Flawed dreams and the morning after: letter from Dubai.

Thornton, Christopher

It wasn't so long ago--just a few short years; it's so easy to forget--that the "Dubai boom" was in full swing. Arabs in other parts of the Middle East were still bearing the weight of corrupt, autocratic regimes, but in Dubai, construction sites pounded away late into the night; housing prices, which once seemed to have crested, were leaping ever skyward; and foundations for new office towers and residential compounds were being poured before real estate developers (private, government owned, whoever--to eager buyers it made little difference) had worked out the bugs in projects still unfinished. Urban planning had become an oxymoron. Road detours changed every few days and almost twenty-four-hour gridlocks clogged the roads, as visitors from around the world arrived to indulge in what was being touted as a modern marvel: a Middle Eastern El Dorado that promoted a simple, seductive mantra--party till you drop, wine and dine till you drop, and, yes, shop till you drop.

But then it all stopped. In a few months the global financial crisis had rumbled through the world like a 9.0 earthquake, and it was soon revealed that the Dubai House of Finance had been built on one of the flimsiest of foundations of all. Within weeks Dubai International Airport had become the largest used-car lot in the world, as debt-laden expatriates left the keys in their BMWs and Range Rovers before boarding one-way flights back to their home countries. On a short tour of my own parking lot one day, I counted eighteen cars so dust-encrusted that their original colors were barely distinguishable. Many had become palettes for graffiti artists. "Goodbye, Dubai!" read one. "Coward!" read another. And so the Dubai boom was over. Or was it?

The world is still a fairly provincial place, even in this globally connected age, so whenever I travel I'm often asked where I'm from, and when I reply the eyes of the listener usually still glow with envy, and words to match :

"Lucky you!"

"What's that like?!"

"That must be neat!"

"Not, exactly," I reply, or something like it, and as I describe a Dubai that few have ever seen--a city of sand piles and rubble scattered around abandoned construction projects, swathes of featureless housing tracts, strings of fast-food chains that line the roads and fill noisy shopping mall food courts--the eyes of the admirers dim as illusion (and what was a very well-marketed illusion) gives way to a reality that is far less attractive and much more commonplace.

The story of Dubai is essentially a study of the clash between dreams and reality. As just about everyone who lives here knows, the dream that Dubai imagined for itself was a fantasy bordering on the grotesque that never could have been realized. If all had gone according to plan, the Dubai of the Future would have boasted a collection of theme parks, tucked in the desert dunes, offering "Hollywood," "Wild West," and "Big Apple" delights, a recreation of the Las Vegas Strip (minus the casinos, of course), a luxury entertainment resort with thirty' five-star hotels and roo cinemas, more island communities in the Gulf, and--God knows what else.

Bu it was not to be. Many tears were shed in Dubai as this dream unraveled, as investors counted losses and property owners saw the value of their holdings evaporate in the fine print of dodgy contracts, but since then the city has more or less picked itself up, salved its wounds, and begun stumbling toward a future that will no doubt be very different from the one it imagined. I doubt, however, that it has yet tallied the kinds of losses that don't show up on quarterly balance sheets, for that will take a longer, more introspective accounting. In trying to offer everything it believed a capitalist-driven, leisure-seeking world wanted, it lost all sight of itself, its own cultural heritage, and--most important--the valuable role it could play in a part of the world going through irrevocable changes. The Arab Spring of 2011 rearranged the playing field of the Middle East for good, and in the years ahead it will continue to evolve into a new social and political construction that the pre-crash Dubai would have had no place in.

So the crash is about much more than Dubai. The city attracted so much attention that anything that happened here was bound to reverberate far beyond Dubai. In pure business terms, a language that Dubai came to understand very well (or thought it understood), it didn't consider what "value" it could offer the market and that its "assets" did not have to be imported, like Tiger Woods, Rafael Nadal, Madonna, Tom Cruise, and other drop-in celebrities it had become so adept at attracting. Its genuine assets were under Dubai's nose all along, integral to the culture and history not only of the city but the United Arab Emirates, the larger society (the world so often forgets) of which the city is a part. Sadly, they were hidden behind the objects of wish fulfillment that Dubai instead chose to promote--private islands in the sea and what must be the world's largest concentration of designer stores--and so curiosity seekers around the world have been presented with little more than a skewed hologram of this region, while its many more meaningful qualities have been overlooked.

