Jim Krane

THIS IS THE story of a small Arab village that grew into a big city.

It was a mud village on the seaside, as poor as any in Africa, and it sat in a region where pirates, holy warriors, and dictators held sway over the years. There was even a communist uprising for a time, right next door. But the village was peaceful, ruled by the same family generation after generation.

No one thought the village would become a city. It sat on the edge of a vast desert, surrounded by a sea of sand. There was no running water, no ice, no radio, no road. The village drifted in an eddy of time. While other nations launched rockets into space, the villagers fished and napped. They and their slaves dove for pearls in the sea.

The villagers trusted the family that ruled them. The family produced generous men who ruled by three principles: what is good for the merchant is good for the village; embrace visitors, no matter what their religion; and, you cannot win if you do not take risks.

The ruling family and their villagers were sorely tested during the hard times of the 1930s and 1940s. People starved. Slaves fled, because masters had no food. Rivals rose against them. Schools crumbled into the earth. The only blessings came as clouds of locusts, which the villagers toasted and ate.

But the villagers were a gregarious and hardworking bunch. They pulled themselves together. They enlarged their sailing fleet and began trading and smuggling. They borrowed money and dredged a little port. They invited foreigners to settle, promising freedom from taxes and turmoil. Foreigners who ventured in liked the village and its ambitious leader, a man named Rashid. The village grew into a town. The foreigners told Rashid of the wonders of the modern world, the skyscrapers of New York and the London Underground. He listened intently.

Rashid and his townspeople were dismayed to learn that no one in the outside world had ever heard of them. Rashid decided this would change.

Rashid wanted the name of his town, Dubai, on the lips of every person on earth. When a family sat down to dinner in America, Rashid wanted them to discuss the happenings of Dubai. And when two Englishmen paused for a glass of beer, it was Dubai that he wished them to talk about. Farmers in China, bankers in Switzerland, and generals in Russia: All of them must know of Dubai. For this to happen, the town couldn’t stay small and poor. Rashid made a wish. Dubai must become the most luxurious city the world has ever known: the City of Gold.

In 1960 Dubai set off on a journey that was more exciting than anything the Arabs had done in seven hundred years. The town grew bigger and more dazzling with each passing day. Rashid’s son Mohammed took over and pressed forward with even more passion. The villagers whose parents ate locusts donned gowns embroidered in crystal. Illiterate elders went shopping by private jet.

Arabs everywhere admired Dubai. A people down on its luck found pride flooding back. They asked their own leaders why they couldn’t be more like Dubai.

But like all great wishes that are granted, the success of Rashid’s quest brought unforeseen trouble. Lives were trampled by the city’s growth. Greed eclipsed common

sense. The old ways were lost, and simplicity disappeared, never to return. The dream of capitalism brought them a new city, unlike any other. It also wed Dubai to the fickle ways of the global marketplace, which, as the desert-dwellers learned, can inundate you with wealth and then, even more quickly, take it away.

The story of Dubai’s wild ride contains powerful lessons for all of us. It starts long ago, when a great migration took place in Arabia’s most isolated corner.

Arabian summers are hot enough to kill healthy men.

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

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

But the Omanis’ blanket acceptance 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

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.

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.

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

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.14
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.15
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.