City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (16 page)

Zayed was a sheikh’s sheikh, with a passel of wives who delivered him an enormous brood. His offspring and their children and handlers could fill a stadium. British diplomats did their best to keep track of Zayed’s wives and counted nine by his death, but that figure could be inaccurate. The Abu Dhabi ruler never kept more than three wives for long, one less than the legal limit, so he had a slot open when he found an eligible mate. He fathered nineteen boys and perhaps twelve girls, but the number of Zayed’s daughters, like his wives, is unclear.
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Zayed’s spending dazzled people everywhere he traveled, including my hometown, Cleveland, Ohio. Zayed visited Cleveland regularly for heart treatment and, at one point, decided he wanted a house. He and his entourage drove through streets lined with fine mansions in the suburbs near the hospital. When Zayed saw the one he wanted, he ordered his men to make an offer. They immediately knocked on the door and asked the family whether they could buy the house. When the occupants refused, Zayed doubled his offer—more than $1 million is the rumored price—and the family agreed to move out within two weeks.
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The UAE’s founder died in 2004 at the age of eighty-six, triggering a nationwide paroxysm of grief. In Abu Dhabi, mourners lined the streets weeping openly, some women throwing themselves to the ground as his cortege passed. Zayed’s sons buried him beneath the site of what has become a vast white marble mosque with fanciful arches and flower-bulb domes tipped in gold. The Zayed Grand Mosque is the third largest in the world, but also one of its most beautiful, reminiscent of the Taj Mahal. The desert Bedouin with his rifle and side-cocked grin had come a long way.

Sheikh Zayed may have passed on, but there’s a strong family resemblance among the men now running the federal government. Zayed’s eldest son, Khalifa, is the UAE president, the head of state. His son
Mohammed, who spent two days with President Bush at Camp David in June 2008, is the Abu Dhabi crown prince and the country’s top defense official. Zayed’s sons Sultan and Hamdan are the deputy prime ministers. Abdullah is foreign minister. Saif is interior minister. Mansour is minister of presidential affairs.

To this day it is common for Emiratis to profess love for Sheikh Zayed. A young Emirati woman I worked with in 2007 told me she and some friends from university visited Sheikh Zayed in 2004. The sheikh was on his deathbed. He asked the young ladies whether they needed anything before he died. They all responded that they only wished him a long life. He asked them the same question twice more. Each time, the girls refused any gifts. “I love him. I really adore him.
W’allah
,” the woman told me, using an Arabic word that means “I swear to God.”

Zayed had his pitfalls, of course. He lost territory to Saudi Arabia that he should have fought harder to keep. One is a wedge of the Empty Quarter that sits atop the huge Shaybah oil field. And his family name was tainted by scandal when a bank it owned, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, collapsed in 1991. U.S. Senate investigators found BCCI officers—including some of Zayed’s financial advisers—involved in a sleazy matrix of kickbacks, money laundering, prostitution, and even terrorist financing.

The life’s visions of Sheikh Zayed and Rashid were distinct. Rashid dedicated his life to Dubai, but didn’t concern himself much with the wider federation, even after he became prime minister. Zayed’s quest was for a unified state, and he accomplished this in the time-honored manner of his al-Nahyan clan, by cultivating the tribes. After independence, Zayed treated the entire UAE to his formula of tribal generosity. It worked. The uncertainty that shrouded the UAE at its birth faded away.

But that didn’t erase the fact that the new country sat in a war-prone region. And it was about to heat up.

On September 22, 1980, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein launched an invasion of Iran, sending troops pouring across the border and warplanes blasting Iranian airfields. Saddam took advantage of the chaos in the opening days of the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini,
who had ousted the U.S.-backed shah. The Iraqi leader hoped to grab some oil-rich territory, but the Iranians rushed to defend their land. The invasion wound up unifying Iran behind Khomeini. The war descended into a stalemate that harkened to the senseless gore of World War I, complete with human wave attacks and poison gassings.

