City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (3 page)

Islam arrived in the lower Gulf in the form of a handwritten letter from the Prophet Mohammed. In 630, Mohammed sent an emissary to the mountain town of Nizwa, in Oman, to deliver a forceful invitation to convert. The Omanis knew the ascendant Muslims of western Arabia were too strong to ignore. The Omani princes felt it was time to befriend them. They sent a delegation to the Prophet in Medina, where they embraced Islam on behalf of all Omanis, which included Arabs living in what is now the UAE. Mohammed accepted these distant tribes into the fold. He sent the converts home with a tutor who showed them the proper way to pray and wash.
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But the Omanis’ blanket acceptance of Islam had been hasty. There were skeptics who weren’t ready to stop worshipping an idol called Bajir.
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When the Prophet Mohammed died in 632, anti-Muslim rebellions flared around the Arabian Peninsula, including one in what is now the UAE. In the east coast port of Dibba, now a two-hour drive from Dubai, a sheikh named Laqit bin Malik took advantage of the chaos to announce he’d abandoned Islam. Laqit led his followers back to worshipping Bajir.
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Laqit’s rejection of Islam set off one of the bloodiest battles that ever took place on the land that became the United Arab Emirates. In 633, the Prophet Mohammed’s successor, caliph Abu Bakr, sent an army of holy warriors on a grueling 1,200-mile march to reconvert the apostates. The Muslim army converged with allied forces from Oman and Bahrain and swept into the coastal plain of Dibba, a swath of palm groves and villages that sit between the mountains and the sparkling blue Arabian Sea.

The site makes the city a poor choice for a military defense. On the north end of town, the mountains plunge directly into the sea, with faces so sheer that no roads penetrate them. The rebels were thus boxed in between sea and crags. The battle was a short one, lasting little more than a day. Abu Bakr’s troops mowed down the unbelievers. As many as ten thousand were killed. The dead wound up in a hardpan cemetery where scattered rocks still mark their graves. The Muslim warriors tore apart Dibba’s souk and tramped home with booty and prisoners. Dibba never regained its prominence, a fate many blame on the disgrace of apostasy. Afterward, southeastern Arabia became nearly 100 percent Muslim. Religion dominated life as never before. The guttural Arabic language and the austere land of Arabia that gave life to Islam are considered hallowed, to this day.

As Muslims, divided Arab tribes found unity. The faith’s equanimity brought leaders closer to their people. The religion swept out of Arabia. The Muslim faithful overran Persia and the richest provinces of the Roman Empire, building a vast empire. Knowledge of this conquest instilled in the desert Arabs a towering sense of pride that endures today. Centuries later, after isolated Arabs understood how underdeveloped they were compared with outsiders, Gulf Arabs still held themselves with striking self-confidence. In the late 1940s, Thesiger remarked upon this sense of superiority, especially among Bedouin, who took pride in hardship
and valued freedom above all else. Thesiger introduced these men in ragged cloaks and long braided hair to cars and airplanes and other trappings of modernity. The Bedouin wanted none of it. The only modern convenience that interested them was the rifle.
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For centuries that extend into the fog of unrecorded history, tribes in the lands that formed the UAE spent alternating periods as villagers and nomadic Bedouin. A tribe might spend a hundred years growing dates and raising animals, and then be uprooted and take to the desert as nomads, raiding towns and stealing animals. After a few generations, roles switched. Bedouin would overrun an irrigated area and start farming. The villagers they’d chased out would become wandering outlaws.

Either way, it was a lean and unstable existence. There wasn’t enough arable land or water to sustain everyone who wanted to farm, and people were too poor to support commerce. Few had the luxury of a single career. A tribesman might winter with livestock in the desert, and in summer he might fish or dive for pearls, harvest dates, or tend a patch of millet in the mountains.

Life, such as it was in southeast Arabia, was made possible by the camel. The bellowing, foul-tempered beasts provided the only means to cross long, waterless stretches of territory, right into the 1950s. Bedouin might travel a thousand miles carrying only a rifle, pots for cooking and coffee, goatskins loaded with water, and reed bags jammed with dates. The Bedouin knew they would die if their camels died, so the animals drank first. Arabs also roasted camels, sometimes whole, and ate their meat. Camel’s milk sustained them far from water sources. Right into the 1990s in urbane Dubai, people kept camels in their yards and milked them. Every grocery store in the city still sells fresh camel’s milk because many Arabs find cow’s milk lacks a certain tang.

