Dubai E-Book

Klaus H. Carl

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 72

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Saint-Exupéry might have had the Little Prince say that he liked the desert because that is where camels can hide out. Dubai is one of the seven Gulf Emirates and has become a high-tech avantgarde metropolis where superlatives are superfluous. Major wonders of architectural imagination and scale include the National Bank of Dubai, Clock Tower, Creek Side and Dubai Internet City. It also operates the world's largest man-made harbour in Jebel Ali, which features a major water desalination plant. It is the world's third largest trans-shipment hub after Hong Kong and Singapore. Nonetheless, Dubai preserves close ties to the past, based on Bedouin tradition, camel racing, falconry, pearl diving and the world of palm groves. The land thrived before the era of oil derricks and is now preparing to live again after they leave as it invests in higher education that heartily welcomes women. Time-honoured legends of Arab cavalries that swept across the deserts still survive in horse races that display equestrian tradition against a background of exclusive state-of-the-art driving machines: Welcome to this sneak preview of the 21st Century!

Leseprobe

Klaus H. Carl

© 2024, Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

© 2024, Parkstone Press USA, New York

© Image-Barwww.image-bar.com

Photograph Credits:

© Klaus H. Carl

ISBN: 978-1-63919-882-5

All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

Contents

From the desert to the Gulf

Before the Discovery of Oil

Geography

The Economy

Religion

The State

The People

The City

The Creek

Deira

Bur Dubai

Umm Hureir

Satwa

Jumeirah

Hatta

Conclusion

Timeline

Biography

List of Illustrations

1. Aerial view of the Dubai Creek with many dhows

A people that does not know its past has neither a present nor a future.

Sheikh Saeed

DUBAI

Dubai is not only, as is occasionally  rumored, “do buy” – a place to purchase duty free or go shopping in the more than thirty elegant shopping malls or in the souks. Above all, Dubai is a busy city that stands in sharp contrast to the desert hinterland, cosmopolitan like few others, filled with friendly, helpful and gregarious people who welcome everybody who does not walk around in shabby shorts or with an exposed midriff. It is a city whose traffic awakens to life at about eight o’clock every morning when white collar employees and dockworkers begin traveling to their jobs. The short rush hour begins about an hour later with the larger cars of the manager and higher-level employees, those who have driven small cars long enough to want to demonstrate their status. Soon most of the inner-city parking lots are filled.

Dubai continues to expand and because of this has become an El Dorado for architects and engineers, who here enjoy a freedom to transform their ideas for construction projects and buildings into reality found in only very few places in the world. Thanks to an elegant and extremely clever traffic system that in many cases avoids intersections and is of course aided by the four-lane and six-lane highways leading into and out of the city, Dubai has comparatively fewer stoplights and thus fewer traffic jams than most Western towns that measure their importance by the number of traffic lights they have installed. Dubai is a city whose building fronts and patterned-tile underpass walls are completely free of the “artistry” of the wild graffiti sprayers, although it is impossible to determine whether the “sprayers” have not yet reached Dubai or already left it behind them. It is also – what joy for pedestrians – a city without dogs and their droppings and with an unusually small pigeon population. In their place one finds an unbelievably large number of gulls, who have made their nests in the greenery near the golf and yacht club, circling above the clean waters of the Creek in their search for prey.

But Dubai is also a city of hard physical labor. The large number of workers on road building crews in the expanding areas or at the quay of the Creek clearly demonstrates this. At the quay, the dhows are anchored in double and triple rows, as close together as the goods they hold. The constant loading and unloading of goods on swaying gangplanks, picturesque but sweaty and nearly unceasing work – large equipment like cranes are used only for the heaviest loads – speaks for itself. The belly of a dhow swallows and transports anything the market demands, whether a small package or a pipeline, car tires or even entire trucks.

