City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (6 page)

Seagrasses wave in the currents on its well-lit sandy bottom, making a perfect oyster habitat and ideal grounds for finding pearls—the priceless anomalies known as
lulu
in Arabic.

Even before oil, the countries surrounding the Gulf
¹⁶
squabbled over jurisdiction over the sea off their coasts, vying for access to undersea beds where pearls could be collected by divers with no more equipment than a nose clip, a leather sack, and a rock tied to one leg. Milky Gulf pearls with their faint blush of pink were must-have accoutrements for the world’s wealthy—from India’s maharajahs to the fashion elite of Paris and New York.

By the 1800s, pearls were far and away the main business pursuit of the lower Gulf. Buyers from Bombay sailed into Dubai, Sharjah, and Bahrain to greet arriving pearling ships and buy up the best specimens. When the business peaked in 1897, British surveyor John Gordon Lorimer reported that Gulf pearl exports ran to three-quarters of a million British pounds, ten times their value just two decades earlier.
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By the early 1900s, pearls commanded 95 percent of the Gulf economy
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and supported 1,200 pearling boats, each with a crew of fifteen to eighty sailors. A quarter of those boats sailed from Dubai.

The pearling business grew complex, creating a native capitalist class that outfitted boats and lent money for the expedition in return for a large cut of the haul. These financiers sent representatives to sea known as
nokhadas
to claim the pearls as crews pried open oysters on the boat deck.

“While the shells were being opened I would have four people, two on either side, to make sure no one took any pearls,” says Saif al-Ghurair, one of Dubai’s wealthiest businessmen and a former pearl boat
nokhada
. “If we were lucky we would catch them.”
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At the end of the day, al-Ghurair locked the pearls in a wooden box, placed the box in a compartment under his mattress, and slept on top.

Pearl merchants grew wealthier than some ruling sheikhs, building mansions with multiple wind towers and carved wooden verandahs. The wealth imbalance caused instability. In Sharjah in 1884, pearl merchants overturned the ruling sheikh and replaced him with a favorite. Cautious voices warned that the pearl economy was unstable in other ways. Dubai and the Gulf were growing dangerously dependent on a single export, an expendable luxury item.

But the Arab natives of Dubai were proud of their ways. They felt it was beneath them to diversify into real estate or shopkeeping. They left a fat wedge of the economy open for migrant Indians, who soon controlled Dubai’s retail sector.
²⁰

The British policy of isolating the Trucial States narrowed Dubai’s already razor-thin economic base. As a reward to ruling sheikhs who relinquished control of foreign affairs, the British announced in 1905 that the rich seabed would be reserved as a Gulf Arab monopoly. The catch: Pearls had to be marketed through British India. The British also banned modern technology—such as trawling or diving gear—to protect the traditional industry.
²¹

Over the long term, it was a disastrous move. The British protected the Arab pearl beds from outside intruders but forced Dubai and other sheikhdoms to maintain their primitive ways, sending divers to sea for months, risking—and sometimes losing—their lives when safer methods were the industry norm.

Dubai’s pearl divers are still celebrated for their toughness in plunging to the seabed up to thirty times a day, holding their breath for two minutes while stuffing oysters in leather bags tied around their necks. One diver says he distracted himself by imagining his fiancée was a mermaid swimming in front of him.
²²
On the way up, with lungs bursting, divers swam through schools of stinging jellyfish and risked the deadly decompression sickness known as “the bends.” But the divers were unwitting participants in a monopoly that left their economy balancing on a house of cards. In 1929 the house collapsed. That was the fateful year when the New York stock exchange crashed and America, then Europe, spiraled into the Great Depression.

When life got hard in the West, it turned brutal in Dubai. The economy depended on a capricious ornament that was of no practical value. When times get tough, luxuries like pearls are the first things people stop buying.

