City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (4 page)

In 1800, Dubai was the northeastern anchor of the vast realm of the Bani Yas tribe. Bani Yas territory with its headquarters in Abu Dhabi, extended deep into the desert and hundreds of miles along the coast, to the base of Qatar. Thus Dubai was under the control of Abu Dhabi but sat on the border of the lands of the Qawasim clan, the finest Arab sailors of the Gulf. A few times the Qawasim in the neighboring sheikhdom, Sharjah, occupied the town. But the Bani Yas always recovered Dubai.
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By the early 1800s, the Persian Gulf’s strategic value was beginning to tantalize the Europeans and Ottomans. Britain, especially, agonized over the Gulf. It saw that it could not secure its lucrative trade lines to India without controlling the nearly landlocked sea. India lay just a few hundred miles across the Arabian Sea from the Gulf coast—easy striking distance. In those days, the rough-and-tumble Gulf harbored pirates and roving Wahhabi warriors, members of an ultraconservative Muslim sect now synonymous with Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabis stoked hostility to the British and any Muslims who befriended them. Rival powers were already extending their tentacles into the Gulf. The Ottomans held Iraq, including the Gulf port of Basra, and they carried influence in parts of what is now Saudi Arabia. The rest was uncolonized and fair game.

Britain’s East India Co., which governed India, made the first major move. It launched new trade routes to Gulf ports, which, besides establishing British power, had the added benefit of profitability. This gambit for trade and influence put the British squarely into conflict with Arab traders, especially the Qawasim, those with the family name al-Qassimi.
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The Qawasim were the most powerful group of families in the lands that formed the UAE, and their cities were the largest, overshadowing the Bani Yas settlements of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which were just dots on the map. The Qawasim owned nearly a thousand ships and boats, with twenty thousand men based in Ras Al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and other ports north of Dubai, and Bandar Lengeh, now in Iran. Their ships ferried goods to East Africa, India, and ports throughout the Gulf.
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The cheap and maneuverable Qawasim dhows proved nimble competition for British shipping. Pirates, some allied with the Qawasim, preyed on British merchant ships. In 1805, pirates boarded two brigs belonging to the British political resident in Basra. They slaughtered most of the crew and chopped off the arm of one of the ship captains. The brigands then reflagged the hijacked ships as pirate vessels. The gruesomely wounded commander saved his life by shoving the stump of his arm into a pot of scalding ghee and cauterizing the wound.
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The Qawasim got the blame for this attack and many others, although they were probably responsible for few of them. Much of the Gulf piracy stemmed from the anarchic disintegration of the Persian Empire.
But the British ignored this source of attacks to take on the trading clan.

In 1809, the British attacked Ras Al-Khaimah, the seat of Qawasim power. The town’s inhabitants simply melted into the mountains and returned when the British left. In 1816, a fleet of British warships again parked itself off Ras Al-Khaimah and bombarded the city. The shelling was so ineffectual that, as the British weighed anchor to depart, townsmen mocked them with victory dances on shore.

In 1819, the British returned in earnest—in a fleet of twelve warships led by the frigate HMS
Liverpool
. The ships brimmed with three thousand marines, largely Indians under British command. Their attack on Ras Al-Khaimah was one of history’s first major amphibious assaults. This time the Qawasim stayed to fight. Their slaughter at the hands of red-coated Indian fighters is enshrined in watercolors at the Sharjah Art Museum. The British raiders went on to smash Qawasim strongholds in Bandar Lengeh and Sharjah. When it was over, the proud Qawasim trading empire was a smoking ruin.

Historians differ on their views of the British assaults. Traditionally, the narrative follows the British line that the attacks were a justified response to Arab piracy. Recent research disagrees. Using documents from the East India Company’s archives, historians—including Sharjah ruler Sheikh Sultan al-Qassimi—say the British decision to destroy Qawasim shipping was made to snuff the competition. The incessant alarms over Arab piracy were more smoke than fact, used to justify sending the Royal Navy on its punitive mission.
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Whatever the truth, the British swooped in to dominate Gulf trade. Exports from British India to the Gulf doubled within two years.
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The Qawasim never recovered. Their powerful sheikhdom of Ras Al-Khaimah shattered into several pieces, with the towns of Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, and Fujairah declaring independence, and Sharjah becoming a separate sheikhdom. Today, Ras Al-Khaimah is one of the poorest of the seven emirates of the UAE. For this, they hold the British responsible.

The 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.
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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.
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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.

The Qawasim of Ras Al-Khaimah held a grudge against the British for nearly two hundred years. But in the late 1990s, the two sides made amends. The HMS
Liverpool
, albeit in a new incarnation, made a special voyage back to Ras Al-Khaimah harbor. And the British ambassador to the UAE, Anthony Harris, escorted the emirate’s leader Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammed al-Qassimi aboard the frigate for lunch in the captain’s cabin. After receiving a twenty-one-gun salute, Saqr gave Harris a tour of his palace, showing him an oil painting of the earlier HMS
Liverpool
, hung as a reminder of the British assault that devastated his sheikhdom.
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While the Qawasim were left to stew over their fate, the British would find no better friend in the lower Gulf than the ruling sheikhs of Dubai. The rewards for their friendship would soon be apparent.

