Rising East Essays

Introduction: Future Unknown

Upon hearing I would be working in Dubai, friends asked one of two recurring questions.

First, where was this country? Dubai – listed as the second of the seven federated components of the United Arab Emirates, and not a country in its own right – was clearly less recognisable than its own press would have us believe.

The second question says something about the circles I was moving in: people asked if I'd read a then recent article by Mike Davis in New Left Review. For some, this essay supplied the first and last word on Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum's entrepôt. What could be more à propos than the radical urbanist who dissected Los Angeles, doing the same to another self-proclaimed city of the future?

Dubai's critics object to the way that conspicuous luxury consumption coexists there with underpaid (and often unpaid) Third World labour. Davis chronicled this better than most. Yet in passing he also issued a reminder that the business cycle could bring this 'evil paradise' down to earth, even though 'like the king of the enigmatic floating island of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels, al-Maktoum believes he has discovered the secret of eternal levitation' (2006: 54) 1.

This fleeting insight, almost an afterthought, escaped many of al-Maktoum's journalistic foes in the West, at least until the credit crunch came home to them. More recently, as the changing economic and demographic trends in the emirate have registered with the Western commentariat, a palpable sense of joy at Dubai's decline has spread across the press like an inkblot. Schadenfreude bolsters moral outrage.

How did journalists move so quickly from architectural awe to celebrating redundancies? Why have crocodile tears for the lowly labourer become fashionable among the chattering columnists? This essay argues that as Dubai rose from the desert in the gleaming mirage of its own myth, it also held up a mirror to Western societies, not least the Britain linked to it through 100,000 expatriates and a top-heavy presence in the second emirate’s English language media.

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City of Nets

Internet access allows many Dubai residents to read the latest overseas comment and opinion about their (temporary) home. Critical materials are reposted to blogs and chatrooms faster than Etisalat and Du, the national telecom providers, can block them. Cue successive phases in a wordy war of attrition, with Emiratis defending their institutions, while other, English- speaking online posters divide into mutually hostile camps, for and against ‘Sheikh Mo’. Debating tactics lack subtlety: ethnic insults, relativism, anecdotal evidence and what-aboutery are the norm. Indeed, it would be low-life polemic to reproduce the low-life polemic here.

Within a few days, English language publications will attempt rebuttals (the UAE Arabic press is another story entirely). Germaine Greer, Simon Jenkins 2, Johann Hari 3 and the BBC Panorama team have all been talking points after their recent commentaries, based on varied amounts of actual reporting, on Dubai society.

Their connections with Dubai may have been relatively superficial, but each of the aforementioned authors managed to get under the skin of the place. Greer seems to have taken a single taxi ride in order to get her story; Jenkins gave the impression of having stayed behind his desk. Hari was able to speak to members of most of the major ethnic/social groupings, with the exception of the non-resident Indians who constitute the largest group. Panorama filmed undercover in a labour camp supplying workers to various property developers, including the British-based First Group. Each story was reported in the Dubai (and Abu Dhabi) English language press, exciting a predictable response. Allegations of spite and misrepresentation were joined by accusatory finger-pointing at other allegedly more troubling regimes, including that of Gordon Brown.

Whereas Jenkins was portrayed as a cut-price J.G. Ballard, whose wishful thinking would have Sheikh Zayed Road engulfed in sand, Hari was (wrongly) accused of making it all up. Panorama’s coverage, which exposed Michael Owen’s limited acting ability and implied that Jamie Oliver treated chickens better than people, also prompted UAE apologists to circle the wagons. National columnist Frank Kane, who in 2007 told readers of the Emirates Today tabloid to ‘stop whingeing’ at rapid inflation, reduced the allegations to a product of the petty frustrations of London hacks 4.

‘Ironically, the British press onslaught coincides with Dubai's appointment a couple of weeks ago of a firm of London communications specialists, Finsbury, with a brief to counter negativity about the emirate, especially in the business press,’ Kane noted. Hiring Finsbury, as opposed to relying on the indigenous (and largely ineffective) PR firms that have grown fat on longstanding UAE government contracts, does suggest a creeping unease.

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Mirror Imaging

Since some of these commentaries entailed only a limited amount of research, many of the ensuing observations should have been blindingly obvious to those already in Dubai, including its outraged defenders and apologists. Surprisingly, amid all the brouhaha, it's mainly the apologists for Dubai's institutions who keep stumbling across an important truth here: this state is controversial precisely because it mirrors the attitudes entrenched in the London media industries.

The war of words between London and Dubai media is not entirely new. No side comes out of it looking particularly honourable. When the London Times was preparing for a UAE launch in 2007, it sent the whole business desk here for a week of junkets and puff pieces. Only when everyone was safely disembarked at Luton airport, courtesy of now-defunct, all-business class airline Silverjet, did a critical piece on labour issues appear, penned by a local reporter.

