City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (17 page)

Sheikh Rashid saw them as a ghetto that stood in his way. He planned a new commercial center, the Bur Dubai of today, with paved streets and concrete buildings. One day, trucks descended on the neighborhood and crews picked up the huts and dumped them in the desert. The residents rebuilt in the desert, and the new district became known as Satwa.

Now, thirty-five years later, Satwa is a quaintly anachronistic neighborhood hemmed in by skyscrapers, where goats still romp in fenced lots. Satwa teems with Filipinos, Iranians, and South Asians, and is home to Dubai’s best curry houses, tailors, and used book shop. It’s one of the few neighborhoods conducive to strolling. Sidewalk cafés sell cups of tea for 30 U.S. cents, fresh Indian
naan
bread can be bought hot from the clay oven, and a bowl of Iranian
ash
—a lamb and dill stew—costs $1.25.

But Rashid’s sons who ruled after him, Maktoum and Mohammed, have pressed Dubai’s redevelopment just as their father did. In 2008, Sheikh Mohammed decided Satwa would go the way of the
barastis
. Landlords gave tenants a year to move, telling them most of Satwa was to be bulldozed to make way for Jumeirah Gardens, a futuristic district of sparkling towers on canals. Government men with clipboards banged on doors, giving residents their demolition dates. The men used green spray paint to number each house for the wrecking crews.
²³
The news caused a clamor of lament in the press and local blogs. To be fair, Satwa’s low-rise concrete block houses are a poor use of valuable land in the city center, and hold little of architectural interest.

Another neighborhood, the Shindagha section that housed the original Maktoum migrants from Liwa—perhaps the most heritage-rich district in the city—was razed in the 1980s during Sheikh Maktoum’s de facto rule. Wrecking crews with bulldozers and backhoes also ripped down a large section of historic Bastakiya. The destruction, captured in the photos of Iranian architect Dariush Zandi, is heartrending. The filigreed
mushrabiya
screens, carved wooden doors, and the coffinlike wind towers that told of the sophisticated Iranian lifestyle, all destroyed.

The bulldozing of these architectural treasures was akin to New York’s 1964 demolition of historic Penn Station. The city woke up and realized its loss, and the lamenting started right away. A few of the wind tower houses were saved and renovated, including the ruin of Sheikh Saeed’s house, where the old sheikh died and his children and grandchildren grew up. A handful of Bastakiya’s old buildings remain, but the city forced residents out and turned the homes into offices. Excessive renovations destroyed the detail and turned the neighborhood into a soulless husk.

Sheikh Rashid’s thirst for modernity often brushed against his Bedouin roots. In 1969, the Dubai ruler and Easa Al-Gurg, the Emirati banker, happened to be staying at the Dorchester Hotel in London when the first moon landing took place. Sheikh Rashid dismissed the event as a stunt, saying it was impossible to put men on the moon. Al-Gurg turned on the television and showed him the pictures being broadcast. Still, Rashid was convinced the event was a hoax. The landscape looked curiously like the empty terrain in Ras Al-Khaimah. Maybe it was filmed there, he said.

Later, flying home to Dubai, Al-Gurg tried to convince Sheikh Rashid that men had indeed walked the moon. “We were sitting together eating a delicious Lebanese meal served some 40,000 feet above the ground. Had he enjoyed his meal, I enquired? He had. Could our fathers ever have imagined eating such a delicious meal in such circumstances? He agreed that of course they could not have done so. I grasped his arm and asked how he could explain the accomplishment of this miracle, when he so firmly believed that the miracle of landing on the moon was an illusion?” Sheikh Rashid didn’t answer.
²⁴

Dubai’s ruler put a huge value on the skills and contributions of expatriates. He understood that Western engineers and advisers wouldn’t invest their time in Dubai if they had to live an ascetic life, or if they couldn’t follow their own religions. So Rashid granted land for churches and schools, and he allowed non-Muslims to drink and open taverns. He appeared to tolerate prostitution.

Though Dubai’s ruling sheikh welcomed those of other faiths, he believed they, as unbelievers, were doomed to burn in hell for eternity.

One day Al-Gurg and Sheikh Rashid were lunching at the Hotel du Rhône in Geneva, sitting with a group of Arabs in their native
kandoura
robes in the picture window. A group of pretty Swiss girls caught sight of the men and stood there, intrigued by the sight of the Arabs in their traditional dress. The men and girls stared at each other in mutual fascination. One of the Arab diners praised the exquisite charm of the Swiss girls. Al-Gurg decided to tease the sheikh. Were such pretty girls as these destined to roast in hell?

“Of course,” Rashid said.

“In that case, why did God make all the people of the world who are not Muslims if it was only to condemn them all to hell? How many millions are there in China, India, America, Russia?”

“Now I know you’re a communist,” Rashid replied, half in jest.

These sentiments aren’t spoken in public in a city that has been built and operated by non-Muslims, and in which non-Muslims (Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Bahai, Jews, and others) form around half the population. But in 2008, the textbooks of every Muslim child in Dubai said much the same thing, irresolutely condemning non-Muslims to the eternal fires of damnation. It’s an anomaly in an otherwise tolerant city. A friend of mine, a liberal Muslim, showed me the passages in his daughter’s textbook one afternoon as we drank beer in his backyard.

“This is really bad,” he says. He’d complained to the teacher that the curriculum violated Dubai’s spirit of tolerance. He asked the teacher to soft-pedal the brimstone because it scared his daughter. The teacher told him the descriptions of hell and damnation were required state curriculum.