In 1984, the Iraqis tried a new strategy: They attacked Tehran’s economic jugular, the tanker ships taking on crude oil at Iran’s Kharg Island terminal. Iran then did the same, sending aircraft and small boats to rocket tankers carrying Iraqi oil exports. The Iranians widened their targets to tankers visiting terminals in the Gulf Arab states. The tanker war was on. Over the next four years, more than five hundred commercial vessels, mostly Kuwait-owned ships, took damage from rockets, shells, and mines, mainly those of Iran. More than four hundred civilian sailors died in the attacks. The war on oil exports ground on in the Gulf until the U.S. and Soviet governments agreed to post their own flags on the tankers, which, under international law, allowed their militaries to retaliate.

For Dubai, the war was an economic lemon. So Sheikh Rashid made lemonade. In a feat of serendipity, the giant Dubai Dry Docks—opened fully in 1983, a year ahead of one of history’s most devastating campaigns against civilian shipping.

The tanker war was a different class of conflict than the German U-boat onslaught on Allied shipping in World Wars I and II. Most of those vessels, once torpedoed from below, sank in the ocean’s depths far from shore. In the busy shipping lanes of the Gulf, help wasn’t far away. Few wounded vessels actually sank. Iran’s French-made Exocet missiles punctured the ships well above the water line, setting tankers and cargo alight. Raging oil fires made the strikes look bad but damage was often slight.
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Each detonating Exocet sent cash to Dubai’s coffers. Sheikh Rashid’s spanking new dry dock sat on the edge of the fray, easy limping distance for a stricken tanker. In a new twist on ambulance chasing, salvage tugs patrolled the Gulf and towed the victims to Dubai. Once again, opportunistic Dubai reaped an Iranian windfall. The dry docks grew so busy that damaged ships waited months for repairs, or got patched up just enough to steam to a yard outside the Gulf.
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This kind of foresight earned Sheikh Rashid an aura of clairvoyance. I asked Emiratis how Sheikh Rashid could have known the completion of his dry dock would be greeted with a sudden supply of damaged
ships. “Sheikh Rashid prayed every day. Maybe he saw a sign from God,” one said.

The word people use most often to describe Sheikh Rashid is “farsighted.” The Dubai leader’s reputation was partly a product of his cagey leadership style. He offered people business tips or free land—on condition they develop it. He assured them that the locations would be profitable one day. But he often withheld full details, so the recipients of his largesse had to proceed on blind trust. When the investments paid off, recipients praised Sheikh Rashid’s farsightedness. But the flipside meant that people sometimes rejected the Dubai leader’s gifts.

Sheikhs are supposed to distribute land and wealth. That’s exactly what happened in most of the sheikhdoms that formed the UAE, with few strings attached. In Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed’s gifts of homes and farms didn’t even require their owners to occupy them. But the recipients of Rashid’s largesse were required to contribute to the city’s expansion. An American might say Rashid offered Dubaians a hand up, not a hammock.

One Emirati merchant family migrated from Sharjah to Dubai in the 1960s to take advantage of Dubai’s business climate. In the late 1970s, Sheikh Rashid gave the family’s head fifty plots of land in what became the upscale neighborhood of Mirdiff, on condition he build on the plots. The merchant thanked Rashid but declined the offer, believing the plots were too far from central Dubai to warrant investment. That decision wound up shortchanging the family hundreds of millions of dollars.
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Sheikh Rashid’s murky ways also made fools of foreign investors. In the 1970s, a self-important Kuwaiti businessman declared that he wished to invest in booming Dubai. Sheikh Rashid welcomed the Kuwaiti, handing him a business card, and telling him he did indeed have a plot available. He drove the Kuwaiti deep into the desert and showed him the excavation in the sand that would become the World Trade Centre. He drove a quarter mile further, to the edge of a caravan track, and offered the Kuwaiti a patch of the undulating scrub surrounding him. It was a place where Bedouin grazed camels.

The Kuwaiti was incensed. His answer was immediate: “No.” He
stomped into the office of Dubai mayor Qassim Sultan to declare that Sheikh Rashid’s vaunted generosity was a myth. Here was a city full of bustle, and he was being offered barren land in the middle of nowhere. “That Bedouin was trying to cheat me!” the Kuwaiti yelled.

Sheikh Rashid gave the land to another developer who built four high-rise apartment blocks there. The buildings became known as the Hilton Apartments, one of Dubai’s fanciest addresses for years, home to diplomats and businessmen working in the just-finished World Trade Centre. The Kuwaiti returned a year or two later and saw the apartments under construction. The desert track had been paved as the Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway, later renamed Sheikh Zayed Road and expanded to twelve lanes.

