City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (30 page)

He’s trained as a fighter pilot, drinks green tea, jogs on the beach, and drives in Dubai’s cutthroat traffic in a boxy white Mercedes G-class SUV. His Dubai license plate carries the single digit 1. Sheikh Mohammed fishes for marlin in the Arabian Sea and hunts game in Africa and Pakistan. He’s a champion racer of endurance horses and the world’s largest owner of thoroughbreds. And the ruler is an astute investor, one of the planet’s richest men, and sole owner of a global portfolio worth billions of dollars.
Forbes
magazine ranks him in the modest number five slot on the world’s richest royals list, with an $18 billion fortune—behind his cousin, UAE ruler Sheikh Khalifa, at $23 billion. Despite his riches, he cultivates the persona of a minimalist.

“I need little from my world,” he writes. “My prayer mat and water container are in my car wherever I go, together with my work documents and my vision.”

Sheikh Mohammed’s Zabeel Palace overlooks central Dubai from atop a dune, its marbled halls gilded to the baseboards and bathed in the glow of hundreds of chandeliers. The gargantuan palace resembles an American high school, its grounds crammed with fountains and strutting peacocks. Spreading out before it is a royal family domain containing a
palace that looks like Versailles and another that resembles the White House. There is the lush Zabeel Club, the royal family’s manicured private recreation haunt. The family’s Zabeel Stables sits next to the club, with racetracks, barns, and horse rings, along with a spa and swimming pool for its million-dollar steeds. Every morning, as the sunrise gilds surrounding skyscrapers, stable hands take the horses for a stroll.

In October 2006, I sat in Zabeel Palace with Sheikh Mohammed as he broke his Ramadan fast with his staff. The men building the world’s most futuristic city ate with their fingers, like Bedouin, grabbing hunks of lamb—including the eyes and brains—from greasy carcasses, wadding it with rice and thumbing it into their mouths. After dinner, manservants appeared with incense burners gushing gorgeously fragrant
oudh
smoke. The men washed their hands in the smoke and let it flow under their headscarves to perfume their hair.

Sheikh Mohammed’s upbringing was decidedly less grand. He grew up in the Maktoum family compound known as Sheikh Saeed’s house, kicking a ball around a sandy courtyard that overlooked the creek. His father, Rashid, his mother, Latifa, and his siblings occupied one of the home’s smaller wings. It consisted of four small, interconnected rooms with thick coral walls, fifteen-foot ceilings, low doorways, and tiny windows. The house had no electricity during Mohammed’s early years. There was little privacy. The only room with a door was the bathroom. It held a toilet—a hole in the floor leading to a pit—and a bath. The royal family washed by drawing water from a clay urn and ladling it over themselves. It was a rare privilege. Most Dubaians washed in the sea.

“In those days it wasn’t like today, where every child gets their own room,” says Abdulla al-Mutairy, forty-nine, director of the museum that now occupies the house. “Sometimes at night they all slept together in one room with a fan.”

In summer, the royals slept in rooms on the rooftop, overlooking the clamor of the creek through carved wooden
mushrabiyah
screens.

When Sheikh Mohammed was a boy, a hundred people or more lived in his family compound, including guards, slaves, and the families of his grandfather Sheikh Saeed, and those of his great-uncles Juma and Hasher. In the giant kitchen, slaves cooked pots of
machbous
and
salouna
on fires built of scraps of wood and charcoal. A big set of doors swung onto the courtyard, where handlers would lead camels that bellowed
as they kneeled under their loads. Cats and dogs wandered the home. And in the evenings, falconers brought out their birds.
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Pictures in the home depict the hard life in pre-electric Dubai. Sheikh Mohammed comes across as a tough little boy. In one photo, young Mohammed sits on his father’s lap wearing a skullcap and a serious look while his father reads from the Iraq Petroleum Company yearbook. In another, Mohammed appears about eight years old wearing a filthy
kandoura
and a beat-up suit jacket. He’s got a falcon clamped to his wrist. An old man appears to be teaching him to train the bird.

