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.

Free trade was mother’s milk for Dubai. Wharves now lined the creek, and the newly built Iranian souk was crammed with goods from British-run India. Cargo was reexported to ports nearby or strapped onto camels bound for inland bazaars like the Buraimi Oasis. Within a few years, Dubai was closing in on larger ports like Sharjah, Ras Al-Khaimah, and Bandar Lengeh to become the chief trade center between the Strait of Hormuz and Qatar.4
Links with the outside world began to mount. Prior to 1901, British cargo and passenger vessels visited Dubai no more than five times a year. Two years later, Dubai was a scheduled destination. Steamships stopped twice a month. By 1908, Dubai was home to 10,000 Arabs, Persians, Indians, and Baluchis—as well as 1,650 camels, 400 shops in two bazaars, and more than 400 ships and boats. The town had long since burst out of its mud walls, which lay in ruins. Sheikh Maktoum ruled from his palace in the beachfront Shindagha neighborhood, backed by a hundred tribesmen who roamed the town with Martini rifles.5
Like the Cubans who fled to Miami, the Iranians who settled in Dubai dreamed of returning home. They hoped the Persian government’s clampdown on commerce was a temporary move. Many of the merchants had left their families in Iran and commuted across the Gulf for holidays. But the reforms never came and the Persian ports slipped into an idle torpor.

1894, Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher took over in Dubai. He wanted to do more to coax merchants from Iran. In 1900, the Persians made his job easier. They raised taxes in Lengeh and another Iranian port, Bushehr. The exodus intensified and included Arabs as well as Iranians.
Sheikh Maktoum saw the low-hanging fruit. He launched a plan to make Dubai the most business-friendly port in the lower Gulf. He abolished the 5 percent customs duty and slashed fees, turning Dubai into a free port. At the same time, Sheikh Maktoum sent his agents across the water to sweet-talk the biggest merchants, whether Arab or Persian, into moving to Dubai. The agents offered free land, guarantees of a friendly ear in the leader’s majlis, and a hands-off government policy.
The incentives worked. The heads of a few of the biggest Iranian businesses agreed to relocate, and as the Dubai sheikh planned, their business partners and customers followed. By 1901, a census found five hundred Persians in Dubai.3 Within a few years it was clear that most of the Iranian traders who’d packed up and left Lengeh were unpacking in Dubai.

The three Maktoum men who ran the city from 1912 until 2006—sheikhs Saeed bin Maktoum, Rashid bin Saeed, and Maktoum bin Rashid—all died natural deaths while on the job. In 2006, the city anointed its eleventh Maktoum ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid. Not one of the sheikhs who governed Dubai since 1833 was overthrown or murdered. By the chaotic standards of the region, 175 years of uninterrupted succession is probably unprecedented. Dubai’s immediate neighbors are more typical. In Abu Dhabi, it was rare for a ruling sheikh to die in office. Fratricidists and coup plotters took out most of them. And Sharjah has been fraught with palace murders and coup attempts right into the 1980s. Much of the Gulf is the same.
In fact, Dubai’s record of peaceful transition even puts America’s to shame. Assassins gunned down four U.S. presidents in that period: Abraham Lincoln in 1865

James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Stable rule and predictable succession is one of the fundamentals of Dubai’s commercial success. Stability is the bedrock of commerce, of course, but so are laws and incentives. And Dubai’s sheikhs, who had been living in rags in the deepest desert, were somehow shrewd enough to build an environment conducive to business. A few decades after the Maktoum takeover, the lonely outpost got its first chance to show what it could do.

British ended their 1819 campaign by demanding that the ruling sheikhs of coastal tribes sign truces renouncing any sort of naval hostility. The ruler of Sharjah signed first, in 1820. He agreed to surrender pirate ships and arms, destroy the town’s fortifications, and release British prisoners. In exchange, the British returned all the pearling and fishing boats they had seized. The other six ruling sheikhs soon followed Sharjah’s lead, although two of them needed a bit of British shelling to make up their minds.25 British supremacy over the coast was sealed. The seven sheikhdoms that later formed the UAE—Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, Ras Al-Khaimah, and Fujairah—fell under British dominance that lasted until 1971.
The 1819 assaults are significant for other reasons: They mark the start of a major Western military presence in this strategic sea. After the assaults, the British kept six warships on patrol in the Gulf. That presence grew over the years until, after World War II, America largely replaced the British. In 2008, the U.S. military kept around 40,000 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen in the Persian Gulf, not including the U.S. forces in Iraq.26
The downfall of Ras Al-Khaimah also left a commercial vacuum in the lower Gulf. The Qawasim port of Sharjah would take over some of the slack for a while, but the opening left room for Dubai to emerge and later, to dominate. Dubai’s leaders learned a lesson from the 1819 raids: The English were a force better befriended than fought.

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.

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.