Dubai E-Book

Jim Krane

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 618

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Today, Dubai is a city of shimmering skyscrapers attracting thousands of tourists every year. Yet just sixty years ago Dubai's population scraped a living by picking dates, diving for pearls, or sailing in wooden dhows to trade with Iran and India. Dubai is everything the rest of the Arab world is not. Until recently it was the fastest-growing city in the world, with an economy whose growth outpaced China's while luring more tourists than all of India. The city has become a metaphor for the lush life, where the wealthy mingle in gilded splendour and luxury cars fill the streets, yet it is also beset by a backwash of bad design, environmental degradation and controversial labour practices. Dubai tells its unique story.

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in the United States of America in 2009 by St Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

First published in hardback and export and airside trade paperback in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This electronic editon first published in 2009 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Jim Krane, 2009

The moral right of Jim Krane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders.The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

First eBook Edition: March 2009

ISBN: 978-1-848-87394-0

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Foreword

Part I: Dubai Stirs

1: The Sands of Time

2: A Free Port Grows in the Desert

3: Oil, Slaves, and Rebellion

Part II: Dubai Emerges

4: It’s Sheikh Rashid’s World—We Just Live in it

5: The Road to Dominance

6: Sprinting the Marathon

7: Almost Famous

8: Spreading Out and Going Up

9: Diamonds, Dubai, and Israel

10: Sheikh Mohammed: Born to Rule

Part III: Blowback: The Downside

11: Labor Pains

12: Sex and Slavery

13: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

14: The Lawless Roads

Part IV: Dubai’s Challenge

15: Danger Ahead

16: Democracy and Terrorism

17: Stuck Between America and Iran

18: The Meaning of Dubai

Epilogue: Dubai, February 2009

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

FOREWORD

THIS IS THE story of a small Arab village that grew into a big city.

It was a mud village on the seaside, as poor as any in Africa, and it sat in a region where pirates, holy warriors, and dictators held sway over the years. There was even a communist uprising for a time, right next door. But the village was peaceful, ruled by the same family generation after generation.

No one thought the village would become a city. It sat on the edge of a vast desert, surrounded by a sea of sand. There was no running water, no ice, no radio, no road. The village drifted in an eddy of time. While other nations launched rockets into space, the villagers fished and napped. They and their slaves dove for pearls in the sea.

The villagers trusted the family that ruled them. The family produced generous men who ruled by three principles: what is good for the merchant is good for the village; embrace visitors, no matter what their religion; and, you cannot win if you do not take risks.

The ruling family and their villagers were sorely tested during the hard times of the 1930s and 1940s. People starved. Slaves fled, because masters had no food. Rivals rose against them. Schools crumbled into the earth. The only blessings came as clouds of locusts, which the villagers toasted and ate.

But the villagers were a gregarious and hardworking bunch. They pulled themselves together. They enlarged their sailing fleet and began trading and smuggling. They borrowed money and dredged a little port. They invited foreigners to settle, promising freedom from taxes and turmoil. Foreigners who ventured in liked the village and its ambitious leader, a man named Rashid. The village grew into a town. The foreigners told Rashid of the wonders of the modern world, the skyscrapers of New York and the London Underground. He listened intently.

Rashid and his townspeople were dismayed to learn that no one in the outside world had ever heard of them. Rashid decided this would change.

Rashid wanted the name of his town, Dubai, on the lips of every person on earth. When a family sat down to dinner in America, Rashid wanted them to discuss the happenings of Dubai. And when two Englishmen paused for a glass of beer, it was Dubai that he wished them to talk about. Farmers in China, bankers in Switzerland, and generals in Russia: All of them must know of Dubai. For this to happen, the town couldn’t stay small and poor. Rashid made a wish. Dubai must become the most luxurious city the world has ever known: the City of Gold.

In 1960 Dubai set off on a journey that was more exciting than anything the Arabs had done in seven hundred years. The town grew bigger and more dazzling with each passing day. Rashid’s son Mohammed took over and pressed forward with even more passion. The villagers whose parents ate locusts donned gowns embroidered in crystal. Illiterate elders went shopping by private jet.

Arabs everywhere admired Dubai. A people down on its luck found pride flooding back. They asked their own leaders why they couldn’t be more like Dubai.

