City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (12 page)

The carved wooden doors on the coral house swung open for Sheikh Saeed one last time. The ruler emerged flat on his back on a wooden bier, his body covered in a red-checked cloth. Pallbearers carried the corpse along the creek to the cemetery. The crowd fell in behind, including Sheikh Saeed’s sons, Rashid and Khalifa, wearing simple white
kandouras
. Men led the group in Quranic chants as muezzins at Dubai’s mosques announced the death in melancholy cadences. Women in black robes and masks wailed on the streetcorners and joined the procession as it passed. Hawley heard a Saudi telling the women to get lost, that it was
haram
, forbidden in Islam, for females to join a funeral march. No one paid him any mind.

Townspeople surrounded the grave to watch the lowering of the old man’s body. Sheikh Saeed had been born in 1878, one of a thousand or so inhabitants in an unknown town on the far edge of the world. He survived as an infant against the odds. He took over as ruler in 1912 upon the death of his uncle, Butti bin Suhail al-Maktoum. The town’s business leaders, Europeans, Indians, and Iranians, were paying respects to his son Rashid, now officially in charge. Hawley found Dubai’s forty-six-year-old leader squatting in the shade of a tree and murmured to him in Arabic, “May God give you consolation.”

A Pakistani photographer named Noor Ali Rashid was one of those in the crowd, but he’d purposefully left his camera at home. Noor Ali Rashid had only arrived in Dubai a few days earlier, and he’d had a bad experience taking pictures of the dead. In Karachi, he’d snapped a photo of a little girl killed in a traffic accident and a mob had chased him through the streets. He’d barely escaped with his life. He swore off corpse photography after that.

The simple burial was over by 10:00 a.m. Locals gathered around Sheikh Rashid, kissing him, according to custom, on the nose. The new ruler looked exhausted and disoriented. By the end of the morning, he collapsed. Dr. McCaully had to visit the royal residence a second time.

The death of Sheikh Saeed and the end of his forty-six-year rule marked the final stage of Dubai’s long slumber in old Arabia. Very little changed on his watch. His death came like a catalyst, a dam burst that allowed fifty years of pent-up modernity to flood Dubai.

Sheikh Rashid, who had been running things unofficially for nearly two decades, would use his mandate to put this unknown city on the map. Within a year, Dubai would have a modern port. Within four years, electricity, running water, and telephones. A bridge would span the creek in five years, and street lights would illuminate the town a year later. Queen Elizabeth II would pay Sheikh Rashid not one but two visits, touring Dubai’s new airport terminal in 1972 and then returning to inaugurate the Middle East’s tallest building in 1979.

The British threw a recognition ceremony for the new leader, complete with a naval artillery salute. Rashid stood on the creek bank amid a smattering of British officials and sheikhs, looking nervous as Hawley read a letter from Queen Elizabeth recognizing him as the legitimate ruler of Dubai.

This time Noor Ali Rashid brought his camera. The wiry man strode up to Sheikh Rashid and snapped his picture, then asked him to pose with Hawley and snapped a few more. Soon he was stage-managing the event, herding merchants to pose with Dubai’s ruler. A few days later he dropped off a few prints. He’d developed them in his makeshift darkroom with chemicals he’d brought from Pakistan. He filtered the water himself because it was so full of grit that it scratched the film. The Dubai ruler was impressed with the pictures. From then on, any time there was an official function—luncheons, visiting warships, falcon demonstrations, ribbon cuttings—Sheikh Rashid would send for the Pakistani photographer.
²

Sheikh Rashid had a crooked hawk’s nose and beady eyes that danced when he smiled. His shaggy beard and the creases around his eyes lent his smile a grandfatherly allure, even when he was a young man. He was self-educated and had had little schooling. He spoke only Arabic. Rashid was skeptical of certain bits of modernity, but he was openly disdainful of the stagnant past.

The new ruler kept himself in good shape, maintaining the bandy physique of a horseman his entire life. He’d already proven his toughness in the 1939 attack that rescued his father’s administration. But the ruthlessness of his younger years had mellowed. Rashid now exuded the simple confidence of the Bedouin, or
Bedu
.

