Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
IHT reports on the way the economic slowdown is affecting Dubai (which unlike other members of the United Arab Emirates does not have much petroleum). Some citizens of the emirate see the end of excess as a good thing and a time to recover some authenticity.
The Dubai property boom has had its bubble burst.
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/14/2008 12:06:00 AM
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5 Comments:
My Dubai experiences are strange.
In the 1970s I came there from Saudi Arabia, via Bahrain. It was a road, literally. A market and a port.
Then I returned a few years ago, and came away in shock. How on earth did they manage to go this batshit crazy over such a short time? A strange combination of Las Vegas, Monaco and Disneyland - totally, completely synthetic, from the very bottom to the top.
It became a playground for the rich, of course, with the maddest of mad schemes being taken seriously. Indoor skiing - great idea! Build residences in the sea, shaped for world maps, palms, what have you? Wonderful. World's tallest building(s) - sure?
In Dubai ... What were they thinking? I was thinking that either this was an elaborate Venus Fly Trap to gather all the world's rich, and then sequester them for good in an Overlandia, protected from the world's riff-raff, or else a major Ponzi scheme.
Turns out it was the latter. When the credit crunch came, I asked a few friends how Dubai was getting hit. "As if a tsunami went through the place," said one.
So a large portion of the world's construction cranes will be going somewhere else, and half-finished residential areas will have the suckers who bought despairing.
Too late, the local authorities realized this was going badly, and started letting the Muttawa (religious police) begin cracking down on some of the worst excesses in public, to show they were upholding the true law. Westerners suddenly found themselves in jail, and that puts a crimp on the festivities, for certain.
Dubai has become an execrable place - and now that the world's rich have been seriously "deriched" it will suffer for its one-dimensional thinking.
This is a disaster for Dick Cheney.
Back to tradition?
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2008/10/once-they-arrive-in-united-arab.html
October 8, 2008
"Once they arrive in the United Arab Emirates, migrant workers are treated little better than cattle, with no access to healthcare and many other basic rights. The company that sponsors them holds on to their passports - and often a month or two of their wages to make sure that they keep working. And for this some will earn just 400 dirhams (£62) a month. A group of construction engineers told me, with no apparent shame, that if a worker becomes too ill to work he will be sent home after a few days. 'They are the cheapest commodity here. Steel, concrete, everything is up, but workers are the same.' "
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/08/middleeast.construction
-- As'ad AbuKhalil
i was watching a Youth Program on Dubai channel and i was surprised at the way the youth were dressed , as if straight from LA or London , and some could not speak Arabic properly they ended each sentence with a few English words .they Loved using Of course , and Already and Please , and come on , etc.. it was interesting
someone on the same program talked about his worry for being a minority that is 10% of the population when the foreigners are the majority , another worried about the future of the Arabic language since English was spoken and heard everywhere and there were more Hindi , Punjabi and Urdu newspapers than Arabic ones ,people worry about the infants learning Punjabi and hindi before they learn Arabic (Nannies) others worry about the youth not knowing about the Arabic traditions etc.... I wish Dubai good luck and i hope they wont get too greedy and destroy their country
By far the only remotely authentic Arab country left in the Gulf is `Oman. The others are just generic international commercial entities where men wear dishdashas. And yet even in Musqat one seems to see at least as many Indians, Pakistanis, and Philippinos as `Omanis.
When I went to the suq I found the people in the shops mainly speaking heavily Indian-accented `Omani dialect (and `Omani dialect is unique, and very different from other Gulf dialects). I would have done better to speak Hindi/Urdu than Arabic there. And there are entire shopping districts that cater primarily to the abundant South Asian expats - lots of beautiful Indian textiles and plenty of Indian taylors, too. And there is at least one Indian school in the city that I know of.
Still, `Oman remains, relative to the rest of the Gulf, an authentic Arab country that has not become so overly commercialized or internationalized. By and large the modern architecture is designed to retain the traditional regional character, so that there is more of a sense of continuity than in most other Arab countries, especially in the Gulf region.
The Sultan's government has done quite a good job of developing without overdeveloping, although Musqat is a much greener city than its rainfall would dictate (drip irrigation is the standard).
As for the natural scenery, you would be hard pressed to find anything much more spectacular. I was delighted to chance one day in my wanderings upon the very pleasant Hadiqat Riam, a green oasis (very artificially so, of course) in a bowl of bare, rocky, craggy hills, between Mutrah and Old Musqat. I spent many a pleasant hour in that park.
There is also quite a bit of fun Arab kitch in Musqat, including a giant climbable replica of an incense burner (`Oman has been famous for millennia as the source of the best frankincense in the world), that offers spectacular 360 degree vistas of its surroundings, a musical dancing fountain that performs nightly, and a fountain of gold pitchers in the roundabout outside of the aforementioned Riam Park.
And then there is, closer to the center of the city, Qurum Natural Park, the largest park in the city, which, though it has vast natural areas, features a spectacular artificial waterfall that is lit up at night in a way that makes it impossible to miss.
`Oman is by far the most interesting of the Gulf countries, in my opinion.
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