The pearl industry wasn’t just ravaged by the drying up of demand. At the same time, Japanese researchers figured out how to “culture” pearls that looked nearly the same as natural ones. Culturing pearls had been tried for years by inserting a speck of grit into the oyster and allowing the animal to cover it with secretions of nacre, the mixture of calcium carbonate and protein that hardens into pearls. But those early
cultured pearls usually turned out to be “blister pearls” mounted to the shell. They could be chipped off and used, but only on rings or mountings where a half a pearl would do.

In the early twentieth century, Japanese researchers who inserted grit into oysters’ genitals found that the creatures would excrete nacre and build round pearls inside themselves.

Cultured pearls flooded the market and killed pearling in the Gulf and everywhere else—permanently. If Dubai had built a backup industry, it might have preserved a reasonable standard of living. It did not. Dubai sprawled like a turtle on its back. The pearling fleet still sailed out in the spring and returned in late summer, and the town turned out to watch the
nokhadas
row ashore carryfing strongboxes jammed with shimmering pearls. But the buyers no longer greeted them when they stepped ashore. So the pearlers turned their boats toward Bombay. There they sold their collections, but at a sliver of the price. Pearling in Dubai was dead.

In a town that had grown dependent on a one-trick industry and imported food, the return to hand-to-mouth subsistence was devastating. The seventeen years between the 1929 crash and the end of World War II in 1945 were the toughest in Dubai’s history.

The pearl crash triggered a famine, with malnourishment widespread in Dubai in the 1930s and 1940s. With war on the horizon in Europe, the British, who could normally be counted on to help, had bigger things to do. Goatherds had gone to work in pearling. Now they were looking for food, not selling it. Bankruptcies tore into the souk, wiping out business. The Indian merchants gathered their families and wares and boarded the steamer for Bombay. Slaves deserted masters who could no longer feed them. Dubai’s first schools that had opened during in the 1920s collapsed. Foreign teachers fled.
²³

As 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.
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In the northern sheikhdoms like Ras Al-Khaimah and among nomads in the interior, deaths from starvation were even more common.
²⁵

Governance during an economic crisis requires a strong-minded leader with bold ideas. Unfortunately, Dubai was stuck with easygoing Sheikh Saeed bin Maktoum al-Maktoum, who presided from 1912 until his death in 1958. He was the grandfather of Dubai’s current ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, who grew up in Sheikh Saeed’s rambling house on the creek.

Sheikh Saeed’s nonconfrontational style bears little resemblance to the determination of Dubai’s strongest rulers, his son Rashid and his grandson Mohammed. A comparison with British rule at the time is apt: Saeed played Neville Chamberlain to his son Rashid’s Churchill.

Sheikh Saeed looked like a melancholy warlock in his long white beard, his body hidden in the folds of curtainlike robes. A silver-handled
khanjar
, a ceremonial dagger, hung from his waist. Saeed’s tired eyes rested in a wrinkled face that gathered around a bulbous nose. In one happy picture, Dubai’s ruler sits on the ground among friends and slices up a bird carcass for his falcons.

Dubaians prized Saeed’s kindness. Once he caught a servant stealing a carpet and warned the thief to return it because “the guards will surely catch you.”
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But Saeed’s submissiveness provoked plots and coup attempts. His cousins, a rough bunch who scorned his authority, schemed openly, ridiculing the ruler as a man dominated by his wife and son. Rivals fed on discontent with the hard times, which bared the ruling family’s privileges.

The first attempt to depose Saeed came with the pearl crash in 1929, when a band led by his cousin Mani bin Rashid forced him to resign. Mani declared himself Dubai’s ruler and informed the British, but they refused to accept him. Saeed maintained power.
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In 1934, rebel cousins tried another tack: murdering him. The failed attempt left Saeed shocked and desperate. He begged help from the British, who sent a squadron of
warplanes to buzz Dubai. More convincing was the show of support from eight hundred menacing Bedouin, who set up camp on Dubai’s outskirts.
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The rebels stood down—for a while.

The respite didn’t last long. Saeed’s cousins tried to extort a share of his income by organizing gangs who beat his night watchmen. In 1938, he faced street demonstrations.

