The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  It is often said, not only by the chamber of commerce, that Dubai is the ultimate “tourist city.” Since I had a few days to kill here before flying out to Calcutta, I wondered how best to use the time. I could go to the elite restaurants, the beaches of Jumeirah, the splendid themed malls like the Wafi and the Renaissance, the famous girlie nightclubs like Cyclone mentioned in every Bachelor’s Guide to World Travel. But did Dubai have an essence that could be discovered in only a few days? The city-state is surely a social laboratory in which a new model of resort living is being tried out. And it is true that Dubai’s ruler, His Highness Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, is masterminding an extraordinary gamble: that he can turn the 2.4 million tourists who visit Dubai every year into 15 million by 2012.

  To do this, he is using two construction companies that he largely owns, Nakheel and Emaar, to reconstruct the city-state from the bottom up. The new city will have the world’s tallest tower, the Burj; the world’s largest shopping mall, the Emirates Mall; and the world’s largest theme park, Dubailand, intended to be larger than the surface area of the actual city. Yet more incredible, however, is Nakheel’s plan to build three gigantic artificial palm-shaped peninsulas sustaining a galaxy of hotels, resorts, gated villa communities, and entertainment districts. The Palms will jut out miles into the Persian Gulf and will be visible from outer space. It is very important for Maktoum, apparently, that his pet construction projects be visible from outer space.

  Next to these Palms, moreover, they are building an ensemble of 250 to 300 man-made islands that together form a vast map of the world—for each island will be shaped like a country. The islands will be sold to developers who will then, it is hoped, build something unique on each island appropriate to the island’s “nationality.” A mini-Mecca hotel on Saudi Arabia; an Eiffel Tower cinema on France. The project is called the World.

  Images of these tourist fantasies are everywhere in Dubai. They have become part of the city’s future subconscious. It would be interesting to know what Margaret Mead would have thought of them, or if they could be subjected to an anthropology of any kind. Do they express kinship structures or a cosmology? An idea of power or pleasure? By the road one sees gigantic images of Sheikh Maktoum, the Builder, the modern Nebuchadnezzar of the Gulf. The sheikh’s eyes follow you everywhere and they are not merry. It seems obvious, then, that the Palms and the World are expressions of power. And these are just part of the story. All along the coast road, self-contained “cities” are springing up, a Media City, a Knowledge City, a Science City. As if each function of the state could be given a separate neighborhood with a wall around it. In any case, I thought I might as well try to visit the World and the Palms. I had an acquaintance in Nakheel’s PR firm, a local company called Orient Planet. He is a young Lebanese exile called Khudr Hammoud, who likes to call the Palms the “most significant” project in the entire Middle East, if not the entire planet. Evidence of the Arab nation being reborn, though as yet there isn’t much to see. The Palms and the World are still construction sites.

  “I still want to see them,” I insisted.

  “As you like. Afterwards, you can go have some fun. I have the phone number of an excellent Chinese girl. I recommend that you bring her flowers. Chocolates are at your discretion.”

  Producing the publicity for Nakheel is a daunting operation, for it amounts to selling Dubai’s image to the rest of the world as a hyperglobalist metropolis that is both fantastical and real: a city-resort with a working mercantile infrastructure. For Khudr turned up a little disheveled, as if he had been at an allnight party, and ten minutes later we were speeding in a company car toward the Palm Jumeirah. On the way, we passed the whole length of Sheikh Zayed Road. Its parade of avant-garde skyscrapers decorated with heads of the sheikh struck me as Mad Hatter enough, but Khudr seemed intensely proud of it. Progress, brutality, power. What did I think?

  “Amazing,” I said. “Very modern.”

  Ah, we are not as backward as you thought, eh? the eyes said.

  But I was not thinking any such thing. I was wondering where Maktoum had gotten the idea to create such monumental avenues lined on both sides by such massive side-by-side towers. The diaries of Mussolini? A trip to Miami? It was an Easterner’s touristic idea of the West.

