by Joe Bennett
The story is typically Dubai. If every breach of Islamic propriety earned a jail sentence, half the population would be permanently banged up. That they aren’t testifies to the fact that Dubai is not an Islamic city. It depends for its wealth on non-Muslims working in non-Muslim ways. And they bring their way of life with them. But as the city fills with booze and short skirts and gay bars the ruler still has to keep his own people happy. And even more importantly he needs to keep the rest of the UAE and the wider Islamic world happy. It’s a pretty balancing act. Hence the occasional much publicised crackdown, such as the arrest of the sex-on-the-beachers or a raid on a known gay bar. Hence the sudden surprising gesture, such as the New Year’s Eve party ban in support of Gaza. Hence the hosting of conferences for Islamic scholars and the granting of pardons to prisoners who have learned to recite the Koran. Hence too the vast sums of money given by Dubai to Lebanon and Palestine, or to earthquake relief in Iran, or to the reconstruction of Kuwait after the first Gulf War.
All of it is aimed at maintaining good relations with the Muslim world as well as with the West. Dubai’s livelihood and its security depend on both. But playing a double game doesn’t come cheap.
There is no one shagging on Jumeirah beach right now. The only intriguing sight is the Indians. They refuse to undress. Families sit on picnic blankets as fully clothed as if in a park, and the Indian boys, as frolicsome as boys of any race, go about in jeans and t-shirts. And whenever someone brings out a camera they endearingly try to sneak themselves into the shot.
A woman lies reading in the shade of a leaning palm. The cover of the book carries the squirly font and the line drawing that warns men against even opening it. I ask the woman if a nearby recliner is free.
‘Help yourself,’ she says. ‘Lovely day.’ She lays the book aside. She’s from Nottingham, here on holiday with her family. Hubby has taken the kids to Wild Wadi.
I ask whether she has relatives here but no, they just came for a bit of winter sun.
‘But why Dubai?’ I say.
I’m genuinely curious. I find the place intriguing in a variety of ways, but it still seems to me a strange choice for a holiday.
‘But it’s perfect,’ she exclaims and launches into a gentle paean to the place.
There’s things for the kids to do and the weather’s dependable and it’s beautifully clean and the streets are safe and everyone speaks English and the service is excellent and there aren’t any drunken thugs about and though it’s got more expensive than it used to be the shopping is just wonderful. None of which I can argue with.
We chat a while on the beach and I warm to this woman. She would unhesitatingly lay down her life for any of her three kids, but they take it out of her, and this is her fortnight off, a rest and recharge for her and a respite from the grey monotony of Nottingham in winter.
‘Just the sight of the sun cheers me up,’ she says.
I ask if she’d be happy to live here.
She gives the question more thought that I expected. Perhaps the possibility has never occurred to her.
‘It’d be a long way from family, wouldn’t it?’ she says eventually. ‘But do you know, I think I would. It’s the sun. I just love it.’ She pauses. ‘But Ken wouldn’t dream of it. He’d miss the football.’
I enjoyed two letters in the paper this morning. The first was from a Peregrine Ansel-Wells. He wondered whether there was anyone in Dubai who would care to join him in forming a Morris Dancing Club.
The other was from a South African woman. She boasted that she’d caught a bus. She described it as an ‘adventure’. Unable to find a taxi she had gathered her courage, taken the plunge, and found it very refreshing. There was really nothing to be afraid of on the buses and she urged readers to follow her example, while subtextually also urging them to admire her audacity.
The people now waiting in the air-conditioned bus stop on Jumeirah Road do not look as though they are having an adventure. Predictably non-white, they wait as passively as any bus queue anywhere. The bus when it arrives is clean and cool and half full. The front half-dozen rows of seats are reserved for ‘ladies’.
I take the bus as far as the turn-off to Safa Park where, according to a man I met in a bar, it is possible to watch Emirati ladies power-walking. When he told me this, immediately an image seized me, an image of veiled women in black abayas, swinging their arms in a western quest for the body beautiful, their white Adidas training shoes flashing beneath swishing cloth.
