Krane - City of gold: Dubai and the dream of capitalism

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 couldnt 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. Rashids 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 couldnt be more like Dubai.

But like all great wishes that are granted, the success of Rashids quest brought unforeseen trouble. Lives were trampled by the citys 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 Dubais wild ride contains powerful lessons for all of us. It starts long ago, when a great migration took place in Arabias 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. Its 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.