Hello Dubai Read online

  Born in Eastbourne in 1957 and educated at Brighton and Cambridge, Joe Bennett taught English in a variety of countries before becoming a newspaper columnist and writer of travel books. He lives in Lyttelton, New Zealand.

  Also by Joe Bennett

  Bedside Goats and Other Lovers

  Fun Run and Other Oxymorons

  A Land of Two Halves

  Mustn’t Grumble

  Love, Death, Washing-Up, etc.

  Where Underpants Come From

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2010 by Joe Bennett

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Joe Bennett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London

  WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia

  Sydney

  A CIP catalogue copy for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-84737-674-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-84983-830-6

  Wilfred Thesiger excerpts are taken from Arabian Sands, published by Penguin Classics, 2007

  Typeset in Palatino by M Rules

  Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

  2 I Love You, I Respect You

  3 Just Walking the Dog

  4 Essential Supplies

  5 Dancing in Sand

  6 Let’s Go Shopping

  7 How it Happened

  8 Down in Deira

  9 Come Fly With Me

  10 You Know It

  11 RIP Sheikh

  12 Where’s the Dugong?

  13 Wadi Filler

  14 On This Beach

  15 To the Tip of the Tent

  16 Pretty Flamingo

  17 A Use for Roundabouts

  18 Quivering Dhabi

  19 Racing with Wayne

  20 Choose Your Goat

  21 ’Bye Dubai

  For Albert Arriola

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank my hosts in Dubai and Al Ain for their generosity and kindness. And also their friends and the many others who answered my persistent questions with such tolerance and patience.

  Introduction

  When I was at school I hadn’t heard of Dubai. If you’d asked me where it was I would have guessed Africa. I wouldn’t have been far wrong. But if I’d guessed India I wouldn’t have been far wrong either, or Asia, or even Europe. Dubai isn’t far from anywhere. That centrality has served it well.

  I hadn’t heard of Dubai forty years ago because there wasn’t much to hear of. It was just a hot little port on the Arabian Gulf. People had lived there for hundreds of years. They’d put to sea and traded and eaten a lot of fish, but they hadn’t multiplied much because the land they inhabited was desert. Offering only dates, a bit of meat and a few sources of fresh water, the desert kept the people skinny and pinned them to the coast. Dubai, like Arabia in general, was a quiet place.

  Time was, however, when Arabia in general had run the world. In the middle of the eighth century, only a hundred years after the birth of Islam, the Arabian Empire was larger than the Roman Empire had ever been. It embraced Spain and about two thirds of the Mediterranean seaboard. It had swept up through what is now Turkey. It had penetrated the Indian subcontinent. It had reached the great mountain ranges of Central Asia and had even clambered over them into what is now western China. Arabia, in short, was the great world power and Islam was the great world religion.

  The world owes much to that empire. It kept learning alive in the West. When Europe was benighted under illiterate tribal thugs, the Arab world was fostering science and philosophy, translating classical texts, importing mathematics from India and adapting technology from the Far East.

  But gradually the empire declined as empires do and Arabia settled back into what looked like a terminal snooze. Then, in the twentieth century, oil happened. It happened to Dubai as it happened to much of the Middle East. Dollars rained down. If it hadn’t been for oil, Dubai would still be snoozing in the sun and I’d still think it was in Africa.

  The places that found oil, or had it found for them, reacted variously. Many leaders gorged on the wealth it brought, but Dubai proved wiser. Perhaps because it didn’t have as much oil as others had, it foresaw a time when it wouldn’t have any. So Dubai set about creating something that would endure when the party was over. The result was the city that seemingly grew overnight.

  In only a few decades Dubai has become a hub of global trade and global finance. It has developed a tourism industry. It has erected buildings that everybody knows. And it has attracted people from almost every country on earth. Since 1960, Dubai’s population has multiplied about twenty-fold.

  And all this has been accomplished peaceably. Though it is situated in the world’s most volatile region, where blood has been spilt throughout my lifetime and looks unlikely to stop being spilt any time soon, Dubai has fought no wars and suffered no terrorism. In a time of increasing tension between the Muslim world and the nominally Christian one, Dubai has somehow stood aside from the fray.

  On the face of it, Dubai would seem like a model for the way ahead, but its critics are abundant and strident. As the American economic crisis spread across the world and put the wind up capitalism, there came a flood of articles about Dubai that oozed hatred. The writers, most of them British, saw Dubai as the emblem of a rotten world, a world that was imploding. Dubai was brash. Dubai was cruel. Dubai was exploitative. Dubai was a speculative bubble. Dubai, in short, was plain bloody horrible, and if the economic crisis killed off Dubai it would at least have done one good thing.

  In the Independent Johann Hari called Dubai a city built ‘on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery.’

  In the Sunday Times, Rod Liddle asserted that Dubai was ‘a slave state’ and ‘not too far removed’ from ‘a pre-war Third World fascist theocracy.’

  And Simon Jenkins of The Times went in for prophecy. ‘The dunes will reclaim the soaring folly of Dubai,’ he wrote. Dubai was ‘the last word in iconic overkill, a festival of egotism with humanity denied.’