  It is one of the great themes for a writer: what one culture wants from another. Predictably enough, we were soon talking about the Iraq war, and Khudr was giving me the standard resentnik line, uttered however with great feeling and bitterness. His argument could be summed up as, “We don’t want your so-called values, we want this, the gleaming skyscrapers and the babes that go with them.” He used phrases like “the poor Arabs.” Shafted by the West, driven from their lands by unreasonable Zionists. But at the same time Dubai was “the future of the Arabs,” because it was not inferior to the West in the quality of its interstate highways and malls. Americans were rather disgusting and oafish, a terrible lack of culture, basically, but he’d rather like to spend some time in New York seeing if he could hustle up some business education.

  “New York must look something like this, no?”

  But over there, he insisted, the Jews controlled everything.

  “I suppose they must censor everything you write. That’s the way it is. Here we say what we want.”

  We arrived at the Palm. It was little more than a giant’s causeway of leveled sand and dirt projecting into the sea under a mass of cranes and arc lamps. Thousands of workers in yellow hats swarmed around what would soon be a freeway coursing down the middle of the “bole” of the seven-mile-long Palm. And for a moment I did think of what New York must have been like in 1930, a place in a blind frenzy of self-making.

  We drove around for half an hour trying to find the Nakheel motor launch that would take us out to the World. Khudr and the driver argued in Arabic as we passed blocks of unfinished villas. Finally we stopped at a jetty surrounded by water clotted with yellow foam. At its end lay a spotless white launch, splendid with navy cushions and tumblers of chilled scotch. The personnel saluted as we stepped aboard. Khudr playfully tapped my arm. That’s the life, eh?

  The Palm is difficult to describe, unless you happen to be sitting above it in a hot-air balloon. From sea level, it looks like a network of desert islands, mounds of white sand, sitting on a topaz sea. Twelve thousand real palms will shade its streets. These will be grown in a special nursery in mainland Jumeirah. There will be underwater marine parks, Hyatts and Hiltons, and, probably, Jean-Georges and Nobu outlets—the whole machinery of tourist splendor. And just behind the Palm sits the Burj Al Arab, the world’s most expensive hotel, shaped like a dhow sail on the Jumeirah waterfront. The three Palms together will increase Dubai’s beachfront by some seventy-five miles, three immense “dreamlands” given over to the logic of twenty-first-century leisure. Naturally, Nakheel calls the Palms “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” One could call them a scene of wonder. We drank our scotch numbly. Why does the world have only eight wonders?

  Khudr had the boat swing close to the Palm’s shore. A jungle of scaffolds and cranes shimmered just above the waterline. The first villas were being built. I was beginning to wonder why millionaires would choose to live on a giant artificial palm tree in the middle of the sea. Khudr pointed over to the Madinat Mall, on the Jumeirah shore, built to imitate an ancient Gulf city, complete with faux mud towers bristling with wood poles and crenellated walls. Its ominous silhouette sat just above the water: a mall looking like a restored ruin, or vice versa. A canal flowed through it, a canal with boats and promenades. Very jolly. A bit like the mad village in the British TV show The Prisoner.

  “Fantastic,” Khudr said. The other men nodded gravely.

  So this was the new East. Just like the West, it was now imitating itself.

  It seemed a long time since the first Western tourists arrived in “the Orient” looking for picturesque poverty and ruins, courtly scenes with water pipes and harems of tattooed slave women. Now they came to bu
y second homes with Oriental themes that only lightly alluded to the former image repertoire. Accordingly, the Palms will soon offer a selection of grandly themed residences, Garden Home units in a Sante Fe style, as well as Arabic, Greek, and Mediterranean. Interiors will be lavish, a riot of marble, columns, and stupendous chandeliers. Canals, docks, and beaches will permeate every neighborhood. The floating city will soon look as utopian as resort living can, an Ideal City worthy of Plato. But who will live there? No one seemed to know. Khudr looked at his notes and brochures. No, there was nothing about buyers yet. “Europeans, Saudis,” was all he said, but what he really wanted to imply was the global middle class, for there will soon be one and it will be five hundred million strong.

  The World lies two and a half miles out to sea, the sandy isles shaped like various countries in sizes ranging from 250,000 to 490,000 square feet and priced from about $11 million to $36 million. There’s a France, a United States, an Italy, an Egypt, and so on. A hundred of them have already been sold. With rehearsed drama, Khudr let on that Rod Stewart had bought England for a tidy sum. He had beaten David Beckham to it, no doubt.

