Dubai

The Story of the World's Fastest City

Jim Krane

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781848873940
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Today, Dubai is a city of shimmering skyscrapers attracting thousands of tourists every year. Yet just sixty years ago Dubai's population scraped a living by picking dates, diving for pearls, or sailing in wooden dhows to trade with Iran and India.

Dubai is everything the rest of the Arab world is not. Until recently it was the fastest-growing city in the world, with an economy whose growth outpaced China's while luring more tourists than all of India. The city has become a metaphor for the lush life, where the wealthy mingle in gilded splendour and luxury cars fill the streets, yet it is also beset by a backwash of bad design, environmental degradation and controversial labour practices. Dubai tells its unique story.

I

DUBAI STIRS

1

THE SANDS OF TIME

Isolation: The Safety of the Undesired

THE ARABIAN PENINSULA is a sun-hammered land of drifting sands and rubble wastes. Ranges of unnamed peaks slash across the landscape, their sun-shattered rock sharp enough to cut skin. Salt flats shimmer in the moonlight night after night, untouched by humans for eternity. It’s a forsaken landscape, this Arabia Deserta, with more in common with the planet Venus than with Earth.

Arabia is as big as Alaska, California, and Texas combined, and it has not a single river. There are places where the earth cracks open to reveal savage gorges as spectacular as the Grand Canyon. In others, the landscape is covered in peach-colored dunes that look like blobs of Dairy Queen frozen custard, except that they rise nearly as high as the Appalachians. And then there is the weather. Dry storms rage for days, sending gusts of sand scouring the earth for a thousand miles. Arabian summers are hot enough to kill healthy men.

Dubai and the United Arab Emirates sit on the southeastern corner of Arabia, the most desolate corner of a desolate land. Elsewhere on the peninsula, civilizations managed to defeat the tough conditions and build cities. But the odds of survival were so low in the Maine-sized territory that formed the UAE that the population hovered around 80,000 for more than a millennium, from the arrival of Islam in AD 630 until the 1930s. ¹

Even the sea conspired to keep man in isolation. Along much of the coast, it’s difficult to distinguish land from water. Tidal flats extend for miles, covered in a white salt crust called sabkha. The monotonous sabkha belts are useless for agriculture and treacherous for travel. Step in the wrong spot and the crust disintegrates like thin ice, pitching man, camel, or Land Rover into a pit of salty mud. Many a camel was butchered on the spot after such a fall.

Offshore, the lower Gulf coast is interwoven with coral reefs and meandering sandbanks that rise to become low-lying islands. Much of this coast is not conducive to seafaring. The main exception is the far northern end, near the Strait of Hormuz, where the Hajjar Mountains plunge to the sea created harbors for a seafaring Arab clan, the Qawasim. Those living along the rest of the coast had to make do with shallow tidal inlets known as khors, or creeks. Dubai’s creek is the best of these, making a fine shelter for small boats and dhows. But the creek was so shallow for most of history that ships needed to anchor offshore, with visitors sculling to shore in rowboats.

There isn’t much known about southeastern Arabia further back than a few hundred years. Before the discovery of oil—and the arrival of air-conditioning—these lands were simply too harsh for all but a few especially tough people. Those who eked out a living were, until about fifty years ago, among the planet’s most undeveloped societies. No one envied their existence of perpetual hunger and thirst, nor their diet of dates and camel’s milk. The ragged folk spent nights around the camp-fire, reciting poetry and recounting intricate tribal genealogies that stretch back thousands of years. Few came to visit and fewer stayed long.

Elsewhere, empires rose and fell, and civilizations were transformed by conquest and colonization. Just across the Gulf, the mighty Persian Empire emerged in the sixth century bc to become the most powerful force on earth. The Persians made halfhearted incursions, controlling bits of the coast and most of neighboring Oman for a time. But they largely ignored the desert tribes across the Gulf, and focused on richer lands.

Even the advances of the golden age of the Arabs, between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, passed the lower Gulf by. The Arabs took their turn as the earth’s most powerful race, ruling an empire that stretched from China to Spain. They leveraged their lateen-sailed ships and astrolabe navigation tools to master the sea. But the chief Arab seaports were far away. The small ports of southeast Arabia lay close to trade routes, and a few outside influences filtered in. Archaeological evidence unearthed by UAE experts like Peter Hellyer shows trade with Mesopotamia starting around the sixth century bc. Local mariners traveled as far as China by the birth of Christ, judging by unearthed shards of porcelain. But these ancestors left little behind. No major ruins or monuments mark their bygone presence.

Few of the shockwaves of science and learning that molded human civilization penetrated the Gulf. History simply happened elsewhere.