But like all great wishes that are granted, the success of Rashid’s quest brought unforeseen trouble. Lives were trampled by the city’s growth. Greed eclipsed common sense. The old ways were lost, and simplicity disappeared, never to return. The dream of capitalism brought them a new city, unlike any other. It also wed Dubai to the fickle ways of the global marketplace, which, as the desert-dwellers learned, can inundate you with wealth and then, even more quickly, take it away.

The story of Dubai’s wild ride contains powerful lessons for all of us. It starts long ago, when a great migration took place in Arabia’s most isolated corner.

I

DUBAI STIRS

1

THE SANDS OF TIME

Isolation: The Safety of the Undesired

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 camp-fire, 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

The Final Frontier

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 En gland 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.

Moon Worshippers, Christians, and Muslims

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

Islam arrived in the lower Gulf in the form of a handwritten letter from the Prophet Mohammed. In 630, Mohammed sent an emissary to the mountain town of Nizwa, in Oman, to deliver a forceful invitation to convert. The Omanis knew the ascendant Muslims of western Arabia were too strong to ignore. The Omani princes felt it was time to befriend them. They sent a delegation to the Prophet in Medina, where they embraced Islam on behalf of all Omanis, which included Arabs living in what is now the UAE. Mohammed accepted these distant tribes into the fold. He sent the converts home with a tutor who showed them the proper way to pray and wash. 9

But the Omanis’ blanket ac cep tance of Islam had been hasty. There were skeptics who weren’t ready to stop worshipping an idol called Bajir. 10 When the Prophet Mohammed died in 632, anti-Muslim rebellions flared around the Arabian Peninsula, including one in what is now the UAE. In the east coast port of Dibba, now a two-hour drive from Dubai, a sheikh named Laqit bin Malik took advantage of the chaos to announce he’d abandoned Islam. Laqit led his followers back to worshipping Bajir. 11

Laqit’s rejection of Islam set off one of the bloodiest battles that ever took place on the land that became the United Arab Emirates. In 633, the Prophet Mohammed’s successor, caliph Abu Bakr, sent an army of holy warriors on a grueling 1,200-mile march to reconvert the apostates. The Muslim army converged with allied forces from Oman and Bahrain and swept into the coastal plain of Dibba, a swath of palm groves and villages that sit between the mountains and the sparkling blue Arabian Sea.

The site makes the city a poor choice for a military defense. On the north end of town, the mountains plunge directly into the sea, with faces so sheer that no roads penetrate them. The rebels were thus boxed in between sea and crags. The battle was a short one, lasting little more than a day. Abu Bakr’s troops mowed down the unbelievers. As many as ten thousand were killed. The dead wound up in a hardpan cemetery where scattered rocks still mark their graves. The Muslim warriors tore apart Dibba’s souk and tramped home with booty and prisoners. Dibba never regained its prominence, a fate many blame on the disgrace of apostasy. Afterward, southeastern Arabia became nearly 100 percent Muslim. Religion dominated life as never before. The guttural Arabic language and the austere land of Arabia that gave life to Islam are considered hallowed, to this day.

As Muslims, divided Arab tribes found unity. The faith’s equanimity brought leaders closer to their people. The religion swept out of Arabia. The Muslim faithful overran Persia and the richest provinces of the Roman Empire, building a vast empire. Knowledge of this conquest instilled in the desert Arabs a towering sense of pride that endures today. Centuries later, after isolated Arabs understood how underdeveloped they were compared with outsiders, Gulf Arabs still held themselves with striking self-confidence. In the late 1940s, Thesiger remarked upon this sense of superiority, especially among Bedouin, who took pride in hardship and valued freedom above all else. Thesiger introduced these men in ragged cloaks and long braided hair to cars and airplanes and other trappings of modernity. The Bedouin wanted none of it. The only modern con ve nience that interested them was the rifle. 12

Frontier Democracy

For centuries that extend into the fog of unrecorded history, tribes in the lands that formed the UAE spent alternating periods as villagers and nomadic Bedouin. A tribe might spend a hundred years growing dates and raising animals, and then be uprooted and take to the desert as nomads, raiding towns and stealing animals. After a few generations, roles switched. Bedouin would overrun an irrigated area and start farming. The villagers they’d chased out would become wandering outlaws.