  We steered a course between a group of these islands, passing so close to them that we could have jumped out and swum to shore in seconds. From close to, it was impossible to judge which part of the World we were navigating through. “I think,” Khudr ventured, “it’s Africa. I think this island over here is Saudi Arabia. Yes, it’s Saudi. There’s Oman.”

  We slowed the launch to look at Oman. It did not look at all like that opulent and mysterious land. There was a fire hydrant standing in the middle of it. Farther on, we passed India and then swung toward Australia. Once, it took weeks to sail to Australia, and who would want to? But here you could sail there in five minutes. True, there might be an obnoxious Lebanese millionaire living there who might tell you to get off his property, but the notion of sailing was still pleasurably exotic. And in fact we were now sailing along the Asian Highway itself, the Margaret Mead route as I now call it. Just north of Australia I asked Khudr if he could show me where Papua New Guinea was. The word, however, meant nothing to him.

  “Papua?” the staff wondered.

  “It’s the world’s second largest island,” I said.

  Khudr: “Never heard of it. I’m sure we don’t have it.”

  “It’s an important country not to have.”

  I then told him that I myself was heading to Papua. This necessitated some explaining: what Papua was, how big it was, what kind of people lived there, and, lastly, why I was going there.

  “Sounds like a fucking awful place.” He smiled. “If we had a Papua New Guinea, how would we market it? Who would want to buy the Papua New Guinea island and live on it? That’s why they didn’t build one, I suppose.”

  The logic was faultless. I couldn’t quite imagine Rod Stewart making a bid for Papua New Guinea. Would one have to build tree houses on it?

  We skirted Japan and made our way back to the Middle East, where Egypt beckoned—a prize island over which many a sheikh would doubtless be haggling. I then asked an incredibly naive question: “Where’s Israel?” For, like Papua New Guinea, it appeared not to exist.

  “You mean Palestine?”

  It had been left out for reasons of “tact.” We sailed through the gap where that triangular little island would have stood, and there was a moment’s unspoken heaviness. So the World was not quite the world.

  “If we had an Israel,” Khudr finally opined, “who would buy it? It would be an Al Qaeda magnet. No thanks.”

  A little farther on, we came to a sprawling white villa being built for the United Arab Emirates’ defense minister. The house already had its sunproof blue windows and steel balcony rails, as well as a grove of young palms with tightly bunched fronds. A Caterpillar tractor sat nearby with a group of Indian workers. A house rising from the sea, then, surrounded by ocean on all sides—the ultimate in planned seclusion. I looked around at the desertlike hillocks of bare sand and tried to imagine what it would look like in ten years’ time, forested with hotels and villas and swimming pools. Then Khudr informed me that, if I wanted, I could visit the Nakheel HQ and see all the master plan maquettes for the developments. They were expecting me after lunch, in fact. He talked into his cell phone for a few minutes as we voyaged back to the jetty, and our second view of the Jumeirah skyline gave me a more oppressing feeling—I could not help being reminded of the skyline of Coney Island at the turn of the century, all pagodas, towers, and spires, a mock-up of the eventual skyline of Manhattan. Why do people build such things? Parody has a more powerful hold on the imagination than reality. Which is tantamount to admitting that tourism is more powerful than reality.

  As if chiming in with my mood, Khudr suggested I go to lunch inside the Madinat Mall before heading on to the nearby Nakheel HQ. It was the best mall in Dubai, some thought, though there were so many themed malls these days that it was hard to say. The Madinat had restaurants, in any case, that were popular with Dubai’s movers and shakers. I could also buy a carpet and an Armani suit if I wanted.

  Khudr adjusted his tie and looked furtively at his watch. Did he have an amorous rendezvous somewhere?

  “Hamza Mustafa of Nakheel will be waiting for you at HQ. Don’t be late!”

  The car left me at what looked like the gates of a walled city. The mall is entered through a monumental gate, its towers bristling with traditional wooden poles. It could easily be a restored archaeological site, or an “old town” surviving intact for centuries. For a moment I wasn’t sure that this was not the case, and it took a few minutes to verify the absolute modernity of the construction. For inside, the streets are covered like an ancient souk and vaulted in traditional woods. The sunlight enters in broken bars and spangles, iron lanterns hang from the beams, and the storefronts are framed by massive carved wood doors with Hand of Fatima knockers. Many a Sinbad Antiques sits in picturesque shadow. It is a perfect piece of Orientalism, but this time it has been made by the East itself.