At the gate into the park an unsmiling dishdashed local behind a grille sells me an entry ticket for three dirhams. On the back of the ticket it says, ‘Our Vision: To create an excellent city that provides the essence of success and comfort of living. Our Mission: Through the appropriate investment in our resources we are working to envision, plan, design, build and manage the municipal infrastructure and other related facilities and services.’
Which proves, if nothing else, that Dubai’s got western corporate speak down pat, poor thing.
The park is a park, with kiddies’ playground, ornamental lake, people strolling; a mob of Africans, who turn out to be a professional team from Cameroon, playing a pick-up game of football; maids with children; grass to lie on; birds to spy on; a garden for women only, and a general air of pleasant indolence. But the Emirati lady power-walkers, whose image enshrines something exact about this city, are nowhere to be seen.
11
RIP Sheikh
Sheikh Rashid bin Ahmed al Mualla, Supreme UAE Council member and Ruler of Umm al Quwain where the booze is cheap, is dead. He was born in a fort in 1932. He died last night in a London hospital. There are perks to being a ruler and one of them is Harley Street.
I never saw Sheikh Rashid bin Ahmed al Mualla in the flesh but from the official photos in the paper I’m frankly surprised he got to seventy-seven. The photos were presumably taken while he was still alive and were carefully selected to show him in the best possible light, but they depict a man standing hard on the brink of crossing that bourne from which no traveller returns. The sheikh has sallow skin, red-rimmed eyes with bags under them, more bags under the bags, and all up he has the appearance of a particularly gloomy bloodhound. A bloodhound, moreover, that has just woken after a hard night on the sauce, though this last comparison is of course unfair because, despite being the ruler of an Emirate that has made a profitable business out of flogging cheap booze to the rest of the UAE, Sheikh Rashid bin Ahmed al Mualla was a devout Muslim and therefore incorruptibly teetotal.
His official obituary is as revealing as all official obituaries: ‘The character of Sheikh Rashid was a reflection of his father, Sheikh Ahmed, who was wise, just, modest and tolerant . . . He steered the affairs of Umm al Quwain with wisdom . . . through the building of several leading projects that contributed to pushing the wheel of life forward to match the development of the UAE.’ From the looks of him he may have pushed the wheel of life forward in other more interesting ways, but de mortuis nihil nisi bonum. Rest his bones.
He is to be succeeded, to the astonishment of nobody, by his son Sheikh Saud bin Rashid al Mualla, who has ten sons of his own. His daughters, if he has any, and with ten sons it would seem likely, don’t get a mention in the paper. Sheikh Saud is an enthusiastic angler.
I won’t pretend to be upset by Sheikh Rashid’s departure from this earth, but I do resent his timing. There is to be a week of official mourning throughout the UAE. Flags will fly at half mast, government offices and financial markets will be closed until Monday, radio stations are supposed to play dreary music, and I’m worried that the company from whom I’ve booked a rental car in order to have a pootle round the less well-known bits of the UAE – a trip that will, I hope, put glitzy Dubai into context – will take the opportunity to shut their doors and go on holiday for a bit.
But they haven’t. In a forgettable first-floor office in a forgettable building off the unforgettable Sheikh Zayed Road, a tiny Filipina makes me sign the usual wad of papers pack
ed with miniature print that both you and they know you won’t bother to read, and that both you and they know absolves them of all legal and financial responsibility and heaps it onto you. She sends me off to find my car in the company of a squat and gloomy man with a clipboard.
I’m nervous. I am not a born driver, and traffic in Dubai is literally murderous. I have been told that, because of the extensiveness of their experience, the hospitals of UAE lead the world in the art of patching up the victims of crashes. I have repeatedly heard the sirens and I have seen the charred or con-certina’d remains of numerous accidents. I have also read some remarkable and alarming reports in the papers. Alarming not just because of the frequency and near apocalyptic nature of the accidents, but also because of the way in which they are reported. Try this one for size from a recent paper. The headline alone is enough to arouse suspicion:
National and Pakistani die in road accident
. . . a collision occurred between two saloon cars and a truck and did not result in any human injuries. However, when the three vehicles stopped in the middle of the main road to examine the damages before reporting the collision to the police, the Pakistani truck driver walked to the collision site without paying attention to the heavy traffic on the road.