Either way, it was a lean and unstable existence. There wasn’t enough arable land or water to sustain everyone who wanted to farm, and people were too poor to support commerce. Few had the luxury of a single career. A tribesman might winter with livestock in the desert, and in summer he might fish or dive for pearls, harvest dates, or tend a patch of millet in the mountains.

Life, such as it was in southeast Arabia, was made possible by the camel. The bellowing, foul-tempered beasts provided the only means to cross long, waterless stretches of territory, right into the 1950s. Bedouin might travel a thousand miles carry ing only a rifle, pots for cooking and coffee, goatskins loaded with water, and reed bags jammed with dates. The Bedouin knew they would die if their camels died, so the animals drank first. Arabs also roasted camels, sometimes whole, and ate their meat. Camel’s milk sustained them far from water sources. Right into the 1990s in urbane Dubai, people kept camels in their yards and milked them. Every grocery store in the city still sells fresh camel’s milk because many Arabs find cow’s milk lacks a certain tang.

In the days before the British took an interest in the coast in the nineteenth century, the lands that became Dubai and the UAE were tribal territory, not part of any state. Tribal sheikhs had none of the hereditary claims on power enjoyed by the UAE’s leaders today. Their authority came from a frontier form of grassroots democracy. A sheikh had to prove that he was braver, wiser, or more generous than any rival.

Tribal chiefs ran their fiefs like Chicago ward bosses. They handed out jobs and gifts and demanded loyalty in return. When a dispute flared, the sheikh and his men rode their camels to the troubled village and erected a tent to be used as a majlis, or council chambers. They invited locals to present complaints and handed down decisions on the spot.

Sheikhs sometimes fell out of favor. When that happened, subjects would either back a rival or move to a place governed by someone they liked better. This happened as recently as 1968, when eight thousand members of the Zaab tribe decided they’d had enough of the ruler of Ras Al-Khaimah and moved en masse to Abu Dhabi. 13

Nowadays, frontier democracy is a relic. Dubai and the other sheikhdoms are still led by tribal rulers, but in a less demo cratic fashion. Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum still holds majlis sessions where he hears complaints and business offers, but the city has swollen far beyond his ability to give personal attention to individual problems, which are now handled—or not—by bureaucrats.

The UAE’s rulers now maintain power and legitimacy by giving generous subsidies to their citizens, known as Emiratis, essentially buying their support. The majority is happy with this unspoken bargain, which holds sway in most of the Gulf. The sheikhs get public backing in return for improvements in living standards, including jobs, homes, health care, and education. Tribal autocracy is one of the oldest ways of or ga niz ing society and the only form of governance the UAE has ever known.

The Portuguese Arrive

Portuguese sea captain Alfonso de Albuquerque was a short man with a long beard. For con ve nience’ sake he kept his beard tied in a knot. In good company, Albuquerque was known for his wit. But the Arabs of the Persian Gulf saw little of the captain’s humor. In 1506 the Portuguese crown handed Albuquerque a job he didn’t want: forging a trade route around Africa and Arabia, to India. His mandate called for setting up way stations in the Arabian Sea and the Gulf that Portuguese ships could call upon on trade voyages between Indonesia and Eu rope.

At the time, Arabs of the lower Gulf knew little or nothing of Eu rope. When the billowing sails of Albuquerque’s five-ship flotilla appeared on the horizon, it was the first major Eu ro pe an arrival in the lands that formed the UAE. The pioneering Portuguese had the unique privilege of introducing the Gulf Arabs to Eu ro pe an civilization. No matter what he did, Albuquerque’s actions would be remembered for centuries as the behavior of Eu ro pe ans and Christians.

Albuquerque made the impression a lasting one. Rounding Africa and reaching Arabia, the mariner destroyed every Arab vessel he saw. When Omanis refused him permission to land, he sacked their towns. When Albuquerque’s fleet arrived in Khor Fakkan—his first stop in what is now the UAE—crowds gathered on the beach, beating drums and shouting. Horse men galloped up and down the shore, and spectators climbed atop the town’s wall and the hill behind, to catch their first glimpses of the Eu ro pe an visitors.

