City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (49 page)

The city’s physical structure is constantly evolving. Streets and neighborhoods are torn up and moved. Several clusters of buildings vie for the title of city center. Dubai is environmentally rapacious, overwhelmingly male, and socially stratified, with men earning a few dollars a day living across the road from billionaires. “It’s difficult to imagine a less sustainable city,” says Jeremy Kelly of property consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle.

Dubai is also a city without a city mentality. It’s governed by rural people. The elite are descended from Bedouin and small-town traders. Their urban roots go back just one generation.

Sharjah-based architect George Katodrytis’s critiques are perhaps the
most imaginative. Dubai, he says, is the urban equivalent of a fractal, a constantly subdividing and repeating pattern. “The city has ceased to be a site. Instead it has become a condition,” Katodrytis writes. “It tends to be everywhere and nowhere. It is more like a diagram, a system of staged scenery and mechanisms of good time.”
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Dubai privatizes public spaces. Instead of parks, it builds themed malls where it can weed out low-wage expatriates and tranquilize consumers from reality. It’s make-believe Arabia, with fancy boutiques.
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Dubai is modern yet obsolete. Profit-seeking has scarred the skyline with unimaginative towers built by unskilled men using cheap materials. These are unsuitable for the environment, making the city dangerously dependent on cheap energy. Many find Sheikh Mohammed’s creations tacky.

“He’s building a large Disney city,” says Tom Wright, the Burj Al Arab architect.

“I think it’s a flattering statement,” responds Nakheel’s Robert Lee. His assistant chimes in: “Everyone wants to go to Disneyland.”

People who lived in Dubai before the post-2002 explosion lament the bathing of the city in concrete. Quiet pockets have been lost. The One & Only Royal Mirage hotel was one such place. It resembled a Moroccan village on an empty shore. Diners sat on a shaded deck and looked out to sea. It’s now surrounded by skyscrapers and hemmed in by flyovers bringing dump trucks to the Palm Jumeirah. The sea offshore is a twenty-four-hour construction site.

“That typifies for me where Dubai can go off the rails,” says Anthony Harris. “Can you build another row of shoreline apartments in front of the ones you just built? Of course you can! Let’s have another row of shoreline apartments in front of the shoreline apartments.”

Some of the rush to judgment is unfair. Dubai may have lapsed into overexuberance, but the city isn’t finished. Lebanese intellectual Rami Khouri says Dubai is halfway to matching the great cities of the world, like London, Istanbul, New York, or Delhi. It has conquered the physical realm. But it’s nowhere close to becoming a contributor to civilization and the arts. Maturity requires attending to music, art, literature, journalism, and research, along with political pluralism.

“They haven’t yet produced anything useful for the human condition,” Khouri says. “But it’s too early to judge them. It’d be like judging New York in 1782. They’re still physically building the place.”

Of its major missing elements, political life will be the most difficult to create, being mostly illegal. Dubai’s not much for intellectual life, either. Its universities are the equivalent of the so-called party schools in America, places where serious study isn’t possible. That is changing. Michigan State and Harvard Medical School are opening campuses and the Harvard-affiliated Dubai School of Government is offering master’s degrees in public policy. Abu Dhabi has stepped forward with branches of New York University and Paris’s Sorbonne.

Dubai’s cultural side is in its infancy. Most impressive is the spontaneous art scene centered in the Al Quoz warehouse district. The artists are foreign, mainly from Egypt, Iran, and Syria. They ship their works to Dubai galleries to find buyers. Dubai has precious little in the way of theater, museums, or music. There is no garage culture of rock bands, nothing in the way of neighborhood theaters, no modern dance, no writers’ hangouts.

Dubai, like the rest of the Gulf, does maintain a tradition of poetry. Recitals are popular with young Emirati men, and they can get raucous, with shouting audience members trading spontaneous verse. Poetry events often get sponsored by Sheikh Mohammed, who, as a teen, sent verses to local newspapers under the penname Sulait. But these events are used to buttress the national identity among Emirati males. Interlopers are unwelcome.