  The Madinat contains a hotel, villas, and a canal bordered with restaurants. After passing through the Souk I came into the open “city center,” with its square Gulf-style towers, piazzas, and palm groves. From this core, a labyrinth of gates, courtyards, and covered shopping arcades, only the mall’s own skyline can be seen; the wharves are shaded by café parasols and palms, the water’s reflections dominated by the pale pink of simulated dried mud—the traditional building material of the Gulf. As I walked around this mise-en-scène I couldn’t help thinking of an operatic set, and of course more than any other opera this set would resemble that of Verdi’s Egyptian-themed Aida.

  In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said takes a scathing look at the “falsity” of Aida, which as a theatrical spectacle, he says, confirms “the Orient as an essentially exotic, distant, and antique place in which Europeans can mount certain shows of force.” Verdi’s opera pretended to look like a genuine Egypt, but of course it was nothing of the sort. It was rather like a model village at a colonial Universal Exhibition: a spectacle of “subaltern cultures … exhibited before Westerners as microcosms of the larger imperial domain. Little, if any, allowance was made for the non-European except within this framework.”

  But what about the mall I was now standing in? It seemed to bear the same relation to archaeology that Aida did. Unlike the sets of Aida, moreover, this is a vital part of an Arab city in which an Arab middle class goes about its daily business. Its spectators are indigenous.

  Said appears to think that every Westerner is condemned to have a colonial psyche. But what he seems not to have considered is that a people can Orientalize itself, or that in fact it principally Orientalizes itself. The pisé towers around me were the Arabs romanticizing themselves. The two hours went quickly as I became more and more disarmed and alarmed. Little canal boats with awnings went by, the Middle Eastern families looking at the towers with binoculars. A helicopter landed on the distant Burj Al Arab helipad, where Andre Agassi had j
ust played an exhibition game that morning as part of the Dubai Open. I thought to myself: Yes, I have a colonial psyche, but who does not?

  Hamza Mustafa is the head of Nakheel’s sales division. In traditional robes and headdress, he sweeps with royal authority through scale models of the Palms and the World followed by a minion bearing a silver coffeepot. The coffee is strongly scented with cardamom, and Hamza’s English is scented with British intonations picked up during a school career in the Somerset countryside. He is the sophisticated face of the new Dubai: smoothly debonair, armed with statistics, and equally at home in two world languages. We walked slowly around the fantastical models of the Palms showing how they would look when completed. The Palm Jebel Ali boasted a ring of boathouses inside its crescent, which formed—when seen from outer space, of course—a gigantic Arabic poem.

  “Written by our great sheikh. Isn’t it nice?”

  It was about horses, he said. And he translated.

  Dubai now allows foreigners to buy freeholds, and it’s the resulting property boom that is fueling Dubai’s growth. But the forces of global tourism are, in any case, favoring Al Maktoum’s wildly grandiose visions. As Hamza is all too aware.

  I got an expert peroration about tourism. “Today’s tourism is driven by climate. Sun and sand weighed against the miserable winters in Europe. We realized that Dubai simply didn’t have enough beach—a measly forty miles. The palm tree structure enables us to construct thousands of villas all with beach access. And to double our beach area with one stroke. Do you see? It’s really quite ingenious. The palm is the perfect commercial as well as aesthetic structure.” He said this as if these two things had never before coincided.

  Around us, other metal palms soared up to a tentlike roof. Receptionists in black robes and headscarves floated through a maze of glass sales offices from which a group of property developers from a company called Zenith exited murmuring in several languages simultaneously. They made straight for the Palm Deira model, taking digital snapshots as they went. Hamza broke off for a few minutes to give them an authoritative spiel, which amounted to saying, “This, ladies and gentlemen, will transform world tourism!” Then he took me to the World. In the model, the islands were covered with bizarre structures, fantasy hotels and Miami-style villas. Hundreds of tiny white yachts lay moored by miniature jetties. I thought to myself how deliciously nightmarish it would be if the whole thing suddenly came to life.