Albuquerque and his men peered at the spectacle from their decks. They decided Khor Fakkan’s raucous reception wasn’t submissive enough. The Portuguese waded ashore, unsheathed their swords, and began hacking off noses and ears, bayoneting men, capturing or killing women and children, and putting the torch to every one of Khor Fakkan’s handsome houses, with their lemon and orange trees and horse stables. 14

The Portuguese made sure the next century in the Gulf wasn’t a pleasant one for Arabs who had the misfortune of meeting them. Albuquerque’s compatriot, the great mariner Vasco da Gama, burned a ship crammed with hundreds of Muslim pilgrims bound for Mecca. 15

While the Arabs of the remote Gulf knew nothing of these warlike Iberians, the Portuguese, like their Spaniard cousins, had plenty of experience with Arabs. Just over a decade before their arrival in Khor Fakkan, the Portuguese and Spanish had put an end to seven hundred years of Muslim rule of their homelands. When Granada fell in 1492, the last Arab-governed city in Eu rope had been captured and the Reconquest was complete. Now the Iberians were in a mood to conquer and colonize. They viewed Arabs and Muslim civilization as heathen enemies. They killed thousands. If a town didn’t hand over its harbor, ships, and forts, the entire population risked death or mutilation.

Historians like Abu Dhabi-based Frauke Heard-Bey believe the unnecessarily cruel Portuguese occupation soured Arabs on Westerners in general and Christianity in par tic u lar. “The memory of the indiscriminate killing of women, children and the old, and the mutilations inflicted on their prisoners by the Portuguese became engraved in the minds of Arabs living anywhere between the Red Sea and the Persian coast, and were remembered as the deeds of Christians,” she writes. 16

The Portuguese showed little staying power. In 1631, after defeats by the surging navies of the Dutch and British, the Portuguese began to fade away. They anchored off Ras Al-Khaimah and fought running battles with the Arabs, and built a short-lived fort. Soon they were gone.

Beyond memories of their cruelty, the Portuguese legacy is minimal. A few crumbling forts and rusty cannon remain, as well as a handful of Portuguese words that still cling to the patois of the remote villages in Oman’s Musandam Peninsula, at the Strait of Hormuz.

When the British arrived in earnest two hundred years later, they were unwelcome. In the Arab view, there was no reason that one Christian power would act less barbarically than another.

Arabia’s Venice

Dubai today is a classic city-state, built on trade and liberal laws that have left competitors scrambling to keep up. Dubai’s admirers regularly compare the city’s dynamism to that of Singapore and Hong Kong, or even the Hanseatic city-states like Hamburg.

But Dubai bears even more similarities to the great entrepôt city-state of Venice, especially during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Venice was the most prosperous city in Eu rope. Venice, like Dubai, lacked natural resources, but grew ostentatiously wealthy and studded with palaces and cutting-edge architectural icons. Both cities leveraged duty-free trade and lured investment and the smartest minds from the surrounding region.

Dubai, like old Venice, survives as an island of enlightenment in a sea of religious fundamentalism. Both cities provoked a backlash for their tolerance. Venice was pilloried by the papacy for trading with Muslims. Dubai gets excoriated by Muslim hardliners for catering to Christians—and a hedonistic lifestyle replete with pork, alcohol, and prostitution.

But there is also an historical connection between the two cities. The first written reference to Dubai appears in the sixteenth-century journal of Gasparo Balbi, who happened to be the court jeweler of the Most Serene Republic of Venice. Balbi set out to discover the source of pearls and sailed up the Gulf to find the world’s richest oyster pearl beds. Balbi’s 1590 Viaggio dell’Indie Orientale mentions a fishing settlement in the lower Gulf called “Dibei.” 17 Back then, Dubai was probably just a few palm-thatched barasti huts. It’s unclear whether Balbi landed.

Until the late eigh teenth century, Dubai was overshadowed by mercantile ports like Sohar, in Oman; Hormuz and Bandar Lengeh, in Iran; and Dibba and Khor Fakkan, on the Arabian Sea; and Ras Al-Khaimah, just up the coast. 18 For the next two hundred years Dubai rated only fleeting references in the archives of the British and Portuguese.

