City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (2 page)

DUBAI STIRS

THE SANDS OF TIME

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 campfire, 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

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 England 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
.

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