"Do 'they' let women drive there?" I've been asked almost as often as what women are "required" to wear. But in Dubai and the rest of the UAE, there isn't even a debate over whether women should be veiled because there is no dress code, for men or women, Muslim or non-Muslim, and no "morals police" to enforce one.

These questions don't really surprise me, because the condition of women has become the litmus test of human progress not only in the Middle East but all over the world. In many countries, inside and outside the Middle East, women struggle to attain the most fundamental rights, yet women in the UAE occupy top positions in media outlets, business, and government. In 2010, when Forbes magazine released its list of the 100 most powerful women in the world, the Arab woman ranking highest was Shaikha Lubna Al Qassimi, formerly the UAE Economics Minister and now the Minister of Foreign Trade. The UAE has two organizations that promote Emirati businesswomen, the Emirates Businesswomen's Council and the Emirates Businesswomen's Group, with some of the members managing global companies with thousands of employees.

Throughout Emirati society, women have begun taking jobs that even in the West have traditionally been the province of men. Last year Emirates Airlines graduated the first woman from its flight mechanics' school, and Etihad Airlines, based in Abu Dhabi, has enrolled the first two women in its pilot-training program. And there is a "trickle down" effect, as these women have become examples for the younger generation. A few years ago an Emirati university student became the first Arab woman to visit Antarctica, and last spring Ehlan Al Qassimi was the first Arab woman to travel to the North Pole--alone, and without a male escort.

The most distinctive features of UAE society have roots that reach deep into the region's history. For centuries the country now known as the United Arab Emirates lay in the path of a trade route extending from the Horn of Africa, across the Arabian Peninsula, and on into Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. This meant not only the exchange of pearls, spices, and other goods but cultural practices and religious beliefs as well. The result is a society long acquainted with the principle of tolerance and respect for those who think differently, dress differently, and even worship differently. Last year, when two more Christian churches opened in Dubai, to add to the five already operating, the event barely rated a mention in the local press. In 2005, when Christians in Abu Dhabi expressed the need for another church, the land on which to build it was donated by the UAE government, and when it opened Shaikh Nahyan bin Zayed al Nahyan, the UAE minister of higher education, was on hand to cut the ribbon.

This naturally leads to the question of immigration. In many European countries, when the level of migrants, or "guest workers," touches ten or fifteen percent, far-right groups rise up to tout the "problem of immigration." For a moment imagine the reverse--a country where eighty-five percent of the population is made up of foreigners, a demographic imbalance not to be found anywhere in the world, and yet the country manages to keep the ugliest manifestations of racism and fears of the "other" outside its borders. Ironically, many "others" are already inside the borders.

Nationals from over 200 countries live and work in Dubai, and this includes members of groups who have often been at each others' throats in their home countries: Hindus, Sikhs, and South Asian Muslims; Indians and Pakistanis; Sunnis and Shiites from Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Yet in Dubai they share the same offices and apartment complexes and stroll the corridors of the same shopping malls. Dubai's treatment of the lower end of its workforce has been disgraceful and well publicized, but most of Dubai's "foreign workers" are office staff and health-care professionals, bank managers, supermarket checkout clerks, and IT specialists, in other words, those who form the backbone of the labor force in any city, and so it represents a modern, globalized society and the mutual respect needed to maintain it.

Here, as in many parts of the world, the important values of a culture are often revealed in trivial incidents. When a spate of "road rage" incidents erupted in Dubai--almost always involving expatriates--a law was passed banning rude and offensive gestures in public. Such a law might be expected in a country that also bans alcohol, that enforces a mandatory dress code, and that sends out morals police to roam the streets. But the UAE has none of these. The reason for labeling "offensive gestures" offensive--socially, culturally, even morally--is that the UAE is a conflict-averse society where disputes are settled through discussion, compromise, and consensus, a tradition rooted in its Bedouin past.