Dubai’s recorded history begins around 1800. Then, the tiny town with its coral fort was an outpost on the remote Persian Gulf, associated with Oman, but not part of any recognized state. The British branded the entire area “the Pirate Coast,” the source of attacks on their shipping. After the first set of peace treaties with Britain in 1820, the sheikhdoms that eventually became the UAE began to be called Trucial Oman, the Trucial Coast, or the Trucial States.

Trucial States is somewhat of a misnomer. The seven and sometimes eight sheikhdoms in the group were tribal lands of shifting sizes and shapes. They weren’t or ga nized as nation-states. They lacked standing armies, central bureaucracies, and diplomatic relations with other states. There was no central authority, as exists now in the UAE federal government in Abu Dhabi. And there were no borders demarcating the limits of the sheikhdoms. Instead, territory was based on tribal leaders and the realms they could control. When the British started drawing borders of these sheikhdoms, the surveyors followed fault lines between tribes. For instance, when demarcating the border between the UAE and Oman, surveyors asked tribes to declare whom they preferred as overlord, the sheikh in Abu Dhabi or the sultan in Muscat.

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. 19

The British Conquest

By the early 1800s, the Persian Gulf’s strategic value was beginning to tantalize the Eu ro pe ans 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. 20

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. 21

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 po liti cal 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. 22

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, towns-men 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. 23

What ever the truth, the British swooped in to dominate Gulf trade. Exports from British India to the Gulf doubled within two years. 24 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 in de pen dence, 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. 25 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. 26

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 En glish 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. 27

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.

The Mud-Walled Village

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. 28 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 Maktoums Take Over

The dispute happened in a place called Liwa, the ancestral homeland of the Bani Yas tribe. 29 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. 30

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. 31 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. What ever 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. 32

The three Maktoum men who ran the city from 1912 until 2006—sheikhs Saeed bin Maktoum, Rashid bin Saeed, and Maktoum bin Rashid—all died natural deaths while on the job. In 2006, the city anointed its eleventh Maktoum ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid. Not one of the sheikhs who governed Dubai since 1833 was overthrown or murdered. By the chaotic standards of the region, 175 years of uninterrupted succession is probably unpre ce dented. Dubai’s immediate neighbors are more typical. In Abu Dhabi, it was rare for a ruling sheikh to die in office. Fratricidists and coup plotters took out most of them. And Sharjah has been fraught with palace murders and coup attempts right into the 1980s. Much of the Gulf is the same.

In fact, Dubai’s record of peaceful transition even puts America’s to shame. Assassins gunned down four U.S. presidents in that period: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Stable rule and predictable succession is one of the fundamentals of Dubai’s commercial success. Stability is the bedrock of commerce, of course, but so are laws and incentives. And Dubai’s sheikhs, who had been living in rags in the deepest desert, were somehow shrewd enough to build an environment conducive to business. A few decades after the Maktoum takeover, the lonely outpost got its first chance to show what it could do.

2

A FREE PORT GROWS IN THE DESERT

Siphoning the Wealth of Iran

DUBAI’S LEADERS HAVE a knack for hitting risky bets. The city’s airline, ports, sail-shaped hotel, and man-made islands confounded common sense and prevailing advice. Even in a place where politics is non ex is tent, they kicked up gales of protest. The leaders wisely ignored the dissenters and went ahead with their gambles. All of them have created value that has soared beyond best-case predictions. But not all of Dubai’s winnings come from mortgaging the city’s future. On a few occasions there was low-hanging fruit to be picked, and all Dubai had to do was spot it, reach, and pluck.

Around 1900, an opening presented itself like a purse drifting in on a cloud. Dubai was able to turn an evolutionary corner, moving from an insular fishing and trading village to an international port, albeit a small one. The town won healthy boosts in population, wealth, and industrial capacity. All it took was a few policy moves from a ruler named Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher.

And, like so many of Dubai’s gains, it came at the expense of the stumbling giant across the Gulf, Iran.

A few decades earlier, a cash-strapped Iranian administration began collecting taxes in the Arab-run ports along its coast. One of those cities, the thriving port of Bandar Lengeh, then known as Lingah, was a haven for Qawasim merchants. This especially rankled the Persians because the Qawasim paid no allegiance to the Persian regime in Tehran. Their metropoles were Ras Al-Khaimah and Sharjah, on the Arab side of the Gulf.