I interrupt at this point to ask whether you have any sense yet of who is going to cop the blame for this accident.
Using a phrase that banishes any lingering danger of journalistic neutrality, the report continues:
As a result, he was hit by a car driven by a UAE national, 20, who was surprised to see the victim in the middle of the road and could not avoid running him over. Moreover, because the UAE national was driving at a high speed he lost control of his vehicle and violently rammed into the victim’s truck which was parked in the middle of the road.
It’s an impressive piece of reportage. Who could fail to admire the stress on the nationality of the victims, the use of the passive ‘was hit’ to shift responsibility for the accident and, in particular, the journalist’s knowledge that the Emirati was surprised? Only a few seconds later the man was dead, which would not, I’d have thought, have allowed him time to be interviewed on his state of mind.
And if by chance the Emirati had survived the accident, what risk do you think he would have run of being prosecuted for the truck driver’s death? Precisely.
And these are the roads I’m about to drive on.
I’ve seen plenty of people driving like the dead man of the story. Indeed, in a taxi on my way here I saw a sports car miss its exit on a six-lane, nose-to-tail arterial highway. Rather than driving on to the next exit, the driver stopped and reversed a hundred metres. I won’t deny being impressed at the time, not only by the man’s astonishing disregard of everything except his own needs, but also by the skill of the rest of the traffic in avoiding him. But I am not a skilful driver and I’m about to share unfamiliar roads with such drivers in an unfamiliar left-hand drive vehicle.
The man with the clipboard says nothing until I’ve signed a document acknowledging that the vehicle has been delivered to me free of dents and scratches and that should I return it with any they will amputate my limbs pro rata, whereupon he looks up from his clipboard, hands me the keys and says, with apparent sincerity, ‘Good luck.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, and I turn on the engine, adjust the mirrors, flick the indicator switch and find that it works the windscreen wipers.
It takes me a while to find a way of getting onto Sheikh Zayed Road and when I do I wish I hadn’t. It’s as if I’ve been seized by a rip tide. I am obliged to travel faster than I wish and numerous drivers encourage me with their horns to go faster still. I feel tension building in my neck, and the distant hint of an urge to vomit.
Dubai’s traffic and its road system have grown exponentially over recent years, and the department that erects road signs has not kept up. I begin by looking for signs to Hatta, a township in the mountains to the east. Then I resolve to follow any sign suggesting an easterly direction. Then I just take the nearest off ramp, taking care to indicate my intention by turning on the windscreen wipers.
The drivers of Dubai are reluctant to stop. The city has accommodated that reluctance by building huge clover-leaf junctions. These are counter-intuitive: in order to get onto a road travelling in a particular direction you invariably have to take a wide swinging exit that appears to head in the opposite direction.
In the hope of heading east I point the nose of my little Nissan towards the mid-morning sun. The road promptly swings me through a hundred and eighty degrees and I find I am heading away from the sun rather than towards it, and towards downtown Dubai rather than away from it. I am heading, it turns out, for Jumeirah. The traffic is unrelenting. I can see no way of turning round, I’m in a middle lane and I’m not happy. Taking the path of least resistance, I just keep driving, waiting to become more familiar with the car, urging myself to come off the boil – which of course keeps me nicely on it – and hoping, hopelessly, that the road will eventually lead to a roundabout. I know where I am with roundabouts.
It doesn’t. It takes me to the coast and then straight onto the massive trunk of Palm Jumeirah, reputedly home to Lindsey Lohan, David Beckham’s sainted mum, and other Middle Eastern luminaries. Consoling myself with the thought that I’d intended to visit the Palm at some stage, I just keep going.
