with Osama). They say that the UAE has struck a deal with the devil.
If this is so, it is because Dubai is the Switzerland of the middle east—useful to everybody, and therefore untouchable. The Americans need an ally in the Gulf. The Iranians use Dubai as a haven for untraceable cash transactions, as does, allegedly, al Qaeda. BSA Tahir, right-hand man to AQ Khan—the Pakistani nuclear scientist who for years masterminded a clandestine international nuclear proliferation network—operated out of Dubai. Dubai is the middle east's convenience store, and who wants to bomb the corner shop?
But Abdulkhaleq Abdulla—my first interviewee—thinks the reasons for the lack of a terrorist atrocity are more complicated. "First, we have an efficient security force. Second, material grievances have been reduced among the nationals. The government has fulfilled its duties towards its citizens." But what of the migrant labourers, many of them poor, badly treated Muslims from the Indian subcontinent? Surely their grievances could be stirred up by terrorists? Abdulla here pointed to Dubai's divide and rule strategy: by taking only a limited number of people of each nationality, the city has made it hard for terrorist cells to develop.
Christopher Davidson, author of Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success (Columbia) and one of Britain's leading experts on the UAE, believes the emirate to be more fragile than many westerners think. "There's some arrogance on the part of Dubai, a feeling that there is an unwritten pact with the Russian mafia and al Qaeda that Dubai is useful to everybody, so won't be attacked. But recently there have been some unsettling events. Plots have been foiled, explosives discovered. If even one of the 100 threats that I have identified is valid, we should be very concerned." He pointed out that Dubai's diversification, which has turned it into a 90 per cent non-oil economy, hasn't necessarily reduced its vulnerability to external shocks. It is now heavily dependent on tourism and real estate investment. "If there were to be regional instability or an attack, or if Saudi were to implode, the tourists would go elsewhere. Dubai has no Roman ruins, no Greek remains. The real estate investors would move to Florida or Cape Verde at the click of a mouse." And it would not be the first time. After 9/11, occupancy rates in its luxury hotels nosedived for months.
And while Dubai's security forces may be able to control fundamentalism, at least for now, Dubai faces other dangers. While its economy is not directly reliant on revenues from oil production, much of the money pouring into the region is oil money. The real estate boom is almost entirely down to flows of Saudi and Iranian petrodollars, and if the oil price collapses Dubai will be hit hard. Another vulnerability is Dubai's dependence on cheap gas from Qatar, which underpins the entire development project. Finally, there is the environment to worry about. Not only is Dubai using vast amounts of energy to construct its golf courses and ski slopes, it is also particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. If temperatures rise, Dubai may become too hot for pampered, demanding tourists—even with all that air-conditioning. If sea levels rise just a little, Dubai's artificial islands and waterfront could be reclaimed by the sea. The UAE's coral reefs, a key attraction, have already been eroded as a result of global warming.
And increasingly, there are alternatives to Dubai. Abu Dhabi has opened up real estate sectors that foreigners can buy and is spending billions on luxury hotels. Saudi Arabia is in the process of building a $26bn real estate project—the King Abdullah Economic City. True, Beckham and Owen are unlikely to decamp across the border into the Wahhabi kingdom but Bahrain and Qatar attract westerners to their luxury hotels, and are tolerant of alcohol and western clothes—and have also travelled further down the road of political reform. Even Iran is casting about for ways to market its own island resort, Kish. But for now, Dubai, with its luxury hotels, functioning market and tolerance of western habits, is where beach bums and shopaholics want to come. It sells Arabia-lite to those people who like to go shopping but yearn to see the desert and handle falcons too. The place has also been capturing middle eastern imaginations.
Will Dubai continue to flourish? The west needs allies in the region, and the middle east craves a success story. But is Dubai the new Cairo—a place from which the idea of a new Arabia can rise? One Iranian filmmaker, who has lived in Britain since he was a boy, said to me: "Dubai has changed my focus. I can now imagine living in the middle east again."
This is something that westerners haven't yet understood. Last year Prospect published a provocative article by Edward Luttwak, arguing that the middle east produces nothing of value and doesn't matter. Dubai proves him wrong. To some eyes it may be a deracinated fantasy island, but it is also pulling in a new generation of entrepreneurs, journalists and intellectuals. Westerners go to make their fortunes. Saudis and Iranians go there to live in relative freedom, while also getting rich. But Dubai is a place for them to dream of something too. The new Arabia is in their hands. It is built on luxury property and cheap energy and run by a benevolent autocrat—yet it is no mirage in the desert.