  I joined the chorus in a small way myself. In a newspaper column in 2008 I called Dubai ‘the spiritual home of suit man.’ Suit man, I suggested, was the business-class executive with the BlackBerry and the Rolex and nothing to contribute to the world except his ability to turn one dollar into two without doing anything useful.

  And on what evidence did we so despise Dubai? Well, I can’t speak for the others, but I’d spent four days there one summer a few years back. During those four days, the heat was too fierce to do anything much but shift from air-conditioned hotel room to air-conditioned bar. In other words I knew next to nothing of the place. My opinion was prejudice.

  That prejudice had been partly fostered by a patrician Englishman called Wilfred Thesiger. Thesiger was an oddball, a loner and an explorer. In the 1930s and 40s he made repeated treks across the sands of the Arabian Peninsula, including two crossings of the Empty Quarter, a terrifying blank on the map. Like his hero, T.E. Lawrence, he dressed as an Arab and he travelled in the company of Arabs, the tribal nomads known generically as the Bedouin. ‘Born freebooters,’ he called them, ‘contemptuous of all outsiders, and intolerant of restraint,’ and he painte
d a picture of them as a heroic race; but also a doomed one, for oil had already been found in the region. Modernity was sniffing round the edges of the desert. It would seduce and destroy, predicted Thesiger, an ancient and noble way of life.

  Thesiger died only a few years ago. As an old man he was invited to return to the United Arab Emirates and see the soaring new cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. He hated them. He described them as ‘an Arabian nightmare, the final disillusionment.’ It’s an old man’s lament, of course, for what was, for ‘a vanished past . . . and a once magnificent people.’ But it’s a persuasive lament nonetheless. From the comfort of one’s armchair and with a supermarket just down the road, it is easy to view modern Dubai as the triumph of shallow materialism over ancient nobility, of consumption over honour, of shopping over endurance.

  It is equally easy to see Dubai as the purest expression of western free market politics. But Dubai isn’t the West. It is Muslim. Its laws are not western laws. Its press does not enjoy the freedom of the western press, and it remains an autocracy, run by an unelected sheikh from an effectively royal family.

  But the one outstanding truth about Dubai is that none of these facts and none of the criticism has deterred hundreds of thousands of people from travelling to Dubai in search of a better life. All of us know someone who’s gone there. And most of us know someone who has stayed there. Out of curiosity, I followed them.

  1

  Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

  Dusk in the desert. The sand’s warm. It seeps into my shoes like dry water and grinds beneath my socks. How deep the desert is I cannot guess. Ribbed like a beach, and relieved only by the odd sprig of grey vegetation, it stretches away from me for perhaps fifty metres. Whereupon it becomes the sixth fairway of the Arabian Ranches Golf Club.

  On the cobbled track for golf carts I empty the sand from the shoes, then set off for the distant clubhouse. As I pass a shrub, four birds erupt, plovers I think. They startle me. My spine jumps at the place where a dog has hackles. The birds screech a five-note alarm call. ‘Where are you going?’ it sounds like. ‘Where are you going?’ Well, birds, I’m going to meet Stephen for a drink.

  The birds wheel in the darkening air and settle further up the fairway. The base of the shrub they rose from is coiled around with irrigation tubing.

  Half an hour ago the sun set like a Christmas bauble. Now it’s no more than a pinkish smear on the horizon, but the air is still warm as a blessing. It’s deep mid-winter. Christmas happened just a few days back and, as in the Christian world, it’s party time in Dubai. Friends of friends have already invited me to a New Year’s Eve celebration. It is to be held in the desert, which I hope means more deserty desert than this. We’ll eat and drink amid the limitless sands, then sleep there in tents – like Thesiger but without the hardship. I have been warned not to leave my shoes outside the tent overnight. Scorpions like to snuggle down in them, apparently.

  I bet scorpions have been banished from this golf course. The place is encircled by the reason for its existence, a housing estate for ex-pats called Arabian Ranches. The houses are not ranches, and neither were they built for Arabs, but misnomers are endemic in Dubai. There are other estates here called The Greens and The Meadows, and it’s hard to imagine anywhere less green or meadowy. The estates have all gone up in the last four years, built on the sands that fringe the city.

  I follow the smooth track as it winds over bulldozed hummocks – their veneer of forced grass mown to different lengths as stipulated by the Royal and Ancient – and around bunkers. Dubai does excellent bunkers. Night’s approach has driven all the golfers to the clubhouse, and left the course to the birds. The birds have surprised me. Already I’ve seen plovers, partridges, doves, mynah birds, wagtails, and numerous bright and darting things I cannot name. Have they always come here? Or have they discovered Dubai more recently as the place has greened? Have they come, like the ex-pats, for the golf courses? I don’t know.

  Near the clubhouse the driving range and putting greens are lit by banks of floodlights. The air resounds with the surprising and distinctive twang of metal woods. A tractor of sorts glides about the range, driven by a man in a metal cage. The machine hoovers the balls into its innards as if feeding.

  More women than men are out practising, almost all of them white and middle-aged, their wide lower portions encased in three-quarter-length shorts. Despite the ballast of their butts, the women don’t hit the ball very far.