In the days before the British took an interest in the coast in the nineteenth century, the lands that became Dubai and the UAE were tribal territory, not part of any state. Tribal sheikhs had none of the hereditary claims on power enjoyed by the UAE’s leaders today. Their authority came from a frontier form of grassroots democracy. A sheikh had to prove that he was braver, wiser, or more generous than any rival.

Tribal chiefs ran their fiefs like Chicago ward bosses. They handed out jobs and gifts and demanded loyalty in return. When a dispute flared, the sheikh and his men rode their camels to the troubled village and erected a tent to be used as a
majlis
, or council chambers. They invited locals to present complaints and handed down decisions on the spot.

Sheikhs sometimes fell out of favor. When that happened, subjects would either back a rival or move to a place governed by someone they liked better. This happened as recently as 1968, when eight thousand members of the Zaab tribe decided they’d had enough of the ruler of Ras Al-Khaimah and moved en masse to Abu Dhabi.
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Nowadays, frontier democracy is a relic. Dubai and the other sheikhdoms are still led by tribal rulers, but in a less democratic fashion. Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum still holds
majlis
sessions where he hears complaints and business offers, but the city has swollen far beyond his ability to give personal attention to individual problems, which are now handled—or not—by bureaucrats.

The UAE’s rulers now maintain power and legitimacy by giving generous subsidies to their citizens, known as Emiratis, essentially buying their support. The majority is happy with this unspoken bargain, which holds sway in most of the Gulf. The sheikhs get public backing in return for improvements in living standards, including jobs, homes, health care, and education. Tribal autocracy is one of the oldest ways of organizing society and the only form of governance the UAE has ever known.

Portuguese sea captain Alfonso de Albuquerque was a short man with a long beard. For convenience’ sake he kept his beard tied in a knot. In good company, Albuquerque was known for his wit. But the Arabs of the Persian Gulf saw little of the captain’s humor. In 1506 the Portuguese crown handed Albuquerque a job he didn’t want: forging a trade route around Africa and Arabia, to India. His mandate called for setting up way stations in the Arabian Sea and the Gulf that Portuguese ships could call upon on trade voyages between Indonesia and Europe.

At the time, Arabs of the lower Gulf knew little or nothing of Europe. When the billowing sails of Albuquerque’s five-ship flotilla appeared on
the horizon, it was the first major European arrival in the lands that formed the UAE. The pioneering Portuguese had the unique privilege of introducing the Gulf Arabs to European civilization. No matter what he did, Albuquerque’s actions would be remembered for centuries as the behavior of Europeans and Christians.

Albuquerque made the impression a lasting one. Rounding Africa and reaching Arabia, the mariner destroyed every Arab vessel he saw. When Omanis refused him permission to land, he sacked their towns. When Albuquerque’s fleet arrived in Khor Fakkan—his first stop in what is now the UAE—crowds gathered on the beach, beating drums and shouting. Horsemen galloped up and down the shore, and spectators climbed atop the town’s wall and the hill behind, to catch their first glimpses of the European visitors.

Albuquerque and his men peered at the spectacle from their decks. They decided Khor Fakkan’s raucous reception wasn’t submissive enough. The Portuguese waded ashore, unsheathed their swords, and began hacking off noses and ears, bayoneting men, capturing or killing women and children, and putting the torch to every one of Khor Fakkan’s handsome houses, with their lemon and orange trees and horse stables.
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The Portuguese made sure the next century in the Gulf wasn’t a pleasant one for Arabs who had the misfortune of meeting them. Albuquerque’s compatriot, the great mariner Vasco da Gama, burned a ship crammed with hundreds of Muslim pilgrims bound for Mecca.
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While the Arabs of the remote Gulf knew nothing of these warlike Iberians, the Portuguese, like their Spaniard cousins, had plenty of experience with Arabs. Just over a decade before their arrival in Khor Fakkan, the Portuguese and Spanish had put an end to seven hundred years of Muslim rule of their homelands. When Granada fell in 1492, the last Arab-governed city in Europe had been captured and the Reconquest was complete. Now the Iberians were in a mood to conquer and colonize. They viewed Arabs and Muslim civilization as heathen enemies. They killed thousands. If a town didn’t hand over its harbor, ships, and forts, the entire population risked death or mutilation.