This critique notwithstanding, Dubai’s global appeal is the pride of Arabs everywhere. There is excitement, incredulity: Look at what those Bedouin have done! That’s why intellectuals like Khouri point out the deficiencies, to help Dubai along. The Arab world has seen leaders aspire to greatness before, especially Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Each one saw his project collapse in humiliation. Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq found free-flowing ideas cut short by strife and security men. Dubai is the next Arab hope.

“You can feel the soul of a city emerging,” says Hafed al-Ghwell, a former World Bank official now at the Dubai School of Government. “The skeleton is built. Now the challenge is to encourage the soft side. It’s not the tallest building in the world that’s going to sustain this place. You need to invest in institutions that can accumulate knowledge and pass it on.”

In a wide-open city like Dubai, a homegrown culture is bound to emerge. The early hints are fascinating. An example is my neighbor, a forty-year-old Iranian who goes by the name Pierre Ravan. He’s a nightclub DJ and music producer. He runs a perfume business. And he’s a meditation guru.

Ravan is an intense man with a shaved head and the hard muscles of a fitness buff. He also manages to exude inner peace, which seems incongruous with his intensity and especially with his Porsche Cayenne. When I see him, he shouts, “How you doing, bro?” from his car window, then roars down the road.

Ravan studied mechanical engineering in Tehran and took a job calculating stress loads on oil pipelines. He served two years in the Iranian air force, maintaining American F-14 jets that the Pentagon had sold the shah.

But Ravan was more interested in music, especially the ancient drumming and primal twang of Iranian Sufi mystics. He journeyed into the mountains to record their spiritual sounds on his reel-to-reel tape machine. He mixed them with hip-hop and electronic house beats. Ravan’s strange mixes became the rage in Tehran’s underground party scene.

But Iran under the ayatollahs isn’t the best environment for an aspiring DJ. Ravan moved to Prague and then to San Francisco, honing the uplifting and hypnotic music he called “spiritual house.” In the late 1990s, he tested his mix at a club in San Francisco. “We started playing the sounds of these big Persian Sufi drums and people started jumping into the air,” Ravan says. “An American guy ran up to me and said, ‘Bro, what is this drum? It takes me high!’”

Ravan spun his records in dance clubs from Moscow to Ibiza. But it wasn’t until his work brought him to Dubai that he felt at home. He found a budding club scene right across from his native Iran. The combination of Persian culture and pumping nightlife hit home. Ravan settled permanently in 2000. He quickly became the city’s top resident DJ, gigging under the moniker Body and Soul: “You bring the body, we provide the soul.” The fashion industry discovered Ravan’s trippy music and stylized looks and he began spinning for catwalk shows.

Since then, Dubai’s dance scene has grown into a destination in its own right. Ravan plays wild all-night gigs like the Coma Festival on Al
Maya Island in Abu Dhabi, a royal resort where gazelles wander among bikini-clad women twirling in the sunshine. Dubai’s air hub allows Ravan to jet off to DJ gigs in Miami, Greece, Beirut, and Spain. He hops over to Iran all the time.

During all of this, Ravan became devoted to Sahaj Marg yoga meditation, studying it until he knew enough to open his own school. It’s not the kind of thing you can do in Iran or Saudi Arabia or a lot of other places in the Gulf. But in Dubai, no problem. Ravan’s meditation group has six hundred adherents—Arabs, Europeans, Indians, Chinese. The spirituality is also key to his club image. Ravan’s Web site pictures him in the lotus position with a candelabra backdrop.

“Everything in life needs balance, bro,” he says over a cup of green tea in his orange-painted living room. “I can be in a party jumping up and down. And I can be in a calm place and meditate. This for me is Dubai. That’s why I’m bound here. All angles of my life are satisfied: spiritual, financial, artistic.”

In the stagnant and conflict-prone Arab world, Dubai is an obvious development model. Copycats have seized many of its ideas. But Dubai’s economy can’t be picked up and replicated. It leveraged unique characteristics: a small native population, proximity to oil, and an enlightened ruling class. Its model wouldn’t apply in Iraq or Egypt, with their large pools of unemployed. Most states wouldn’t countenance importing so many foreigners. Besides, Dubai’s already won first-mover advantage in many sectors.

But Dubai offers vivid lessons for the region and the world. First among them is a superb cultural model, one that shatters the assumptions that Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and others can’t live and work together. Dubai puts the lie to propaganda that says Muslims are intolerant.

