Dubai

World War II ground on, the famine grew desperate. When there was no rice, fish, or dates, people ate leaves or the ubiquitous dhub, a spiny lizard that may have given Dubai its name. Plagues of locusts became a blessing. People would net the bugs and fry them, crunching on them by the handful. “They were very delicious,” says Fatma al-Sayegh,a history professor from Dubai who ate locusts as a girl. “They taste like French fries.” A town can’t survive on bugs, leaves, and lizards. Inevitably, some Dubaians starved to death.24 In the northern sheikhdoms like Ras Al-Khaimah and among nomads in the interior, deaths from starvation were even more common.25

Nearly half a million Iranians have fled to the good life in the UAE. In Dubai, Iranians outnumber local Emiratis by around three to one.8
Iranian parliamentarian Hadi Haqshenas blames the exodus on Tehran’s failed social and economic controls. “Since these wrongheaded policies won’t be reversed any time soon, we can expect the UAE to attract many of our specialists, medical doctors, engineers and other experts,” Haqshenas said in 2006.9
Iranians are a key cog in the machinery that has created this marvel in the desert. Dubai now hosts nearly ten thousand Iranian-run businesses10 that have diversified beyond the Iranian market and now ship anywhere in the world. Iranians are among the city’s largest developers and merchants, its top buyers of homes, and one of its biggest sources of investment.
All of this comes at huge cost to the Iranian economy, which has seen its citizens investing tens of billions of dollars in the UAE rather than at home. Some $15 billion flowed out of Iran and into Dubai in 2007 alone, estimates Jean-François Seznec, of Georgetown University, who has researched the links.11 Dubai is also Iran’s largest trading partner. Iranians spent some $14 billion importing goods that sailed across the Gulf from Dubai that same year, Seznec believes, rather than the $10 billion tallied in official figures.12

Iranians brought prosperity and worldliness to a town that had known little of either. Most Dubaians still lived in thatch huts and gathered their water at a communal well. But the town had a modern quarter now, Bastakiya, which showed off the latest imported cooling technology: the wind tower. Most of the big new homes had at least one of the square towers that rose a story or two above the roof, with openings on all sides to catch the breeze—whether blowing off the sea or from the desert. The wind towers funneled the breezes indoors and, sometimes, directly onto the hammock of a merchant taking his midafternoon nap. The fresh air might be hot, but the Bastakis called the indoor relief “God’s breeze.”6
Bastakiya is now an historic district, and some of the old Iranian merchant homes still stand, rescued from wholesale bulldozing in the 1980s. Unfortunately, the government’s heavy-handed restoration of the once elegant neighborhood has destroyed most of its charms.