Rashid disdained certain comforts. He rode his horse even after he owned a car. He preferred to sit cross-legged on the floor in the Bedouin style. When offered a seat on a couch, he’d draw his legs up underneath him. He smoked a tiny pipe, a
midwakh
, common in the Gulf, and held it absentmindedly as he spoke, filling it with green tobacco from a small aspirin jar.
³
Rashid’s charm was infectious and disarming. His
majlis
was as much a forum for teasing and gags as for serious business. His jokes were often self-deprecating. He’d ask people to explain things in detail, saying with a smile, “I am a
Bedu
and do not understand complicated modern ways.”
⁴

Behind the modesty was a skilled politician who managed to stay on good terms with just about everybody, including the Saudis and Iranians, despite territorial disputes. He’d allied himself with the ruling al-Nahyan family of Abu Dhabi when he married Sheikha Latifa, a cousin of ruling sheikhs Shakhbut and Zayed. Rashid earned enormous respect in Britain and, in his later years, in Washington. He even managed to out-maneuver Saddam Hussein in the 1980s while remaining on cordial terms. During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam demanded that Dubai halt trade with Iran, which, he complained, was giving his enemies an economic lifeline. Sheikh Rashid’s sympathetic noises managed to mollify Saddam while keeping up the profitable trade with Iran.
⁵
The Bush administration put the same diplomatic pressure on Dubai after 2006, haranguing Sheikh Mohammed to heed the U.S. trade embargo on Iran. Like Saddam, Bush got friendly responses and little action.

Sheikh Rashid maintained a punishing work ethic in a region known for languor. He rose while it was dark and toured the city before dawn prayers. Afterward he held daily
majlis
meetings with movers and shakers. He brought Dubaians under his spell, demonstrating a knack for sizing people up, and then investing trust in men who found themselves working to impress him, if only to extend the magical sensation of Sheikh Rashid’s attention.

“Those of us foreigners that came here, we all got the same infection from Sheikh Rashid. Dubai had to become a place on the map,” George
Chapman says, reeling off a list of names of Englishmen who pitched in. Bill Duff handled finances. Eric Tulloch became the state engineer and developed Dubai’s municipal drinking water. The surveyors of Sir William Halcrow designed major projects and mapped out the city’s growth. And Chapman handled shipping.

In the 1950s, Dubai was in trouble. The creek, its lifeline to the world, was being choked with silt. Ships had to anchor in deep water a mile offshore and transfer goods to barges, which ferried them into the creek. This could only be done when weather and tides cooperated. The creek mouth was only two and a half feet deep at low tide, far too shallow for most boats. Barges could only get in at high tide. Even then they ran aground. Breakers rolled in and swamped the barges, ruining sacks of rice and flour.
⁶

Ship captains on tight schedules skipped Dubai, which could only handle tiny cargoes. The creek debacle was a constant theme in Sheikh Rashid’s
majlis
. He agreed with the merchants: If the waterway was deeper and had moorings, ships could enter and they’d only be unloaded once.

In 1954, when Sheikh Rashid was still crown prince, he commissioned a feasibility study that called for dredging the creek and building up its banks with bulkheads and sheet piling. But the estimated cost, £600,000 (about $3 million), was far beyond Dubai’s means, representing years of the town’s total economic output. Sheikh Rashid decided to raise the cash. He gathered £200,000 by levying special taxes, selling bonds, and strong-arming donations from merchant families who relied on the creek.
⁷
And the rest, £400,000, he borrowed from newly wealthy Kuwait, which played the role of Gulf big brother in those days.

Aerial photos from the era show how the dredging barges, with their backhoes scraping the creek bed, swept away the shoals from the creek’s mouth. Crews shored up the banks with steel and concrete, allowing boats to moor. From a shallow tidal wash whose mouth shifted with each storm, the creek became a defined channel. It could handle ships with eight-foot drafts, carrying seven thousand tons of cargo. One ship could deliver triple the cargo Dubai imported in all of 1951.
⁸

Sheikh Rashid used the dredging spoils to reclaim new land along the banks, which he sold to merchants for warehousing. When Dubai’s largest public project finished in 1961, Dubai was the most accessible and important port on the Trucial Coast.

