City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (11 page)

“The British advice was not to give blatant handouts, but to give prominent families exclusive trade licenses. If you make one family, say,
the sole importer of Mercedes cars, you make them billionaires very quickly,” he says. The revolutionaries gave up their fight to get rich.

Perhaps nowhere begged for revolutionary change more than did Abu Dhabi before 1966. This sheikhdom had one of the world’s largest underground reservoirs of oil, and it was governed by Sheikh Shakhbut, a ruler who lived in a mud fort and, by several accounts, kept his money in his mattress because he didn’t trust banks.

Shakhbut’s moment in the sun came when drillers hit oil in 1958. All eyes were upon him. Was he going to use the money to raise his people up with dignity? Or was he going to squander it on trifles? As it turned out, Sheikh Shakhbut wasn’t going to do either. He feared the modern world and knew the ageless traditions of his land would be dashed by riches. He was considered stingy, rare for a Bedouin leader. Shakhbut wanted Abu Dhabi to keep its frontier edge and reject the soft clutches of the West.

In his defense, Sheikh Shakhbut understood the delicacy of the situation. His subjects had lived in primitive isolation for millennia. They weren’t ready for the Rolling Stones and miniskirts. Shakhbut wanted to ease his people into wealth and preserve their culture.

Shakhbut even rejected practical improvements, like roads and schools. For instance, by the end of his reign in 1966, he had only just started building a bridge to the mainland from Abu Dhabi island. Until the Maqta Bridge was finished, visitors had to wait until low tide to drive or wade across the channel. There was still no paved road between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. People drove more than sixty miles along the beach and the salt flats, which was only possible when the sea was calm.
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Shakhbut could be unreasonable. He sparked a diplomatic row by refusing to repay a loan from the British Bank of the Middle East. He considered the money a gift and used it to buy rifles and a generator. When the bank asked him to repay, he accused it of stealing his money. Shakhbut settled only after the British sent a diplomat from London.
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Shakhbut was eventually overthrown. But it was no revolutionary uprising that toppled him. He’d become an embarrassment to his own family, the ruling al-Nahyans. On August 6, 1966, with the urging of the British, Shakhbut’s youngest brother, Zayed, took control of Abu Dhabi in a bloodless coup. Sheikh Shakhbut went quietly, apparently relieved to relinquish the headaches of rule. But Sheikh Zayed’s coup didn’t end tribal rule in Abu Dhabi. It strengthened it. Zayed went on to become
the UAE president, ruling until he died in office in 2004. He is revered as the father of his country. His son Sheikh Khalifa is now UAE president and Abu Dhabi leader.

It turned out that the political scientists who’d predicted an end to Gulf monarchies had got it wrong. In the UAE, as well as in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman, the same tribal families in power in the 1950s were still locked into power in 2009. Of the six, the UAE has enjoyed perhaps the greatest stability despite offering the fewest political freedoms. The other five Gulf countries allow some form of elections, although in Saudi Arabia only men vote. The sole vestige of democracy in the UAE is an advisory body in which half the members are elected by a hand-picked caucus. Political parties and civil society organizations are banned. Yet the tribal leaders in the UAE, especially Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed, are broadly popular, seen as competent and benevolent. There is precious little political grumbling. How could the theorists get it so wrong?

In the short term, agitators were put down. Witness Sheikh Rashid’s 1939 smashing of the rebel
majlis
. After independence, Sheikh Zayed made clear that he brooked no talk of democracy. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, the professor who is one of the UAE’s few democracy activists, got a personal demonstration. Abdulla had written about UAE tribal rule at Georgetown. The articles weren’t flattering, but they weren’t distributed widely. One of them came to Zayed’s attention in 1991. Zayed got angry. The UAE president stripped the professor of his passport. It was a mild punishment, but Abdulla, who suddenly couldn’t leave the country, got the message.

“We tried to be daring but it wasn’t a good time. We knew we were testing the limit,” Abdulla says while crunching on a Caesar’s salad at the Novotel Hotel in 2008. “It could’ve been much worse. I said ‘Okay, take my passport. I don’t want to go anywhere anyway.’”

Dubai leader Sheikh Maktoum quietly intervened, speaking to Sheikh Zayed and getting Abdulla’s passport returned. The professor got a personal warning from a security man. “You can talk about anything else but don’t mention democracy. Sheikh Zayed doesn’t like it,” the official said. “Anybody can bring it to his attention and you’re in trouble, guy.”