Young Mohammed lived in Sheikh Saeed’s old house until he was nearly ten, moving out after his grandfather died in 1958 and his father became ruler. Sheikh Mohammed still visits his boyhood home. He takes visitors on tours, pointing out the places where he played and the pictures of his relatives. President Bush got the guided tour in 2007.
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Sheikh Rashid often took Mohammed for walks along the creek, pointing out locations where his city of the future would rise. Rashid was said to be impressed by young Mohammed’s intelligence and decisiveness. Early on he steeped his third son in the details of running Dubai. He sent him to Sandhurst to beef up his leadership skills and to improve his English.

By the age of twenty, the young sheikh was in charge of Dubai’s police and security forces. Sheikh Mohammed has enjoyed a remarkable run since then, managing to preserve the city’s safety despite its overwhelming social changes and the conflicts in countries nearby.

At the age of twenty-two, when the UAE emerged as an independent state, Sheikh Mohammed became the country’s minister of defense, the world’s youngest. But it wasn’t until 1997 that he agreed to integrate Dubai’s own troops—which he led—with those of the other emirates. Only after the UAE received defense guarantees from Washington, Britain, and France was he convinced the merged forces would be better able to stand up to neighborhood bullies like Iran and Iraq.
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Sheikh Rashid seems to have outlined a succession scheme after his 1980 stroke that would eventually put Mohammed in charge. By 1985, his serious-minded son controlled several levers of power, enjoying the support of a growing posse of powerful backers. When Sheikh Rashid died in 1990, the Dubai leadership role passed to Mohammed’s eldest
brother, Maktoum, a horse enthusiast known for the kind heart and mild manner, which made him a natural diplomat. The second-eldest, Hamdan, became deputy ruler and UAE finance minister. But Mohammed gradually took control of the emirate, plunging his hands into every aspect of the city’s growth, sculpting the landscape and tinkering with the economy. By 1995, when Maktoum appointed him crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed emerged as the city’s key decision maker, his Executive Office the center of power.
⁵

Sheikh Maktoum remained ruler of Dubai and federal prime minister and vice president until January 3, 2006. On that day, Maktoum died of an apparent heart attack while vacationing in Australia. He was only sixty-two. Maktoum’s three brothers buried him next to Sheikh Rashid, and, with barely a hiccup, Sheikh Mohammed assumed his brother’s titles.

Running into Sheikh Mohammed can be akin to meeting a leprechaun. For Mohammed Saleh Khamis al-Kaabi, the oldest man in the remote Wadi Al Qoor, that’s exactly how it was. Al-Kaabi, who guesses he is a hundred years old (he looks more like seventy), was sitting in his crumbling house one day when Sheikh Mohammed’s entourage rumbled into his village.
⁶

The Dubai ruler happened to be touring the area, assessing its housing needs, which in the UAE means giving housing grants. He came across al-Kaabi and sat with him on a carpet. “Do you know me? I am Mohammed bin Rashid,” the sheikh told the old man. “Give me an order, father. Whatever you want, just name it.”

He asked the old man, with cropped gray hair and an unkempt beard, what was lacking in his life. He addressed al-Kaabi’s wife respectfully as “my aunt.”

Al-Kaabi leaned over and grasped Sheikh Mohammed’s hands and the two men rubbed noses, their foreheads touching in traditional greeting. Al-Kaabi spoke of losing four of his seven sons, three of whom died in car crashes. The wife and children of one of his dead sons scratched out a tough existence in the
wadi
. Sheikh Mohammed, in a khaki
kandoura
and olive headscarf, saw the cracks in the walls and understood that the old man’s life could be more comfortable. Still, al-Kaabi asked for nothing. He told the Dubai leader that he’d vowed never to leave the
house that Sheikh Rashid gave him thirty years ago, despite its deterioration from lack of maintenance.

“We owe the Maktoum family many favors,” al-Kaabi said. “They provided me and my family with housing all our lives.”

On the spot, Sheikh Mohammed ordered a new house built for al-Kaabi as well as for the family of one of his dead sons. Days later, crews turned up in the lonely
wadi
to start work. A year later, al-Kaabi had a six-bedroom house that would have made Martha Stewart proud, with wooden beams, palm-thatch porticos, lanterns hanging on the walls, and heavy wooden doors. The house was furnished right down to the boxes of Kleenex and fresh fruit. It spoke of style and luxury, worth at least a million dollars.

Al-Kaabi’s wife Aliba, in a metallic burqa mask worn by Gulf women, was flushed. “God created this man to look after his people. We never imagined we’d see him in this remote area.”