Of course, Dubai is also a city of luxury and wealth, recognizable not only in the golf club and exclusive hotels, evident in the horse and camel races or discreetly hidden behind mirrored facades, but also in jewelers’ displays behind bulletproof glass or the international houses of fashion design.

Dubai is all of this, and more. No one word can describe it, but if the quality of the paper used to print newspapers is any measure of quality, Dubai is surely among the wealthiest cities in the world.

2. An Emirate

3. Sparkling façades of the Creek

From the desert to the Gulf

Sometime in the grey mists of antiquity, the first Bedu came from the depths of the enormous desert area of the Rub-al Khali, whose 132.000 km² make it three times the size of Switzerland, and settled in what is today called the Persian Gulf. These Bedu are the descendants of an ancient once-existing culture. Why they gave up the nomadic life they had led up until then, which by their own accounts was hard and full of deprivation but still met their essential needs, and moved to what was the exact opposite of their former environment, will probably forever remain a mystery. But even in this predominantly new environment they continued to live their strictly tribal life.

Matters do not become less murky until the 1830’s, when a small part of the Bani Yas tribe under the leadership of the Maktoum family migrated from the Liva oasis, which lies much further south at the border to Saudia Arabia, to the Gulf. They first settled near what is today Abu Dhabi (in translation something like ‘father of the gazelle’ – according to legend, members of the Bani Yas discovered a gazelle at a water hole and thus deemed it a suitable spot for settlement).

The area of the Liva Oasis lies about 250 kilometers to the southwest, inland on the edge of the northern Al Qafa region and the enormous Uruq al-Shaiba Desert. Among the Bedu, this region had always been known for its wells and its villages, in whose houses, made out of woven mats or clay and roofed with palm leaves, the Al bu Falah and the Bani Yas lived modestly with their donkeys, sheep, goats and camels. The entire oasis, where even today numerous villages lie closely together, is of considerable size; three camel travel days are necessary to travel its perimeter. The Bedu laid in a supply of water in these villages for their travels through the unimaginably large desert areas, for in the oases that lie protected by the high dunes were protected areas of flourishing date palms. The date palm has been cultivated for over 5,000 years and has adapted well to desert conditions; its fruit is a basic staple of the Arab diet and in some circles it is even believed to increase virility. There is an old Arabian saying that says (in essence) “We sit in the shade of the date palm, we eat its fruit, our animals are fed with its seeds, we weave baskets, mats and walls from its leaves and we transform its trunks into columns.” The nomadic Bedu also gathered flour, tea, butter and goat’s meat as provisions in the oases, however.

The still-migratory Bedu tribes here in southern Arabia are small in relation to those in northern Arabia, whose tribes sometimes have thousands of members. Mid-sized tribes have about 500 men, who travel great distances with their camels in search of water and grazing land. They wander through the unimaginable, nearly uninhabited desert Rub-al Khali, also called The Sands or The Empty Quarter. It is one of the largest desert areas in the world, where during the summer and particularly between the end of May and the end of June tremendous sandstorms bring life in the desert practically to a halt and where during the winter temperatures range from nearly 50° C during the day to 10° C at night.

4. Traditional architecture with wind towers surrounding the Creek

5. One of the numerous parks surrounding the city

6. Traditional Arab boats, dhows, facing the modern towers

A huge piece of earth with high moving dunes that stretch in every direction, an area that must survive with almost no precipitation and one which only very few non-Arabs have dared to penetrate. The desert is not dead, despite these extreme conditions. It has sparse, permanently visible vegetation, occasionally as large as a bush and a large number of plants that form buds or even bloom only at certain times of year or after one of the rare rains – 13 cm of rain falls here at the most. For example, one often finds “Soddom’s Apple,” which grows singly, is small, yellow, salty and only edible for antelopes. Traces of animals that are active only at night can also be found in the sand, as well, of course, as the free-roaming camels. The most beautiful thing in the desert, however, is the night sky above it: the stars twinkle and glow in breathless silence in an endless space.