The base of the trunk is lined with palatial apartment blocks. A few hundred yards out to sea the fronds start, each one consisting of a single road, inevitably blocked by a barrier arm and a guard in a hut, and flanked by flashy villas. Every villa backs onto its private sliver of beach and what looks like stagnant sea.
Near the top of the tree the multiple-laned highway takes a flip through a tunnel and then right and then, suddenly, framed in the windscreen, there’s the fabled wonder of the Atlantis Hotel. It looks like a princess’s castle in a Disney cartoon, all turrets and titivation, with a veneer of Arab motifs and an arch through the middle in the form of a keyhole. Kitsch would sum it up nicely. The place has only been operating a few months, having been opened with a famous party to which the great and the good came flocking from all over the world in their private jets. They got a concert by Kylie Minogue, complete with pert bum and cancer recovery story. She got five million bucks.
More recently the place has been in the news for a whale shark. The beast was caught by a local fishing boat, whereupon Atlantis management offered to look after it. Looking after it meant putting it on display in their aquarium. Despite it being an endangered species they’ve shown no inclination to let it go. Rumours abound that the beast was captured to order. The animal rights people are distinctly unhappy. No one has asked how the whale shark feels about it.
I’d quite like to have a look at it, but having already spent the best part of an hour on the road and succeeded only in plunging deeper into the shallow heart of Dubai, I feel that I’d better keep going. I follow the road in a big circle and return down the trunk of the Palm the way I came, heading more or less, at last and hallelujah, east.
I keep thinking I’ve escaped Dubai only to come upon more of it. It sprawls haphazardly into the desert, with open highway suddenly shrinking to roadworks and seething Indian crowds. I stop at a supermarket for water and bananas, which cost me half what I’d pay in the city proper, and to rub my aching neck. The air is tangy with exhaust and blown dust and urban rawness. A group of young Indians lounge outside the supermarket smoking. They study me with some interest. This is not white man country. Nor is it Arab country. Nor, emphatically, is it the Dubai of the tourist brochures and the carefully cultivated image.
‘Can anyone tell me the way to Hatta?’
It proves a provocative question. The Indians discuss it merrily among themselves and reach a consensus that none of them has heard of Hatta. But they do so with great good humour.
I drive on, navigating by the sun, and suddenly Dubai is behind me. All around me is desert: desert with the sort of dunes I want desert to h
ave, stretching evocatively away to the horizon like frozen ripples in tangerine ice-cream. And here too are camels loping beside the highway, ranging in colour from light straw to the grey of a photographic negative. They sway and plod on colossal feet, their faces set in an impassive sneer as if wearily conscious of their own bizarre construction. And they are simply terrible pedestrians. They lumber along beside the road until suddenly, collectively, they decide that the sand is browner on the other side. Twice I have to stop at short notice to let them pass by the bonnet. They don’t even look at me.
I have been told that they like to sleep on the road for the warmth and that should you run into one its owner will appear from the dunes within seconds and let you know that the one you hit was renowned for its beauty, a winner of numerous races and a long-time favourite of the local sheikh, and that you are in debt to the tune of your life savings. Though I suspect that if my little suburban Nissan did run full tilt into a sleeping camel, the camel would be bruised, the Nissan would be bound for the wrecker’s and I would have no further need of my life savings.
This is the sort of land that Thesiger crossed and made several books out of, but I have no wish to trudge into it. It is barren and forbidding. To look at it makes you thirsty. But any sense of isolation is destroyed every few miles by an outcrop of garish villas or a sand-buggy park or a parade of shops catering for motorists. I stop at one such where I buy a cup of coffee for very little but still more than its taste deserves. Looking for a drain to tip it into, I tour the half-dozen clothing and souvenir shops, all Indian-run. Against the steps leading up to each shop a little bank of wind-blown sand has gathered. Leave the steps unswept for a week and they would disappear. Leave them unswept for a year and the next person to visit would be an archaeologist.