Meanwhile, columnists replying on behalf of Dubai do so against a backdrop of tightening media laws, where ‘harming business’ – negative reporting, especially of the slump – is a punishable offence. Less dramatic, but just as indicative, freelancers covering the hospitality sector are reporting a growth in boring interviews ever since a memo was sent to hoteliers preventing anyone but the Tourism Department from commenting on yield management and rack rates in the Emirate as a whole.

On the discussion threads and message boards devoted to UAE news, the same pattern of hot air and division has even informed the response to a lengthy video in which Sheikh Issa, brother of the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, seems to be seen torturing an Afghan grain merchant. Although technically a minor member of a leading family in a neighbouring emirate, Sheikh’s Issa’s antics have somehow cast a spotlight on Dubai. What is it about this city state that excites so much cross-continental outrage?

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Savouring bachelors’ rights

One element of modern Dubai fell into place with the Al Maktoum dynasty of the Bani-Yas clan taking over the settlement in 1833. Whether or not equivalent events are occurring in the virtual tribalism of internet chat rooms, is a story for another day; doubtless countless rounds of mutually hostile Wikipedia re-edits will set the record straight. Yet it is clear that, among Western observers, a different set of rules and political assumptions apply when discussing the most populous emirate. This inflexible viewpoint is best seen as a reified and paradoxical re-imagining of Dubai’s peculiar state formation.

Rightly, critics point to the overlap of business, government and law as a way of making sense of the latest moral outrage to waft across from the Arabian Gulf. The legal system is a bone of contention, with Shariah inflexibility on cannabis and adultery a particular affront to UK journalists; the misfortunes of migrant labour are also a matter of concern. Some of these objections to local arrangements may hit the mark, but only in the manner of the stopped clock being right twice a day.

As a case in point, take the city’s treatment of ‘bachelors’. In 2007 new laws were announced forbidding bachelors from living in villas anywhere in the city: at least 1800 evictions followed. For presentational purposes at least, Dubai Municipality is a (supposedly) separate institution from the Emirate of Dubai. With characteristic sensitivity, this is how Omar Mohammed Abdul Rahman, Head of the Building Inspection Section, summarised the situation in the now defunct publication sometimes described as Emirates Toady:

‘Our policy is very clear. No bachelors will be allowed to live in villas in any part of Dubai. Whereas nobody will restrict them from renting out an apartment in any part of the emirate [sic]. The restriction covers all nationalities and is targeted at groups of men living together in villas’ 5.

The type of people in the firing line for these evictions were the majority of the population, whose living arrangements are far removed from the freedom of movement implied by the term ‘bachelor’. Emiratis, who dominate the civil service and have long exercised exclusive property ownership rights in areas such as Satwa, had profited from bunching up the low-paid and deportable into ‘bedspacers’, consisting of bunk beds rammed into apartments, and ‘rooms’ cobbled together using hardboard or cardboard partitions.

For Western expats, usually young, white media types from current or former Commonwealth countries, the wake-up call came when it transpired that the rules applied to them too: having housemates was grounds for eviction rather than fun. Those so affected supplied interviews in which they vented their own sectional complaints, articulated in terms not unlike the couples who report a burglary and find themselves busted for cohabitation. Evictions completed, opportunistic landlords used this as a chance to hike up the rents on their villas. Little wonder Durham University UAE expert Christopher Davidson uses the term ‘rentier pathologies’ to explain why many able-bodied local men can choose not to work. 6

On the surface, banning bachelors from villas seems like an example of Dubai’s ability to extend the law, whether civil or criminal, into one’s personal affairs. That this happens at a time when Western states appear more liberal on such matters – or at least intent on rolling back the legislative norms of the 1950s – means that among expats Dubai comes off badly in comparison with the relaxed legal regimes of cities like Amsterdam, especially when it appears that petty personal matters – ‘about 20 complaints a day’ from local families – fed directly into the formulation of the new policy.

A state formation where arbitrary individual whims have a direct bearing on the law is not unique to Dubai, but it becomes a bigger deal because of the emirate’s claims to a form of cutting-edge modernity. For expats, this leads to a core tension between what they like to call ‘the Lifestyle’, and the intrusive restrictions placed upon them during upfront encounters with the authorities. Meanwhile journalists looking in are prompted to highlight yet another contradiction. Unlike a large proportion of Western expats, such writers are happy to link the exercise of police power over some hapless Brits to the plight of labourers.

This resurgence in ‘industrial reporting’ would be welcome, but it is narrowly focussed on international locations such as Dubai where luxury retail and conspicuous consumption are immediately juxtaposed with low pay and grim conditions, at the same time belittling their coexistence throughout the global economy. There seems little of the same outrage about the manufacturing sector in, say, China or Sri Lanka.

While British expats point to the pink fortress walls of the Atlantis Hotel and simper ‘that’s so Dubai’, their columnist counterparts back home try and remember the anonymous drones of the Indian subcontinent who built the whole thing (and, indeed, the city itself). This might be preferable to rhapsodic write-ups of the joys of being a crane operator on Dh7.50 per hour 7, but there’s still something missing. Underneath the focus on labour issues in Dubai there is a somewhat blinkered application of standards.