Her husband said: “Sheikh Mohammed can fulfill anyone’s dreams. It only requires meeting him once. He looks you in the eye and then looks around you. He can easily find out what you want without you asking for it.”

Giving houses is part of a tribal leader’s bargain with his people. But it doesn’t usually happen with such a personal touch. Sheikh Mohammed’s housing charity recently gave away 260 five-bedroom villas—with free utilities, schools, and a clinic—in the mountain town of Hatta. Each cost $220,000 to build.
⁷

When I was at Sheikh Mohammed’s Ramadan
iftar
for journalists in 2006, he avoided the dozen or so Western reporters he’d invited. A few Emirati women journalists were the only ones to chat with him. At dinner, I tried to strike up a conversation with his aides. All I could coax out of them were monosyllabic grunts. Finally, one of them looked at me and said, “We’ve been told to watch what we say around you journalists.”

It was against the odds, then, when in 2007, the American TV show
60 Minutes
persuaded Sheikh Mohammed to grant an interview. CBS sent a crew of seven to spend a few days with the Dubai leader. The crew
interviewed him several times and filmed his wanderings around the city, chatting with him as he drove his Mercedes 4x4. What followed was a fawning portrayal of the Dubai leader and his accomplishments—a rare event for a program dedicated to investigative reporting.

When filming was finished, Sheikh Mohammed’s three top lieutenants—Mohammed al-Gergawi, Mohammed Alabbar, and Sultan bin Sulayem—threw the CBS crew a going-away party. Representatives from the
diwan
handed each crew member a bathing suit and led them to a speedboat, which whisked them two miles out to sea. Nakheel’s archipelago, The World, rose in front of them. The boat beached on the only inhabited island, home to a mansion belonging to Sheikh Mohammed’s second wife, Princess Haya. The CBS crew swam in the infinity pool and lounged on the beach, with a view over the neighboring islands.

A row of twenty brand-new Jet Skis sat parked on the beach. Bin Sulayem, Alabbar, and Gergawi hopped aboard and told the crew members to follow. Mike Charlton, a Dubai-based cameraman, was one of the CBS crew that day. The forty-year-old Australian jumped on one of the craft and roared after the three billionaires. It was an unbelievable opportunity. It wasn’t just spending simultaneous time with the three busiest men in town—getting an interview with one of them is difficult enough—but the fact that they’d tossed aside their responsibilities to horse around with a camera crew.

The men sped around the three-mile by five-mile archipelago. The three hundred islands are separated by narrow, curving passages of water, making it difficult to see far ahead. Charlton, a Jet Ski novice, found it exhilarating—and dangerous. A few times, he’d slash out of a narrow channel to find the boyish Alabbar bearing down on him, in what looked to be a head-on collision. At the last moment, the Emaar chairman, with a devilish grin, would jerk the handlebars to the side and send his craft swooshing in a long skid, launching a giant wave over Charlton and nearly knocking him over. Then he would speed off.

“Boy, can those guys Jet Ski,” Charlton says. “They tag-team you. You don’t know where you’re going because they just sprayed you with water and they’re gone.”

The men chased each other around The World, juddering around the tip of South America, circling Australia, and darting through the channels separating the European countries. After a while, a helicopter passed overhead and landed on the island. The Jet Skiers followed. Sheikh
Mohammed stepped out, dressed in a short red wetsuit. The Dubai leader said hello to the CBS crew, then he, too, peeled away, skittering over the sea faster than any of them.

“He just shot off around the islands. Man, was he fast! You’d chase him and every now and then you’d see him, just shooting past,” Charlton says. “I gave up trying to catch him. He was just flying.”

It wasn’t the most salubrious activity for a head of state. Charlton, a daredevil cameraman inured to the front lines of the globe’s war zones, was worried he was going to crash, either into an island or into one of his Jet Skiing companions. The chance of taking out Sheikh Mohammed was an alarming possibility.

“You have to pay attention. These things are moving maybe fifty miles per hour, which is why it was so exhilarating. You’re going in and out of these islands, and some of them only have a sandbar between them. Three or four inches of water. And you’ve got to make a really quick decision. Can I make it?”

“In terms of my life experiences, it was right up there,” Charlton says. “I was thinking to myself,
‘This is the business
. I’ll remember this until the day I die.’”