The proud Kuwaiti realized his folly. He returned a chastened man to Sheikh Rashid’s
majlis
. “Hello, Kuwaiti!” Sheikh Rashid greeted him. “Too bad you didn’t take that land!” The Kuwaiti assured the Dubai leader that he was now ready to accept the site he’d spurned. Sheikh Rashid apologized, saying the land was taken. But he offered the Kuwaiti another plot. Again it required a leap of faith. The new plot was another quarter mile into the desert, and had no road frontage. Today the site houses the twin Emirates Towers skyscrapers, which surpassed the Dubai World Trade Centre in 1999 as the tallest buildings in the Middle East. But in the mid-1970s, the land was desolate. Again, the Kuwaiti demurred. “Why does he want to take me to the desert again?” He gave up and went home.

The Kuwaiti didn’t return for fifteen years. By then Qassim Sultan was nearing retirement and Dubai was the most dynamic of Gulf cities. The Kuwaiti turned up in the mayor’s office. This time his hubris was only a memory. He’d gone to see the Emirates Towers and admire the silver triangular spires that resemble razor cartridges. The businessman realized he’d doubled down on his shortsightedness. “This land could’ve been mine and I didn’t take it,” he told Sultan. “I’m such a fool.”

There are dozens of Sheikh Rashid stories that circulate in Dubai. Some are so improbable that any wisp of truth has long since slipped out. But they’re useful in gauging the enormity of Sheikh Rashid’s influence on the mentality of Dubaians.

Dubai’s physical shape is one of Sheikh Rashid’s legacies. He bequeathed us a linear city with multiple centers, rather than a traditional metropolis that radiates outward from a central core. The World Trade
Centre anchored a new business district in the southwest desert, away from the creek. The Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway became a grand entrance. And the building of Jebel Ali port on a faraway beach created a new development anchor. Jebel Ali ensured Dubai would stretch along a narrow coastal strip. Sheikh Rashid’s sons set about filling the space in between with housing, golf courses, resorts, parks, warehouses, racetracks, industrial zones, factories, and malls.

Sheikh Rashid’s investments transformed Dubai into a low-cost hub of global trade. But the days when Dubai would have to finance its own expansion were ending. Dubai’s second phase of growth, which took place under Rashid’s sons Maktoum and Mohammed, would lean on the wealth of foreign investors who saw the emerging city as a strong bet.

Sheikh Rashid showed no compunction about erasing the past. He fought against huge odds to modernize Dubai, to improve his subjects’ lives—but also to win respect, even if it meant only that outsiders would know his city’s name.

Modernization comes at the expense of heritage, of course, and Dubai’s heritage was bulldozed without hesitation. Sheikh Rashid began by demolishing the old cloth bazaar, a souk on the south bank of the creek that sat just behind the Beit Wakeel, the Gray Mackenzie office where George Chapman lived. The Indian vendors in the covered alley brought a welcome clamor, as well as a stream of people pissing on the beach next to the house. Chapman says he could tell who was squatting below his window by the pattern of his
lunghi
.

The bazaar was a touch of old Araby, reminding visitors of Damascus or Tehran. At night, the vendors locked the great wooden doors at either end of the souk and climbed to their sleeping quarters above their shops, safe from Bedouin who might be tempted to a bit of looting. Steamship passengers liked to wander the souk while their ship refueled. Chapman asked Sheikh Rashid to halt the demolition. “I bring people off ships and they like to see old Dubai. Now you’re knocking it down.”

Rashid was unrepentant. “What do you want that old place for? Let’s have a proper road in the town so people can get through.”
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The ambitious sheikh did the same thing with the neighborhood of palm-thatch
barasti
houses that crowded behind Bastakiya’s big coral homes. Many of Dubai’s greatest citizens grew up in a
barasti
, which were perfect for pre-electric Dubai, their loose thatching allowing cool breezes to penetrate. Most were built as compounds, with a palm fence surrounding the home, giving privacy to women who cooked outdoors on kerosene stoves. But ramshackle
barastis
were more like tents than houses, too primitive and fire-prone to electrify.