Peace Be Upon You (48 page)
After a flurry of hearings and a wave of uproar, Dubai Ports World agreed to alter the arrangement so that the American ports would not be included. The emir of Dubai, in public, was tight-lipped, but in private he was apparently furious. More than almost any state in the Arab world, Dubai had embraced the logic of global capitalism, and yet it was still treated as a pariah by the American public and lumped together with al-Qaeda.
It was easy enough to read what happened as the latest chapter in the history of conflict. Yet here as well, all was not as it seemed. For while the ports deal was scuttled, other arms of the Dubai government were wrapping up the purchase of several luxury hotels and office buildings in Manhattan, including the Essex House on Central Park South and the W Hotel in Union Square. Two of the Park Avenue buildings bought by the Dubai company Istithmar were acquired from Boston Properties, which is controlled by Mortimer Zuckerman, who is not only a prominent New York developer but a publisher and an outspoken American Jewish financial backer of Israel. Another investment arm of Dubai purchased the second-largest private homebuilder in the United States, John Laing Homes, for $1.05 billion in the late spring of 2006, after the ports imbroglio. Around the same time, the international hotel and casino operator Kerzner International announced its intention to become a private company in a management buyout. Among other things, Kerzner owns the Atlantis complex in the Bahamas and is working on a Dubai project that will include a lavish resort on an artificial island, which may have the first casino in the Persian Gulf. The company’s primary owners are the Kerzners, a South African Jewish family, and the royal family of Dubai.
Dubai was the beneficiary of the spectacular rise in the price of oil between 2004 and 2006, but unlike the other Gulf states, the country itself has few oil reserves. While it receives a share of the oil revenues of Abu Dhabi and the other states that comprise the United Arab Emirates, Dubai’s wealth and power is a product of a purposeful decision by Sheikh Rashid al-Maktoum in the 1970s to align his strip of desert with the West. That policy was continued by his sons, who turned a weakness— the absence of oil—into a strength. Unable to rely on petrodollars, the royal family was forced instead to become entrepreneurial. The results have far exceeded Sheikh Rashid’s ambitions.
With fewer than a hundred thousand citizens, Dubai in the early years of the twenty-first century became one of the largest construction zones in the world and home to more than 1 million people, almost all of whom were citizens of other countries drawn to Dubai by low taxes, loose credit, unintrusive banking, easy-to-obtain menial jobs, and countless opportunities to get rich. An odd amalgam of Las Vegas, Singapore, and Miami, Dubai is the only city in the conservative Gulf region to allow consumption of alcohol and to welcome Western and global tourists unconditionally. It is a free-trade and duty-free zone that built on its earlier foundation as a port and used the national airline to attract visitors to the dozens of malls that the city has to offer. Tourists from Europe and Asia flock to Dubai for shopping holidays, as do Arabs from oil states. The Emirates Mall, opened in late 2005, includes a Ralph Lauren boutique, a Carrefour hypermarket, and a Harvey Nichols department store. It also has hundreds of boutiques, one of which offers custom-made burqas to cover upper-class women from Saudi Arabia; two shops over, La Perla displays nearly naked mannequins. A hundred yards farther on, there is Ski Dubai, a four-hundred-meter snow-packed ski slope fully enclosed and air-conditioned, with a Chili’s restaurant providing a view of the surreal sight of people skiing in the middle of a desert where temperatures often exceed 110 degrees.
In spite of the furor over the ports deal in the United States, Dubai simply doesn’t fit the images of a Middle East defined by conflict with the West, or images of Christians and Jews locked in a battle with Muslims. What are we to make of a Muslim ruling family doing business with a gambling and leisure company run by Jews? Or of a company owned by the royal family concluding real estate deals with an American Jewish real estate mogul who makes no secret of his ardent support for Israel? Or of a city-state that borders a puritanical Saudi Arabia and acts as an escape valve for the same Saudis who accept the stricture of Wah-habi dogma at home? Or of a burgeoning state that annually draws half a million British tourists, who are lured by the prospect of cheap shopping and beaches? What are we to make of Dubai, a city-state that epitomizes the excesses and successes of capitalism in a globalized age?
Contrary to predictions that the scuttling of the ports deal would imperil relations between the United States and Western-leaning regimes in the Middle East, within weeks it was business as usual. The virulent reactions of the United States did leave a bitter residue, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century—as in most of the prior fourteen hundred years—conflict and cooperation do not cancel each other out; they exist simultaneously.
Dubai is no longer ignored. It has too much glitz. It makes great copy for travel magazines and media outlets looking to observe the lifestyles of the rich and famous. It has a hotel shaped like a traditional fishing boat that rises a thousand feet above the water with rooms that start at $1,000 a night. It has sports tournaments and nightclubs that draw global sponsors and international celebrities, and it has resorts and condominiums that spring out of the dunes, along with a booming (and occasionally busting) stock market that piques the interest of international investors.
But Dubai as a counterpoint to the relentless drumbeat of civiliza-tional war is unappreciated. It may be a shrine to greed and decadence, and it may be but a beneficiary of high oil prices and so will face hard times if those prices head south, but none ofthat makes it any less than a testament to the ability of Muslims, Christians, and Jews to find common cause.
And it is hardly the only one. In Egypt, a business dynasty led by the Coptic Christian Sawiris family has been trying to break out of the parochial backwater that has been the Egyptian economy. Perhaps in response to the petrodollars flooding the region and anxious to offset the rise in the fundamentalist movement, the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak finally realized that you can have political reform, you can have economic reform, but you cannot have neither. The loosening of state control over the economy—overseen by another Copt, the finance minister, Yousef Boutros-Ghali—proved to be a boon to the Sawiris clan, and especially to Naguib Sawiris, the fifty-year-old head of Oras-com, the largest telecom company in the region. He seized the opportunity to create a new mobile phone network in American-occupied Iraq, and then negotiated a multibillion-dollar purchase of Wind, a subsidiary of one of the largest telecom operators in Italy.
Sawiris is strongly pro-American yet works assiduously to improve the lot of Gaza Palestinians by opening businesses in the impoverished region. He has been openly critical of Mubarak for the slowness of economic reform, and is unapologetically secular in his demeanor and outlook. He is, in short, a global capitalist who happens to be an Egyptian. He is a Coptic Christian who has created a company that employs tens of thousands of Muslims and offers its shares on international stock exchanges to Americans, Asians, Middle Easterners, and Europeans. And like any successful businessman, he is more likely to speak of the world becoming flat than he is to think in terms of any inherent antagonism between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
And therein lies a final lesson and a real danger. Muslims, Christians, and Jews have been so enmeshed in a framework of conflict and so determined to view not only history but the present through that lens that they risk missing the next wave of history. Many parts of the world that are emerging in the twenty-first century have not been party to that history, and are neither interested in nor constrained by it, China most of all.
In no small measure, the rulers of Dubai and the Sawiris family have been able to turn their aspirations into reality because they are unencumbered by the history of conflict. They have shed the burdens of the past, and have instead taken advantage of the opportunities that cooperation and coexistence create and have always created. They are not trying to restore a golden age. They are not driven by a sense of grievance. They are simply working with the world around them. But whether or not they greet strangers with the word of peace, they are emissaries of it just the same. And so are the millions who go about their daily lives seeking only the betterment of themselves and their families, uninterested in dogma, theology, and hatred. That has been true for the entire history of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, even though that part of the story has been neglected, even though discord makes for better drama and more passion. It remains true today. Peace is woven into our collective past; it is there to be seen in our messy present; and it will be there in our shared future.