“They have enjoyed the safety of the undesired, and have lived lives to which a hundred generations have specialized them, in conditions barely tolerable to others,” wrote British military administrator Stephen Longrigg in 1949, in the Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society. ²

The other side of the Arabian Peninsula, the west, was where the action was. The vibrant caravan cities near the Red Sea supported people and commerce. In one of them, Mecca, an orphan born around ad 570 grew into a merchant who enjoyed bouts of solitude in the mountains. On one of his meditation sojourns, an angel brought him God’s revelations. The merchant returned to Mecca a changed man. He began to preach and became known as the Prophet Mohammed. The people of Mecca were skeptical of his message. So in 622 Mohammed took his few followers to the nearby city of Medina. This event, the Hijra, marks the start of the Islamic calendar. From Medina, of course, Mohammed and his followers returned to conquer Mecca, and, by the time of his death in 632, the religion of Islam had swept across most of the Arabian Peninsula, claiming even the few souls in the remote patch of desert that became Dubai. ³

The Final Frontier

As late as the 1940s, the West still had little clue what lay in the lands that now form Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Africa and Antarctica had been crossed, the source of the Nile pinpointed, and the North Pole conquered. The interior of the Arabian Peninsula was the last major blank spot on the map, the earth’s final frontier.

In the 1940s, people speculated that the center of the terrible Arabian Desert, the Texas-sized Empty Quarter, or Rub al-Khali, was the source of the plagues of locusts that ravaged East Africa. The final great British explorer, Wilfred Thesiger, used the locusts as an excuse to explore the unseen region. Thesiger was a British officer born in Africa and stationed in Sudan’s Darfur region, where he developed a love for desert life.

Rather than return to En gland after World War II, Thesiger lit out for Arabia. In Oman, he coaxed a band of desert Bedouin to lead him by camel across the Rub al-Khali in 1948. Thesiger, wearing the robes and beard of a Bedouin, found no evidence of locusts and not much else. He and his companions trudged barefoot up and down dunes for months, finding almost nothing—no shade, almost no water, and few signs of humanity.

Thesiger’s two crossings of the Rub al-Khali were little different from those done a thousand years ago, or at any time since the domestication of the camel in the late second millennium BC. Camels gave eastern Arabians a far broader range, encouraging migration, trade, and the mingling of isolated cultures. The swath of desert that became the UAE even attracted some migrants in the second and sixth centuries when waves of Arab pioneers wandered in from what is now Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Those settlers gathered themselves into tribal clans that still govern society in the UAE today.

The Arabian wastes of the UAE may have been a bit more attractive in those days. The land wasn’t always as powder-dry as it is now. Traveling by caravan was probably easier. ⁴ The evidence for this is bolstered when the drifting sands part to reveal dried riverbeds and long-abandoned frankincense caravan routes deep in the desert. In 1992, an expedition in remote Oman discovered the lost ruins of the fabled city of Ubar, which, according to the Quran, was so full of sinners that God destroyed it. Part of Ubar did collapse when an underground cavern gave way, but its residents were more likely driven off when its water source dried up. ⁵

As late as the 1930s, the British explorer Bertram Thomas, who roamed southeast Arabia for six years, met tribesmen who told him the rains had stopped in their lifetimes, with the date crop dropping by half and farmers abandoning the land. ⁶

There isn’t much left in the UAE from the ancestors of the Arabs beyond a few beehive-shaped burial tombs made of piles of rocks, some primitive settlement foundations, archaeological finds—including Central Asian ivory and Greek pots—and the ingenious irrigation channels still in use called falaj.

Moon Worshippers, Christians, and Muslims

There are few experiences more enchanting than spending a night in the desert. As the sky darkens, a giant moon rises above the dunes like a dinner plate just out of reach. The moon’s craters are so clear, it seems as if someone just scrubbed the sky. Scattered behind the moon, billions of stars glisten like polished crystal. Heaven never seemed so near. It’s practically a religious experience.

In fact, it is a religious experience—or it was before Islam arrived. Many Arabs of the lower Gulf worshipped the moon and the stars. Some prayed to the fearsome sun, which makes a powerful entrance in the clear sky each morning. A temple to the sun god once stood in the town of Al-Dur, now Umm Al-Quwain, probably the largest settlement on the lower Gulf coast at the birth of Christ. ⁷

Gulf Arabs also worshipped Jesus. There are churches scattered around the area that is now the UAE, including an important monastery of the Nestorian Church, built in honey-colored stone carved with crosses, grapes, and palm trees. The remains, unearthed just a few years ago on Sir Bani Yas Island in Abu Dhabi—not far from Dubai—may date to the fourth century. A village of Nestorian Christian monks lived on the island in what must have been stark isolation, with little fresh water. Besides praying, they sold pearls to their brethren in India. The monastery reached its peak in the eighth century, well after the arrival of Islam. Christianity in southeastern Arabia fizzled out by the ninth century. ⁸

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. ⁹

But the Omanis’ blanket ac cep tance of Islam had been hasty. There were skeptics who weren’t ready to stop worshipping an idol called Bajir. ¹⁰ 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. ¹¹

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 con ve nience that interested them was the rifle. ¹²

Frontier Democracy

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 r...