Demon Dubai
Welcome to the empire of superficiality
The recent news of financial crisis in the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world offers everybody the opportunity to take a closer look at that shining city in the Gulf. Dubai—that outwardly gorgeous, irresistibly tax-free haven of opportunity and prosperity—is, and has been for a long time, a profound sham. Perhaps nowhere else on this planet can so many dark and shameful human tendencies be seen with such staggering, in-your-face clarity.
Dubai is the sheer embodiment of modern hypocrisy. It is, bar none, the absolute paragon of contradiction in our world. It is a place where rich and poor comfortably overlap, as do prince and slave, the medieval and the modern, the past and the future, the tragic backwardness of devout religious adherence and the idiocy of mindless hedonistic excess.
Foreigners come, like moths to a flame, beckoned by the siren call of no taxes and single-minded ambition. They come, unfazed by the stark horror of the modern day slavery that undergirds their fantasy world. They come, mouths watering at the prospect of wealth without work, of beauty without ugliness, of freedom without responsibility. And so, consciously or otherwise, they patronize a social-political-economic system simply unrecognizable to the values that lie at the heart of their own homelands—gender equality, freedom of movement, freedom of press, and basic human rights for everyone.
The contradictions inherent in this empire of superficiality have had (or at least begun to have) their inevitable financial consequences. Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, has these thoughts on where Dubai goes from here:
I still have no doubt that Dubai will survive, despite its lack of oil or other natural resources. But it will do so as a benighted settlement on the Gulf shore, in hock to neighbouring and more cautious oil-rich states, such as Abu Dhabi. Its luxury apartments will become tenements to an ever shifting army of refugees from the torments of the Islamic world. Its towers will stand empty, unable to afford their energy-guzzling services. Its fantasy islands will be squatted or will rot and sink back into the sea. Where fresh water will come from, who knows?
In a society where over 80% of the entire population is foreign, where men outnumber women 3 to 1, and where illegal prostitution (coerced and otherwise) thrives alongside the use of Islamic Sharia law, the normal frame of reference for understanding human affairs barely applies. Up is down and down is up such that fantasy to the point of delusion is the only mindset useful for thriving within it.
It is truly fitting that this mirage of beauty, wealth and freedom should occur in a desert. And how poetic, indeed, that this city’s breakneck rise—marked by fantastic hubris, superficiality and the ruthless exploitation of the helpless—should be interrupted (if not concluded) with a humbling and equally impressive financial fall that exposes its darker internal workings.
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