Saeed’s eldest son, Sheikh Rashid, was better matched to take on his unruly cousins. Pictures of young Rashid show an intense man with a full black beard, eyes brimming with vitality. As a young man, Rashid held a monopoly on Dubai’s taxi service. One of his cousins mounted a challenge by opening a taxi service of his own. In 1938, Sheikh Rashid led an armed posse that ambushed the competing business, wounding a driver and locking others in stocks.
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The attack incensed the Maktoums’ rivals, pushing them to develop an alliance with Dubai’s influential merchants.

The merchants understood that Sheikh Saeed’s tribal rule was inadequate, and that the city needed deep reforms to climb out of the depression. Together, the merchants and the rebellious cousins channeled their opposition into a remarkable democratic reform movement. The shortlived movement, which had popular support—but crucially not that of the British—hacked away at Saeed’s powers, backing him into a corner that nearly ended his rule.

Saeed allowed the merchants to set up a fifteen-member
majlis
, led by his cousin Hasher bin Rashid. The council approved progressive reforms including health care, garbage pickup, and the reopening of schools. It voted to abolish the taxi monopoly and other privileges, and required Saeed to contribute seven-eighths of his income to the town treasury.

When Sheikh Saeed ignored the demands, the rebels occupied rooftops around Dubai. The city divided into armed camps trading sniper fire. The ruling family kept control of the southern Bur Dubai side and the rebels held Deira, the commercial center on the northern creek bank.

It was then that Sheikh Saeed decided to destroy the
majlis
. It’s unclear whether he was pushed to do so by his eldest son, but Rashid
would soon scatter the council, end its reforms, and restore his family’s full power. Maktoum rule would never face a serious challenge again.

March 29, 1939, was Sheikh Rashid’s wedding day. He dressed that morning in his white
kandoura
robe and covered that in a gold-trimmed black cloak. His bride-to-be was Sheikha Latifa, a refugee of the al-Nahyans, the Abu Dhabi royal family. Latifa’s father was Hamdan, Abu Dhabi’s ruler from 1912 until 1922. When Sheikh Hamdan was assassinated by two of his brothers, Latifa and her mother fled to Dubai. In 1939, her home sat deep in rebel-held Deira.

The rebels agreed to a temporary truce, a conciliatory act that allowed Rashid’s wedding to go ahead as planned at his fiancée’s home. Foolishly, the reformers also welcomed Rashid’s entourage, including a band of armed Bedouin who, it was explained, would fire their rifles in celebration at the ceremony’s climax.

The climax came ahead of the wedding. The Bedouin, calloused men with long tangles of hair and wild beards, were crack shots with their ancient single-shot rifles. Once they were in place, Dubai’s only democratic reform movement would be cut down in a burst of bullets and blood. The Bedouin first gunned down Saeed’s cousin, the
majlis
leader Hasher bin Rashid, along with his son and eight others.
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Then they set upon the coup plotter Sheikh Mani, besieging his home. Mani escaped, bolting for the safety of Sharjah. When the gunsmoke drifted off, Deira was no longer rebel territory. The reformers who’d challenged the Maktoums’ rule sprawled dead in the sand or had fled to Sharjah.
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The audacious attack was a total success. The bloodshed didn’t postpone the wedding of Sheikh Rashid and Sheikha Latifa. The couple went on to lead a full life and Latifa bore Rashid five daughters and four sons, two of whom followed their father to rule Dubai.
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By the early 1940s Saeed slipped into retirement and Rashid began assuming his father’s duties.
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The wedding strengthened Maktoum rule in another way. It tightened their bonds with the al-Nahyan rulers in Abu Dhabi. The children of Latifa and Rashid became cousins of the Abu Dhabi royal family.

A few months after the wedding, Dubai got another display of the
Maktoums’ brutality. Saeed heard rumors of another coup plot. This time he didn’t hesitate. He arrested five suspects and put out their eyes.
³⁴
The gruesome punishment triggered an outpouring of disgust with Maktoum rule. But instead of rising up, dissenters packed up and moved away in the time-honored fashion. Saeed and Rashid were in total control.