The situation in Bandar Lengeh looked like Havana in 1959. Dubai, like Miami, sat just ninety miles across the water. Lengeh was a vibrant port with smart people who knew how to make money. But the freewheeling environment that attracted them was slipping away as the government tightened the screws. Around 1887, the Persians began to forcibly kick out the Qawasim merchants and brought Bandar Lengeh under direct rule. 1

Disgruntled Qawasim began moving across the Gulf. But unlike the case with those fleeing Havana, Dubai wasn’t as obvious a destination as Miami. Many of the merchants returned to their tribal homelands, Ras Al-Khaimah and Sharjah. The Dubai leader at the time, Sheikh Rashid bin Maktoum, understood the value of the capitalist brain trust that was looking for a new home. He did his best to divert the refugee merchants to Dubai, and lured a few dozen. 2

In 1894, Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher took over in Dubai. He wanted to do more to coax merchants from Iran. In 1900, the Persians made his job easier. They raised taxes in Lengeh and another Iranian port, Bushehr. The exodus intensified and included Arabs as well as Iranians.

Sheikh Maktoum saw the low-hanging fruit. He launched a plan to make Dubai the most business-friendly port in the lower Gulf. He abolished the 5 percent customs duty and slashed fees, turning Dubai into a free port. At the same time, Sheikh Maktoum sent his agents across the water to sweet-talk the biggest merchants, whether Arab or Persian, into moving to Dubai. The agents offered free land, guarantees of a friendly ear in the leader’s majlis, and a hands-off government policy.

The incentives worked. The heads of a few of the biggest Iranian businesses agreed to relocate, and as the Dubai sheikh planned, their business partners and customers followed. By 1901, a census found five hundred Persians in Dubai. 3 Within a few years it was clear that most of the Irani an traders who’d packed up and left Lengeh were unpacking in Dubai.

The Dubai ruler gave each a plot of land on the south bank of the creek, and the Iranians built the Bastakiya neighborhood, named for the ancestral town of Bastak in south-central Iran. Besides their businesses, the Persian migrants brought their language, their pomegranate-laced food, their melancholic music, and social customs like enormous weddings that raged for days. The Iranian influx was the second mass-migration to transform Dubai after the 1833 arrival of the Al Bu Falasah. There would be many more.

Free trade was mother’s milk for Dubai. Wharves now lined the creek, and the newly built Iranian souk was crammed with goods from British-run India. Cargo was reexported to ports nearby or strapped onto camels bound for inland bazaars like the Buraimi Oasis. Within a few years, Dubai was closing in on larger ports like Sharjah, Ras Al-Khaimah, and Bandar Lengeh to become the chief trade center between the Strait of Hormuz and Qatar. 4

Links with the outside world began to mount. Prior to 1901, British cargo and passenger vessels visited Dubai no more than five times a year. Two years later, Dubai was a scheduled destination. Steamships stopped twice a month. By 1908, Dubai was home to 10,000 Arabs, Persians, Indians, and Baluchis—as well as 1,650 camels, 400 shops in two bazaars, and more than 400 ships and boats. The town had long since burst out of its mud walls, which lay in ruins. Sheikh Maktoum ruled from his palace in the beachfront Shindagha neighborhood, backed by a hundred tribesmen who roamed the town with Martini rifles. 5

Like the Cubans who fled to Miami, the Iranians who settled in Dubai dreamed of returning home. They hoped the Persian government’s clampdown on commerce was a temporary move. Many of the merchants had left their families in Iran and commuted across the Gulf for holidays. But the reforms never came and the Persian ports slipped into an idle torpor.

By the 1920s, most Iranians accepted Dubai’s invitation to settle permanently. They brought their families across and adopted the customs and dress of the local Arabs. Dubai was happy to have them. The Iranians brought their entrepreneurial savvy and trading links with Africa and Asia, and removed those assets from Iran, a competitor.