Historians like Abu Dhabi-based Frauke Heard-Bey believe the unnecessarily cruel Portuguese occupation soured Arabs on Westerners in general and Christianity in particular. “The memory of the indiscriminate killing of women, children and the old, and the mutilations inflicted
on their prisoners by the Portuguese became engraved in the minds of Arabs living anywhere between the Red Sea and the Persian coast, and were remembered as the deeds of Christians,” she writes.
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The Portuguese showed little staying power. In 1631, after defeats by the surging navies of the Dutch and British, the Portuguese began to fade away. They anchored off Ras Al-Khaimah and fought running battles with the Arabs, and built a short-lived fort. Soon they were gone.

Beyond memories of their cruelty, the Portuguese legacy is minimal. A few crumbling forts and rusty cannon remain, as well as a handful of Portuguese words that still cling to the patois of the remote villages in Oman’s Musandam Peninsula, at the Strait of Hormuz.

When the British arrived in earnest two hundred years later, they were unwelcome. In the Arab view, there was no reason that one Christian power would act less barbarically than another.

Dubai today is a classic city-state, built on trade and liberal laws that have left competitors scrambling to keep up. Dubai’s admirers regularly compare the city’s dynamism to that of Singapore and Hong Kong, or even the Hanseatic city-states like Hamburg.

But Dubai bears even more similarities to the great entrepôt citystate of Venice, especially during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Venice was the most prosperous city in Europe. Venice, like Dubai, lacked natural resources, but grew ostentatiously wealthy and studded with palaces and cutting-edge architectural icons. Both cities leveraged duty-free trade and lured investment and the smartest minds from the surrounding region.

Dubai, like old Venice, survives as an island of enlightenment in a sea of religious fundamentalism. Both cities provoked a backlash for their tolerance. Venice was pilloried by the papacy for trading with Muslims. Dubai gets excoriated by Muslim hardliners for catering to Christians—and a hedonistic lifestyle replete with pork, alcohol, and prostitution.

But there is also an historical connection between the two cities. The first written reference to Dubai appears in the sixteenth-century journal of Gasparo Balbi, who happened to be the court jeweler of the Most
Serene Republic of Venice. Balbi set out to discover the source of pearls and sailed up the Gulf to find the world’s richest oyster pearl beds. Balbi’s 1590
Viaggio dell’Indie Orientale
mentions a fishing settlement in the lower Gulf called “Dibei.”
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Back then, Dubai was probably just a few palm-thatched
barasti
huts. It’s unclear whether Balbi landed.

Until the late eighteenth century, Dubai was overshadowed by mercantile ports like Sohar, in Oman; Hormuz and Bandar Lengeh, in Iran; and Dibba and Khor Fakkan, on the Arabian Sea; and Ras Al-Khaimah, just up the coast.
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For the next two hundred years Dubai rated only fleeting references in the archives of the British and Portuguese.

Dubai’s recorded history begins around 1800. Then, the tiny town with its coral fort was an outpost on the remote Persian Gulf, associated with Oman, but not part of any recognized state. The British branded the entire area “the Pirate Coast,” the source of attacks on their shipping. After the first set of peace treaties with Britain in 1820, the sheikhdoms that eventually became the UAE began to be called Trucial Oman, the Trucial Coast, or the Trucial States.

Trucial States is somewhat of a misnomer. The seven and sometimes eight sheikhdoms in the group were tribal lands of shifting sizes and shapes. They weren’t organized as nation-states. They lacked standing armies, central bureaucracies, and diplomatic relations with other states. There was no central authority, as exists now in the UAE federal government in Abu Dhabi. And there were no borders demarcating the limits of the sheikhdoms. Instead, territory was based on tribal leaders and the realms they could control. When the British started drawing borders of these sheikhdoms, the surveyors followed fault lines between tribes. For instance, when demarcating the border between the UAE and Oman, surveyors asked tribes to declare whom they preferred as overlord, the sheikh in Abu Dhabi or the sultan in Muscat.