This aversion to confrontation plays out internationally. In the forty years since the founding of the country, it has managed to walk the finest of political lines, maintaining friendly relations with the U.S. and the West, a cordial relationship with conservative Saudi Arabia (which is occasionally irked by the UAE's liberal mores), and a non-confrontational stance with nearby Iran. For forty years the UAE has claimed sovereignty over three islands in the Persian Gulf that Iran occupied in 1971, but in October, 2011, at a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the UAE proposed that disputes between Islamic countries (240 on record) be settled through parliamentary diplomacy. In April, 2012, Iran's belligerent president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, paid a visit to one of the islands, apparently for the sole purpose of proclaiming Iran's sovereignty, and this was followed with characteristically bellicose statements that violations of Iranian sovereignty would be met with force. On the UAE side of the Gulf there were no calls to arms but rather a recall of the ambassador, the cancellation of a "friendly" football match, and another request to have the dispute settled by an international court of arbitration.

Long ago I came to the conclusion that the economic implosion was the best thing that could have happened to Dubai. With no more borrowed cash to burn, it now has the opportunity to ask itself a few sobering questions. The first might be: What was it trying to prove? The answer, quite simply, is that it could measure up--that it, too, could erect glistening office towers, even the tallest in the world, host celebrity-studded sporting events, outspend the capitalist capitals, in short, that it could out-West the West. And for a while it succeeded. From all over the world, celebrities, holiday makers, and get-rich-quick opportunists poured in, seduced by the sky's-the-limit promise that was promoted like a luxury brand. When the crash shook the city at the end of 2008 and it was forced to reveal the scale of its debt, chants of "Goodbye, Dubai" erupted among members of the media and others who only a few months earlier had been touting its success. But predictions of Dubai's demise could be as misguided as Dubai's fantasies were fanciful.

So all is not lost. Many of us don't realize the mistakes we make in life until it is too late. Dubai made its mistakes while it is still young, very young, so it has plenty' of opportunity to turn things around. But if the city is going to play the prominent role it has sought for itself, it should spend a little time looking into its past and learning to value itself. "Know from whence you came," the African-American writer James Baldwin recalled his father telling him. "If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go." The leaders of Dubai could also recall the words of Albert Einstein: "Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value." Dubai broke its back--and its financial institutions--straining to project an image of success, to become the "Singapore of the Middle East" or the "Hong Kong of the Middle East," but by turning itself into a playground for globetrotting tourists and its own privileged classes, it was fast on its way to becoming little more than the Club Med of the Middle East.

There is no shame in wanting to create a vibrant profitable tourist industry and business center, but neither Dubai nor the rest of the world needs more luxury shopping malls, five-star hotel spas, or celebrity-designed golf courses. What the world needs, and the Arab and Muslim world needs desperately, are models of tolerance and coexistence; demonstrations of a moderate, humanistic interpretation of Islam divorced from political ideology; and standout examples of women playing prominent roles in their societies. These, too, are all on display in Dubai, but unfortunately they have been hidden behind its futuristic skyline.

In the years since the economic implosion, the city has become a much more livable place. In most neighborhoods, rents have been halved and the traffic, even at rush hours, is once again bearable. But most important, the idea that an unlimited flow of cash can create a gilt-edged cocoon of isolation from the rest of the world and the issues that consume it has been shattered, at least for the time being. Dubai may be burdened with debt for some time to come, but its entire future hasn't been mortgaged. If it realizes the ways it can serve as a true model for other Arab societies, it will undoubtedly become a leader in a rapidly changing Middle East. If it continues to view itself primarily as a market for speculative real estate projects and a luxury tourist industry, it will likely become just another casualty of a cycle of boom and bust, and on its tombstone will be written a simple but prescient epitaph: "All that glitters ..."