A tiny political opposition has developed in Dubai, but its activists still run into trouble with Sheikh Zayed in his grave. Mohammed al-Roken, a lawyer and rights activist, has been arrested twice and forced
out of his job as a professor at UAE University. His newspaper columns and speeches have been banned by the government, his passport seized. Al-Roken’s main offense has been speaking out about what he describes as a government that caters to the foreign majority. He says Emiratis shouldn’t feel like strangers in their own country, shouldn’t have to stomach immodest dress and rampant boozing. Al-Roken’s conservative critiques are considered political activism, which is not tolerated.

In the longer term, rulers in Dubai and the UAE have stanched dissent the nice way, by paying off their opponents. In practice, a wealthy populace is a happy populace and not one to clamor for political rights. In the UAE, the calculus is easy because the number of citizens is tiny, around one million, and the budget surplus is huge. The UAE earned $71 billion in oil revenue in 2007, enough to dole out $55,000 a year in subsidies to the average male Emirati.
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Subsidizing away the political opposition isn’t so easy in other Gulf states. Bahrain discovered oil in 1932, when prices were low. It has since pumped out most of its reserves and has little left to pamper its people.
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The tiny country is now embroiled in a slow-burn rebellion led by its underprivileged Shiite majority.

Neighboring Saudi Arabia may sit atop the world’s largest oil reserves, but it must share the proceeds among 25 million citizens. Saudi per capita income is $23,000 per year, a third less than the UAE average of $37,000, and far lower than Abu Dhabi’s towering $74,000.
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Not surprisingly, there is far more political opposition in Saudi Arabia.

Emirati sheikhs also survived because there was no one to unseat them: no army, trade union, or party that could start a conspiracy or grassroots movement. Dubai didn’t even have a police force until 1956.
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The only people in arms were desert Bedouin, who, by their nature, wanted to remain free and nomadic; and the tiny British-led Trucial Oman Scouts, created to prop up British-backed rulers. The sheikhs were safe because no one, save the British or their own families, could topple them. When Sheikh Zayed formed a national army in the 1970s, he staffed the officer corps with tribal leaders loyal to his family.
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There is another reason the sheikhs confounded those predicting their downfall. People are happy with them. There may not be much political freedom, but that doesn’t mean the country is oppressive. The UAE enjoys broad social freedoms which substitute for its lack of political ones. People raised under democracy feel at home in Dubai. Women are encouraged
to work and there is little of the separation of the sexes seen in Saudi Arabia, even in Bahrain. Alcohol is freely available. Speech is relatively free, in comparison with censored media in Saudi Arabia and Egypt (but less free than in Kuwait). UAE leaders are seen as progressive. Sheikh Mohammed encourages—even subsidizes—entrepreneurship and scholarship. These social liberties compensate those who might grumble about a lack of a political voice.

“People don’t want to replace tribal rule. It is my absolute conviction that they are happy with it,” says Anthony Harris. “The sheikh makes sure he’s a river to his people, through property, jobs, and sponsorships. Certainly there’s no threat to that system, no threat at all.”

DUBAI EMERGES

IT’S SHEIKH RASHID’S WORLD—WE JUST LIVE IN IT

IT WAS A
silver dawn that broke on September 10, 1958. A suffocating mist enveloped the town and the sun appeared to be working in concert with it, cranking up the heat and basting everyone in sweat.

British political agent Donald Hawley, an Oxford-educated Arabist in his mid-thirties, was eating breakfast when a knock came at the door. The caller was Dr. Desmond McCaully, the local physician. McCaully looked a state. His pressed tropical outfit of white linen trousers and jacket were rumpled, and his face glistened with the oily sheen of a sleepless night. McCaully said that he’d spent the night tending to the ill Sheikh Saeed and that, despite his best efforts, the eighty-year-old ruler of Dubai had died. The old sheikh’s attendants were, at that moment, preparing his body for burial.
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Muslims, especially in the Gulf, waste little time burying their dead. In the days before refrigeration, the reasons were practical as well as religious.

Hawley donned a somber suit and tie and walked with McCaully to Sheikh Saeed’s sprawling home on the creek. Arriving, he found a silent crowd of white-clothed mourners sitting on the ground, clustered in patches of shade. The dhows in the creek swayed silently in the tide as if
respecting the end of a benevolent man and his era. The anguished wail of a mourning woman rose from inside the house. The death had defied at last the inscription over the door: “O house, let no grief enter you and let not time betray your owner.”