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Dubai: The Arab city of the future BY MATEIN KHALID
19 January 2007
THE skyline of Dubai is a tangible testament to the most spectacular economic transformation in modern Arabia, an emirate whose unique milieu defines the heartbeat of the globalist ethos.
Of course, the Dubai Creek was a hub of trade and finance for centuries, with the silhouette of its moored dhows a symbol of the Arab pearl diving fleets and merchant princes whose networks once extended to Bombay, Kerala’s Malabar, Basra, East Africa’s Swahili coast, Zanzibar, Aden, Kuwait, Iran’s Gulf ports and even the Indonesian archipelago.
Dubai embraced the logic of tree trade, laissez faire capitalism, an absence of xenophobia, an obsessive commitment to infrastructure roll out, a liberal social ethos a generation before it was fashionable. Dubai’s entrepreneurial spirit suffuses its traders to move goods, money and cargo in some of the most high risk emerging markets of West, South and East Asia. The gold, electronics, and textile trades, Jebel Ali Free Zone, Port Rashid, the dry docks, DXB, the establishment of Emirates Airlines, the freehold property revolution, DSF, the Monaco/Singapore style branding as a tourism and services hub, the DIFC, DIC and Media City have created a city–state that, like Venice of the Serenessima or Rembrandt’s Amsterdam, has become an East–West entrepot of ideas, population exchanges and finance.
Dubai’s government is unique in the Arab world, with a ruler whose leadership model is the CEO and whose template for Arab socio economic renaissance is Cordoba, the medieval kingdom in Moorish Spain where Arabs, Jews and Christians created a unique mélange of cultures before the religious fanatics of the Reconquista engaged in one of history’s most ruthless examples of ethnic cleansing. In fact, even now, the Spanish word “convivencia” denotes more than tolerance, even pleasure in cross cultural exchanges, a recognition that the human family is a kaleidoscope, that values are relative and bigotry is abhorrent, that celebration of our common humanity is the essence of civilised existence. As the only global metropolis in the Islamic world, Dubai has resurrected the spirit of Cordoba, staked its claim as the Arabian city of the future. In fact, the Dubai model has become the DNA of iconic property projects and economic reinvention policies from Morocco to Oman at opposite ends of the Arab world.
The post 9/11 world of soaring oil prices, regional petrodollar flows, brand new financial markets, exponential wealth creation and capital flows in the emerging markets, cross–border mergers and acquisitions, the bidding war for overseas infrastructure assets, even war in Iraq and Lebanon, repatriation of Arab private wealth from the US and, above all, the real estate El Dorado has transformed the economic landscape of Dubai. Without the huge oil reserves of Abu Dhabi or Qatar, without the population of Saudi Arabia, without the military power of Egypt or Iran, Dubai has carved out a unique role in the global village, become Arabia’s daring incubator of the social, urban, even financial avante–garde. Bahrain was the offshore capital market of the Gulf ever since Beirut’s descent into the Stone Age in Lebanon’s civil war in the 1970’s but Dubai’s DIFC has positioned its financial free zone as the hot new destination of international banking and fund management in a mere four years. Economic change that was measured in decades in conventional Arab economies is now telescoped by the decision makers of Dubai Inc in virtually Internet time. The bureaucratic inertia that defines societies East of Suez has simply been leapfrogged into oblivion in Dubai.
Unlike Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, Dubai was not a major player in the international financial markets. No longer. Dubai Holding’s DIC, in takeover mode with Liverpool FC, was established as recently as 2004 as a conduit for the investment of surplus state funds into trophy franchises all over the world. DIC, whose portfolio includes Daimler Chrysler and Doncaster, is only the latest example of Dubai’s diversification and global brand strategy. With a mere seven per cent GDP in oil and gas, Dubai is not the traditional Arabian Gulf petrocurrency emirate but nothing less than the cosmopolitan portal to the Middle East whose existence in mission critical in a region where the collision between global capitalism and East–West geopolitics has been traumatic.
When Israel bombed Hezbollah last summer, the best and brightest of Lebanon considered Dubai in the same league as a haven destination as London and Paris. When Iranian political risk escalated after the election of President Ahmedinijad and the uranium enrichment dispute with the West, Tehran’s merchant elite often bought properties in New Dubai, an alternative to squirreling funds in Swiss banks, the traditional mode of Persian capital flight since the reign of the Shah.
Dubai hosts the Gulf’s benchmark conferences for hedge find managers, Islamic financiers, even for travel agents and software engineers. From Australian pilots at Emirates to Gujarati gold traders, Sindhi textile millionaires, Lebanese advertising yuppies and Bohra hardware merchants, Dubai has its own ethnic clusters and professional networks that create value for the entire society and contribute to its role as the magnet for the young, the rich, the restless in societies elsewhere in the region wounded by war, terror and economic sclerosis. In an age of hyperkinetic offshore capital, a mass communications revolution and digital culture, Dubai is a compelling model and catalyst for change in Arabia, the ideal place to live for those of us who define our identify not by our passport, tribe or ancestry but our determination to live lives of excitement and intellectual self discovery, to evolve into quintessential citizens of the world in the new millennium.
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