The dredging cleared away the obstructions to Dubai’s modernization as if they were bowling pins, catapulting the growing port into the commercial leadership of the lower Gulf. Weather was no longer a big problem, since there was no need to transfer cargoes offshore. Shippers knew their vessels could visit and stay on schedule. Dubai became a profitable destination. Merchants could order hundreds of tons of concrete, for example, or block, steel, glass, and plaster. No one built from palm fronds or coral anymore.

Dubai’s entrepôt business, its reexports, caught like a gasoline fire. The town became the chief port for southern Iran and the supplier for the rest of the Trucial Coast, warehousing goods that were transshipped down the coast in dhows or humped into the interior by camel. From then on, Dubai would ride an incredible growth spurt that has yet to stop. The dredging of the creek was the spark that started the whole thing.

Sheikh Rashid was able to repay the merchants and the Kuwaitis ahead of time. Locals who shared the risk became some of the richest in the city and in some cases, the world. The al-Ghurair family, the al-Rostamanis, the al-Futtaims, and others were repaid with exclusive import licenses and business contracts. To this day, Sheikh Mohammed pays tribute to the families who risked their personal wealth to build Dubai.
⁹
A few of their descendants, men like Abdul Aziz al-Ghurair, are now on the
Forbes
magazine “world’s richest” list.
¹⁰

Rashid’s next task was to brighten up the place. In his initial year as ruler, he set up a municipal electric company. It built a rudimentary 1,440-kilowatt generating plant and strung the town with wires.
¹¹
The bright lights of Dubai flickered to life in 1961. It was about time. Not far away, Israel had already launched a rocket into space. The Soviets sent a satellite zooming past Venus. Dubai’s municipal power came eighty
years after the lights went on in Niagara Falls, New York, and long after Cairo, Beirut, and even Saudi Arabia. Electricity brought all sorts of unknown comforts. The souks were suddenly awash in fans, refrigerators, radios—even air conditioners. That same year, technicians cobbled together the town’s first telephone exchange and spliced it into the international network. Dubai was now a phone call away from anywhere in the world.
¹²

Dubai’s good fortune often looks like a gift. In some cases, this is literally true. Its first paved road, first bridge, and municipal water system came as dowry presents from Sheikh Ahmad bin Ali al-Thani, the emir of the nearby sheikhdom of Qatar. Sheikh Ahmad helped his upstart neighbor in gratitude for being given the hand of Sheikh Rashid’s eldest child, Mariam, in 1958.

In 1961, Sheikh Ahmad paved a sand track that ran between the creek and Sheikh Rashid’s new Zabeel Palace, a few miles inland. Zabeel Road was Dubai’s first tarmac street.
¹³
Engineers soon began laying out roads and roundabouts in the English fashion. At first, Dubaians drove like Brits, on the left. When it became apparent that neighbors had adopted right-side driving, Sheikh Rashid ordered everyone to switch.

In 1962, the Qatari emir plunked down £162 million to pay for Dubai’s first creek crossing, the Maktoum Bridge.
¹⁴
For the first time, people could walk from Bur Dubai to Deira, and driving didn’t mean an hour-long sand rally around the far end of the creek.

A few years later, drillers found an aquifer of fresh water at Al Aweer, fifteen miles south of the city. The clean water was delicious compared with the brackish swill in town. Sheikh Ahmad bankrolled the system that brought the water into Dubai, with underground pipes fanning out to nearly every building by 1968. Finally, Dubaians had running water. Nobody mourned the demise of the donkey cart vendors.

New amenities swept Dubai one after another: an ice plant, radio and television broadcasts, streetlights, municipal government, a police force, even the use of concrete. Dubai was among the last places in the region to get these things. Sheikh Rashid knew it was part of his ruling bargain to bring water and power and pave the streets. That would have been enough to gain public support as the tribal patriarch. But, of course, Sheikh Rashid wasn’t content to bring Dubai to par with the region. Dubaians got a lot more than the ruling bargain called for.

In the 1950s, Dubai was overshadowed by next-door Sharjah, a larger city with a bigger port and a long maritime history under the Qawasim. But Sharjah drifted in indecisiveness. Its ruler refused Kuwaiti assistance to stop the silting up of its own tidal creek, its chief port.