Dubai is simultaneously the planet’s most cosmopolitan and tolerant city, a beacon of peace and prosperity where all of mankind is welcome—as long as you work. This is the city’s greatest achievement. And, amazingly, this model of social harmony sits in the Arab world.

“The way Islamic and Western values and cultures are being merged is wonderful,” Bill Clinton said in a 2005 speech in Dubai.

Also worthy of imitation are Dubai’s innovations in government, its efficient airport, and its intolerance for corruption. The emirate’s legal system inspires confidence enough for Western firms to invest. And Sheikh Mohammed’s use of strategic planning has been deft and successful. Dubai conceives daring new developments, like Internet City, and then it builds them exactly as promised. It’s a new concept in the Middle East. Emulators have taken note.

It used to be that reformers looked to America for inspiration. As America has grown discredited in the Arab world, Dubai has taken over that role. It’s a more convincing example because it’s right next door. Sheikh Mohammed’s reforms can’t be dismissed as the product of an alien culture. His success stands as an embarrassment to backward regimes, even as Dubai’s top-down model is appealing because it doesn’t involve democracy.

Sometimes it’s the small things that impress the most. A few years ago, Dubai took a step toward reducing lines at the airport by launching the e-Gate card for frequent travelers. A chip on the card stores biometric data and allows arriving and departing travelers to skip immigration and pass through an automated booth. It’s a huge time-saver. But to people from surrounding countries, it’s a marvel. To them, the card says the Dubai government trusts people enough not to interrogate them when they want to leave the country.

“It reflects a new mentality in a region that is controlled by police states,” says Sulaiman al-Hattlan, a TV talk show host and former editor of
Forbes
magazine’s Arabic edition. “It shows efficiency and trust in the system. And it shows political security.”

Al-Hattlan, in his white
kandoura
and red-checked headscarf, is a Saudi, one of many who prefer the social freedoms in Dubai to the enforced Islamism across the border. Saudis and Iranians, especially, find a refreshing dignity in Dubai, a respect for their ability to make the right choice. Their governments are keeping a close eye on Dubai’s lifestyle freedoms. It’s not yet a model, but many would like it to be.

“Friday you can pray, but Thursday night you might want to go to the bar,” al-Hattlan says. “It’s up to you.”

Dubai has shown its neighbors that political stability comes from a solid economy and a government that serves its people, rather than the other way around. Absent is the Arab obsession with politics, the syndrome of feeling slighted by the West, which favors Israel and works to
divide and weaken Arabs. Al-Hattlan believes that obsession is based in unemployment.

Dubai offers itself as a new option to Arab professionals, reversing the age-old brain drain that saw dissatisfied Arabs leaving for Europe and America, where their contributions did nothing for their homeland. “Sheikh Mohammed is calling the bluff of Arabs in America and Europe,” says al-Ghwell. “Instead of sitting in Washington and London complaining about the Arab world, he’s asking us to help him build a new Arab city. ‘Why don’t you come and help out instead of whining?’”

Al-Ghwell, a Libyan, did just that. He left his post at the World Bank in Washington to take a job at the Dubai School of Government. “After 9/11 Arabs in America were subject to racism. I know enough Arab women wearing the
hijab
who were insulted in public, even attacked. That was the impetus for some of us to say, ‘I’m a stranger here. Maybe I should go.’ Moving to Dubai is like coming home.”

Dubai has opened a window of creativity for the Middle East. Arabs and Iranians take its ideas home, spreading the seeds of reform. Washington has begun to understand this. It started paying more attention to Dubai after the crash of the ports deal. Since then, U.S. congressmen have filed into the city, touring the power centers and malls to study this powerhouse of Arab investment and reform. U.S. policy now calls for expanding Dubai’s moderating influence on the Middle East. It does this quietly. A public embrace from Washington is counterproductive.

Leaders across the Middle East also point to Dubai as an example of what
not
to do. You don’t build a city of glass-skinned high-rises in the desert, because it wastes energy. You don’t hitch your economy to sun-and-sand tourism because you get overrun by drunken Westerners having sex in public. And you don’t turn your city into an air and trade hub, or a center of international finance, because Dubai has beaten you to it.