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Ganging Up

Under the local authoritarianism of Dubai Municipality, the invidious position of bachelors is clear. What is less apparent, given the willingness of the Emirati state machinery to enforce these ethnic and social divisions, is why its critics call upon the very same regulator to protect the working poor once they set foot outside their homes. While baring its fangs towards a few landlords who have partitioned their villas to excess, public authority in Dubai saves much of its venom for the kind of people it turfs out onto the street.

Talk of Sheikh Mohammed acting as the CEO of Dubai has a ring of truth about it. Barring the hereditary privileges of the ruling family, the oil-subsidised welfare state for Emiratis (excluding women who ‘marry out’), and the enormous role of wasta (influence) in the most basic business transactions, he does indeed present himself as every bit the modern captain of industry.

Yet this is far from a free market system, with countless regulations designed, not least, to keep migrant labour in its place.

In a recent exposé of two UK-based property developers, Panorama lobbied for greater regulation, in the form of a UAE-government crackdown on the recruitment agents who con thousands out of exhorbitant fees even before they’ve done a stroke of work in the desert heat. But Panorama-style critics of the conditions facing Dubai labourers are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

UAE labour law is one source of the problem they deplore, since it ties down labour even while Dubai itself tries to latch on to the remaining global capital flows and other revenue streams. Prior to the world slump, indentured labour was one explanation for Dubai’s spectacular growth, with the state doing much of the indenturing. Calling on the Dubai government to take action against ‘rogue subcontractors’ is like asking the gangmasters to investigate themselves.

While some critical voices fall back on a naïve faith in the UAE state machinery, others offer little more than a counsel of despair. Lamentations against ‘the police force of an ideologically repressive regime’ 8 when it makes arrests in an adultery case (with, once again, British protagonists), are good for the soul while also suggesting that nothing is going to change. A similar fatalism pervades the outpourings of another Scott Trust commentator who complained that the BBC’s Doctor Who Easter special should be filmed anywhere but Dubai 9.

The two views are closely entwined: both see Dubai as beyond the pale, but one sees Dubai as beyond redemption while the other calls upon the city state to redeem itself.

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It’s Not About Dubai

Just like the virtual tribal conflict mentioned earlier, at the heart of the row are certain fixed beliefs that fire the incessant feuds between internet warriors. Discounting patriotic locals, who spent 2008 getting confused over their official ‘year of national identity’, English language pundits are divided between those who respect Dubai, typing ‘when in Rome…’ on the Daily Mail comment threads every time a Brit is picked up, and their antagonists, who attack Dubai with a special vehemence not deployed against other tinpot dictatorships precisely because it appeals to stereotypical Daily Mail readers, at least in the mind’s eye of the stereotypical Guardian reader.

That large numbers of laptop bombadiers have divided loyalties over a far-away dry dock and gateway airport is surprising, yet symptomatic of the empty space at the heart of their own society. Next to a Brown or a Cameron, the dynastic figure of ‘Sheikh Mo’ can appear visionary and/or monstrous: it’s a shame they can’t vote him out, though.

Herein lies the tragedy of the polarised view of Dubai that informs pundits and internet trolls alike. ‘Dubai’ (the idea more than the actual place) has become a byword for projecting domestic disappointments, expressing either hatred of economic growth or a desire to return to the early 1950s. Signifcantly, neither side sets much store on a common struggle for democratic rights and majority rule within the UAE. Granted, these things take time, but they will take by surprise the person who rules them out in advance. Besides, these visceral feuds over a ‘Dubai of the mind’ have little to do with the UAE itself, and everything to do with a hollow space, an empty shopping mall, at the heart of Western society.

This unseemly mixture of channeling and projection was bad enough when credit was cheap and plentiful in the space between LHR and DXB. Now that global slump has kicked away this stabilising influence, the Schadenfreude merchants have taken over the souk. Any residual unease about the Green idea of a ‘good’ recession is swept away in favour of Ballardian scenarios where sand engulfs both Burjs and widespread redundancies are a good thing. The more one sees of these rumblings, the clearer it becomes: they have got next to nothing to do with Dubai.

Vicky Francis works as a freelance writer in the Arabian Gulf.

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References

1. Davis, M (2006) 'Fear and Money in Dubai' New Left Review 41, September/October 2006
2. Jenkins, S 'As they did Ozymandias, the dunes will reclaim the soaring folly of Dubai', The Guardian, 20th March 2009
3. Hari, J 'The dark side of Dubai' The Independent , 7th April 2009
4. Kane, F 'Enough, all you expat whingers', Emirates Today 19th June 2007
5. Quoted in George, J 'Dubai is a bachelor's paradise, as long as they stay out of villas', Emirates Today, 19th July 2007
6. Davidson, C M (2008) Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success London: C. Hurst & Co.
7. Landais, E 'A Higher Calling', Gulf News, 14th September 2007
8. Gerrard, N ‘Can a husband stoop any lower?’ Observer, 31st May 2009
9. MacLean, G ‘The Doctor in Dubai: dubious indeed’, GuardianBlog, 16th January 2009

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