The Warba Centre is a forlorn mall in blue-collar Deira. Inside, it smells pleasantly of
oudh
incense and apple-flavored
sheesha
smoke. The mall’s main draw, besides the smoky café, is the commercial office for Iraqi Kurdistan. It was in the Warba Centre that I met Ali al-Sayed, a beefy Emirati man who speaks in a rambling, mystical style while chain-smoking
Captain Black cigarillos. I’d heard about al-Sayed through several Emiratis who told me he had the best insights on Sheikh Rashid’s legacy.

“I can tell you the secret of Sheikh Rashid, how he built Dubai. I have it,” he says, relighting a cigarillo stub while taking care not to ignite his paintbrush mustache.

“What’s the secret?” I ask, sipping mint tea and soaking up the surroundings. It’s a typical
sheesha
house, full of idle men in their fifties, the Gulf version of guys who hang around the off-track betting parlor. Except that
sheesha
smoking is now hip with Arab women in their teens and twenties, so there were also Lebanese and Syrian girls wandering past in eye-popping outfits.

Rashid’s secret, Ali al-Sayed says, was his bureaucracy-killing management style. “Sheikh Rashid did something the Arabs couldn’t do for hundreds of years: He kept lawyers away from the decisions. The biggest sickness in the Arab world is legal advisers saying, ‘This is forbidden, this is forbidden, this is forbidden.’ If a certain contract violated the law, he didn’t care,” al-Sayed says.

“Instead of waiting to choose among bidders for a project, he just chose a qualified company. He didn’t care if he paid a higher price,” he says. “Time was more important.”

Sheikh Rashid visited Europe and said, “‘Why aren’t we like this?’” He asked how long Europeans spent crafting their cities. “The answer was, ‘Hundreds of years.’ That was too long for him. How could he make it shorter? The answer was to create a new management paradigm.”

“People say management is the art of the possible. Not in Dubai,” al-Sayed says with a penetrating stare. “In Dubai, management is the art of the impossible.”

On May 9, 1981, Sheikh Rashid finished one of his punishing eighteen-hour days with a banquet for visiting Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The next morning, the sixty-nine-year-old didn’t rise for
fajr
prayers at dawn. He left his breakfast untouched. Sheikh Rashid struggled through the next few days feeling sick, then decided to take a break in Hatta, Dubai’s picturesque enclave in the Hajjar Mountains. A few days
in the mountain air had no effect, so he decided to return to Zabeel Palace and try to work. On the two-hour ride back to Dubai, the ruler’s illness spiked. He vomited several times. The next day doctors declared he had suffered a severe stroke.

Word swept Dubai. Rashid’s four sons, Maktoum, Hamdan, Mohammed, and Ahmed, kept a bedside vigil.
²⁵
Sheikh Zayed phoned his concern, and his son, current UAE president Sheikh Khalifa, drove up from Abu Dhabi. Phone calls expressing support came in from around the world, from Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Jordan’s King Hussein, the Reagan White House, and Margaret Thatcher’s office in London.
²⁶

Dubai’s longtime leader eventually made a partial recovery. In 1982, the aging sheikh made his first public appearance since the stroke, touring a new highway underpass. Dubaians lined his route to catch a glimpse. Sheikh Rashid waved as he drove past. He had become gray and frail. The crowds waved and cheered, but some Emiratis cried.

A year later, Rashid’s wife of forty-four years, Sheikha Latifa, died while undergoing routine medical treatment in London. Sheikh Mohammed broke the news to his father. It came as a total shock. The loss of his only wife and the mother of his nine children devastated the old sheikh. It was the only time anyone had seen him weep. Sheikh Rashid never regained his old spark, his dancing eyes, his joking confidence. He doled out his tasks to his sons, who took control of Dubai in all but title.

Sheikh Maktoum, the eldest, took his father’s role as Dubai’s ruler, as well as his functions as federal vice president and prime minister. Sheikh Hamdan took the helm of Dubai’s industrial plants and the Dubai city government. Sheikh Mohammed was entrusted with the city’s vital organs: Dubai’s police and military, its oil production, the airport and its ports. His
majlis
grew into a key power center.

Sheikh Rashid spent the last days of his thirty-two-year rule sitting outside his Zabeel Palace, a low-key whitewashed building that still sits on a small rise in central Dubai. A much larger mosque faces the palace from across the street. The seventy-eight-year-old’s grizzled beard had gone white, hiding the sunken mouth below his falcon’s nose. The father of modern Dubai kept an eye on the progress he’d started, watching new skyscrapers rise alongside his World Trade Centre as his life ebbed. On October 7, 1990, he died in his sleep.

News of his death brought more than ten thousand mourners to Zabeel Palace, where his sons spent days receiving condolences. Ali al-Sayed
was one of the mourners. He rushed to the palace to join the crowd of pallbearers who held Sheikh Rashid’s coffin aloft, sometimes just reaching a hand or a few fingers to touch the casket. Dubaians lined the streets leading to Umm Hurair cemetery, where Sheikh Rashid, wrapped in a white shroud, was laid into the sandy earth. Halfway around the world, at UN headquarters in New York, the General Assembly and Security Council observed a minute of silence. The U.S. representative was among those who rose to pay tribute to Dubai’s leader.

“We cried for Sheikh Rashid even after he was dead a long time,” al-Sayed says. “At first we didn’t understand what he was doing. But after we saw everything growing more and more beautiful around us, we realized he was giving his life for Dubai.”

SPRINTING THE MARATHON

BY 1985, DUBAI
had come a long way. Just about everyone lived in an air-conditioned home. The creek bank held a phalanx of trophy office towers. Dubai’s offshore oil platforms were pumping. And the dry docks were fixing tankers almost as quickly as Iraq and Iran could rocket them.