Iranians brought prosperity and worldliness to a town that had known little of either. Most Dubaians still lived in thatch huts and gathered their water at a communal well. But the town had a modern quarter now, Bastakiya, which showed off the latest imported cooling technology: the wind tower. Most of the big new homes had at least one of the square towers that rose a story or two above the roof, with openings on all sides to catch the breeze—whether blowing off the sea or from the desert. The wind towers funneled the breezes indoors and, sometimes, directly onto the hammock of a merchant taking his mid afternoon nap. The fresh air might be hot, but the Bastakis called the indoor relief “God’s breeze.” 6

Bastakiya is now an historic district, and some of the old Iranian merchant homes still stand, rescued from wholesale bulldozing in the 1980s. Unfortunately, the government’s heavy-handed restoration of the once elegant neighborhood has destroyed most of its charms.

The best place to see wind towers is across the Gulf in Bandar Lengeh, where the old port has been frozen in time. Lengeh’s coral homes are still in use, and the town retains a bygone air of another century, thanks to the exodus of its merchant class and the drying up of the economy. The Lonely Planet travel guide to Iran describes Bandar Lengeh as “an infectiously lethargic place” that shuts down for a five-hour siesta every afternoon. Dubai, in effect, siphoned away Lengeh’s lifeblood.

Dubai’s leaders took a lesson from Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher’s free trade and business incentives. They know that, but for a few changes in circumstance and wisdom, the fortunes of Bandar Lengeh and Dubai could have been reversed.

Since the 1920s, Iran’s cascading missteps have showered Dubai with wave upon wave of Iranian entrepreneurs and their savings. In the 1970s Iran raised import tariffs to nearly 40 percent on some goods, triggering another exodus. In the 1980s and since, the Islamic revolution pushed liberal-minded Iranians and much of its academia across the Gulf. Dubai’s free ports have even cut into Iran’s retail sector. Iranian importers learned it was easier to serve their customers from tax-free Dubai, so Dubai now takes a profit on reexported goods sold in the Islamic Republic.

Much of Dubai’s Iran-bound cargo gets ferried across the Gulf in colorful wooden sailing dhows, now chugging under greasy diesel smoke. Hundreds of these old ships with their jutting prows and grizzled sailors glide into the Dubai creek every day, loaded with pistachios, watermelons, raisins, and zucchini from Iran. They return home with tele vi sions, Colgate toothpaste, Clairol shampoo, and Teflon-coated frying pans. 7

Nearly half a million Iranians have fled to the good life in the UAE. In Dubai, Iranians outnumber local Emiratis by around three to one. 8Iranian parliamentarian Hadi Haqshenas blames the exodus on Tehran’s failed social and economic controls. “Since these wrongheaded policies won’t be reversed any time soon, we can expect the UAE to attract many of our specialists, medical doctors, engineers and other experts,” Haqshenas said in 2006. 9

Iranians are a key cog in the machinery that has created this marvel in the desert. Dubai now hosts nearly ten thousand Iranian-run businesses 10 that have diversified beyond the Iranian market and now ship anywhere in the world. Iranians are among the city’s largest developers and merchants, its top buyers of homes, and one of its biggest sources of investment.

All of this comes at huge cost to the Iranian economy, which has seen its citizens investing tens of billions of dollars in the UAE rather than at home. Some $15 billion flowed out of Iran and into Dubai in 2007 alone, estimates Jean-François Seznec, of Georgetown University, who has researched the links. 11 Dubai is also Iran’s largest trading partner. Iranians spent some $14 billion importing goods that sailed across the Gulf from Dubai that same year, Seznec believes, rather than the $10 billion tallied in official figures. 12

“Prosperity in Dubai is based squarely on trade with Iran,” says Anthony Harris, a former British ambassador to the UAE, now a Dubai-based insurance broker. “Dubai merchants speak Farsi to this day. They feel totally at home doing business with Iranians.” 13

The Wisdom of Pearls

The mighty Persian Gulf curves like a fat banana for six hundred miles, from the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr in the west to the Gibraltar-like narrows in the Strait of Hormuz. There, the Gulf empties into the Arabian Sea and the broader Indian Ocean.

The Gulf is a gentle and shallow sea, never more than three hundred feet deep. Hot sunshine makes it one of the world’s warmest, with surface temperatures between 75 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. 14 High rates of evaporation make it one of the saltiest. It is so salty, in fact, that before air-conditioning, Dubaians used to take advantage of the extra buoyancy by taking cool naps while floating in the sea. 15

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. 17 By the early 1900s, pearls commanded 95 percent of the Gulf economy 18 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.” 19 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