In December 1819, a British ship anchored off the Dubai creek and a scouting party rowed ashore. The sailors wandered around a dusty village with fishing and pearling boats resting on the beach or nodding in
the tidal creek. Lording over the settlement was the Al-Fahidi Fort, a castle of coral and mud. The fort’s two watchtowers—one square, one round—rose above its thirty-foot walls, giving riflemen a clear shot at anyone walking up from the creek. The British sailors faced no such threats, exchanging warm handshakes and brief words with the man in charge. He was a Bani Yas noble named Mohammed bin Hazza bin Zeyl al-Nahyan, a cousin of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, the al-Nahyans. When it came his time to sign the British truce a few months later, Mohammed bin Hazza was ill. He sent his uncle, Zayed bin Saif bin Mohammed, to sign.

In 1822, a British naval surveyor, Lt. Cogan, returned to the village at the mouth of the languid creek. Cogan took the time to jot down a description of Dubai. He found a thousand people living in an oval-shaped town ringed by a mud wall, with goats and camels throughout. The site was barren, barely clinging to a low peninsula just a few feet above the waterline. The map he sketched shows three watchtowers poking up above a wall with several breaches.
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Two small groves of date palms grew outside the wall, harboring the town’s only fresh water wells. Dubaians lived in huts of thatch or mud. They dressed in crude cloaks and turbans. Their exposed skin was so deeply tanned that it cracked like old cowhide. Men and women daubed black
kohl
, mascaralike, on their eyelashes, to protect their eyes from the relentless sun. It helped, but not enough to prevent most from getting cataracts. The men spent their days fishing, pearling, and collecting shark fins.

The dozen streets Cogan found in Dubai were sandy footpaths that cut across the village. On one side the paths led down to the anchorage on the reedy creek. On the other, they converged outside the walls, where they trailed off into the desert as caravan routes. There was nothing about Dubai that suggested a spark of greatness; nothing that hinted at future skyscrapers and palaces, thrumming ports and glittering resorts that would cover the blinding sands that stretched beyond the horizon. Dubai was as primeval and timeless as any seaside village in Africa.

The lethargy wasn’t to last. Two hundred miles away, deep in a lost desert oasis, a tribal clash was brewing. The outcome brought big changes to Dubai, providing the spark that sent the village on a course of incredible growth.

The dispute happened in a place called Liwa, the ancestral homeland of the Bani Yas tribe.
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The Liwa Oasis is a long arc of four dozen villages that lies so deep in the desert—more than seventy-five miles from the coast—that outsiders didn’t know of its existence until 1906.
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Liwa now sits on the Saudi border, the last outpost before the endless sands of the Rub al-Khali, the Empty Quarter. Then as now, palm grove villages nestled in the hollows between towering orange dunes that rise to seven hundred feet, giving Liwa the look of West Virginia done in sand. Groundwater made the settlement possible, supporting villages and palm plantations.

The Bani Yas—whose name, in translation, means the Sons of Yas—is the biggest of the tribes claiming Liwa as its homeland. Two Bani Yas branches are worth mentioning: the Al Bu Falah branch, which houses the al-Nahyan ruling family of Abu Dhabi; and their cousins, the Al Bu Falasah, which includes the al-Maktoum family, the rulers of Dubai. Collectively, the Bani Yas dominates the UAE.

In 1833, the tribe’s leader, Sheikh Tahnun, was murdered by his brother Khalifa, who then slew several others who rose up against him. The Al Bu Falasah were said to be so disgusted by Khalifa’s repression that eight hundred of them fled north, heading for a frontier province on the coast.
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There, they must have known, al-Nahyan rule was so weak that they could take control and govern themselves.

Their weeks-long journey to the Dubai creek took the settlers out of territory that was later found to hold some of the world’s richest oil fields. When they descended on Dubai, this mass of rough tribesmen and their camels and livestock overwhelmed it, nearly doubling the village’s population in the space of a few months. The newcomers took control of the settlement and its fort. The two Al Bu Falasah sheikhs, Obaid bin Said and Maktoum bin Buti, declared Dubai a new sheikhdom, independent of Abu Dhabi and its al-Nahyan rulers. The British soon recognized the new regime, cementing the Maktoum family in power. Sheikh Obaid died just three years after his arrival, leaving Sheikh Maktoum bin Buti to rule Dubai until his death in 1852.

Why the Al Bu Falasah risked their future on a little-known fishing village on the coast is a forgotten detail of history. Whatever the reason,
the clan’s decision to gamble on Dubai was the first recorded evidence of the Maktoum family’s knack for bold decisions. The family’s skill in backing these decisions with quick action would pay off incredibly well, making the Al Bu Falasah and its ruling Maktoum house wealthy beyond belief, anchoring them in control of a Rhode Island-sized patch of desert that grew into one of the world’s great sea-trading city-states.

The year 1833 was a watershed year in the history of Dubai. It signaled the start of the Maktoum family’s long and profitable friendship with Britain. That relationship served both parties, but the British nurtured Maktoum leaders and kept them in power through virulent challenges. It was also the year in which Dubai would receive the first of dozens of waves of immigrants who would strengthen and remake the settlement time and again, leaving it, by 2008, one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, with some two hundred ethnic groups living in a rare atmosphere of tolerance.

Most importantly, the 1833 takeover heralds the start of the Maktoum dynasty, which has ruled Dubai with remarkable stability for 175 years. A quick succession of Maktoum sheikhs ruled Dubai after Maktoum bin Buti’s death in 1852. Life expectancy wasn’t long in Dubai those days; up until the 1960s, few people lived beyond the age of forty-five.

Maktoum bin Buti’s brother Said bin Buti ran the village until he died in 1859. His nephew Sheikh Hasher bin Maktoum ruled until his death in 1886, and his brother Rashid bin Maktoum held control until 1894. His death gave way to Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher, who died in 1906 and was succeeded by his cousin Sheikh Buti bin Suhail, who held power until his death in 1912.
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