  I trot up the grand steps to the clubhouse. The place is mock-baronial, with a marble atrium and flunkeys in uniform. The bar is thirty feet long. Behind it stand more flunkeys in dark shirts and aprons. Their skins range from light hazel to lustrous African black, and they’re all young, fresh and well groomed. On the other side of the bar, and facing them, stand men in less appealing skins. Those skins are twice as old and range in colour from sallow straw to soon-to-burst burgundy, though these men would all describe themselves as white. They wear polo shirts and they don’t look happy.

  I order a Stella Artois, the Belgian beer that was the cheapest available when I lived in France thirty years ago but which has since thrown foil round the neck of its bottles and, by a masterpiece of marketing, become a premium brand. It still gets you drunk but more expensively. It’s a beer that seems apt for Dubai.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ says the barman with a propitiatory smile, ‘fifteen minutes.’ He taps his watch to underline his point, then indicates a laminated notice, one of several dotted along the bar. It announces, with apologies, that the bar will not open until 6.30 p.m. in honour of the Islamic New Year.

  Only then do I notice that none of the men at the bar has a drink. And they are exceptionally keen to get one. They fizz like wasps in a jam jar, glancing abstractedly at a screen showing an English football match, then back to their wrists and the cruel dawdle of time. There’s an air of only just good-natured impatience.

  ‘What do they think this is, a fucking mosque?’ The speaker is short and tubby, and his accent, Liverpudlian at a guess, turns fucking into fooking. His plump little gut is enclosed by a shirt of a colour that I wouldn’t have chosen myself. For me or for him.

  I ask him how it is that the Islamic New Year differs from the Christian one, but in the circumstances it’s a poor choice of question. ‘Fook it,’ he says and turns to the football. Ads for beer line the pitch. I hope they annoy him. The pitch is English winter mud. Many of the lithe young footballers have skins like the ones behind the bar.

  One golfer ceaselessly drums his fingers on the bar top, as if doing a piano exercise. Others banter with the staff. ‘Come on, mate. The cops aren’t going to come in. We’re all friends here.’

  The youngsters behind the bar are used to accommodating these older men. They open doors for them, fuel their bellies with booze and food, agree with them at all times and on all subjects, laugh at their jokes and hope for tips. Thwarting them brings acute discomfort.

  More men come in and add to the waiting throng. The pressure mounts. In the end it tells. Watched by a hundred eyes, a barman reaches up, extracts a glass from the rack and pulls the Heineken tap. By my watch it’s 6.25. The tap gurgles and splutters. The froth becomes a steady stream of beer. The gates of heaven have opened and Allah chooses not to send a thunderbolt. And there’s an instantaneous exhalation of breath and a change of mood. The men stir with anticipatory pleasure. They do not clamour to be served, but they get close to it. The evening has begun. And so, almost, has the Islamic New Year.

  It takes a while to ease the backlog. The men retreat from the bar one by one, holding glasses of what they crave to smooth the edges of the evening, to put out the little fires of dissatisfaction. I take my Stella out to the patio, laid with tables and chairs for dining and big cushioned chairs for sprawling in and drinking. Free-standing heaters on wheels abound like tall green toadstools. They are not needed this evening. The air bathes the skin.

  The floodlit practice area is more sparsely populated tha
n half an hour ago, the golfers whirring back to the clubhouse on their little electric carts like birds coming in to roost. A couple of stars have appeared in the night sky, or perhaps planets. I have never known the difference.

  The terrace starts to fill with men and family groups, a few of them Indian or oriental, but the great majority white. The women wear what seem to me to be abnormal quantities of jewellery, but maybe I am deceived by my expectations: I’m expecting the ostentation of nouvelle richesse.

  The villas that encircle the course are just inky shapes. The irrigated rock garden at the fringe of the patio is planted with exotic shrubs, immaculately tended. The trunks of the date palms have been clipped to neatness and wound around with strings of Christmas lights. Invisible speakers play easy-listening music, by which I mean the stuff that it’s easy not to listen to, familiar, tuneful, out-of-date songs, a sort of aural wallpaper.

  Stephen, my friend and host, arrives, his hair wet. He apologizes for being late.

  ‘I decided to have a shower,’ he says. ‘Wonderful showers here.’

  ‘I thought you said you weren’t a member?’

  ‘I’m white, aren’t I?’

  It seems that no one has ever challenged him.

  I offer to fetch him a beer but, as if by telepathy, a girl appears, places a salver of crisps and peanuts on the low table and takes Stephen’s order. She is from Myanmar. She’s been in Dubai for eight months, she says. She is pleased to be here. Her smile is all charm.

  A pair of young Indians appears, one in staff uniform, the other in the check trousers and straitjacket of a chef. They wheel a barbecue onto the patio and set up stall to make pasta on demand. And bang on cue for the Islamic New Year an Islamic moon rises. It’s the thinnest sickle, gleaming and whetted. I think immediately of the curve of metal that tops the roof of every mosque in the world. And simultaneously of a knife, curved and gleaming, a knife to slit the throat of an infidel dog.