by Tony Horwitz
The mud had been covered with whitewash and the fortress converted to a government center. Inside, an amiable English archivist, Edward Henderson, invited me into his air-conditioned office. “This building used to lack certain amenities,” he said. “Glass, electricity, potable water, that sort of thing. But by the standard of the day it was quite grand.”
Henderson first came to Abu Dhabi in 1948, by wooden sailboat, to win oil concessions from the local sheik. The sheik invited Henderson onto the fortress rooftop to feast on dates, camel's milk and a whole sheep lying on a bed of rice. Bedouin retainers recited poetry as they dined. “One had the feeling that life hadn't changed for centuries,” Henderson said.
Forty years later, Henderson was now among the legion of Westerners in the principality's employ. “One must learn to move with the times,” he added, smiling wryly at the irony of his situation.
It was a Friday, when most Arab offices close and reporting is difficult, so I rented a car and drove inland to a camel race I'd seen advertised in the Emirates News. The causeway swept me out of the city and into an arid plain dotted with signs for camel crossings: red triangles with humped silhouettes at the center. Thirty minutes out of Abu Dhabi there was nothing: a vast soup of oil, crusted with sand.
It was my first real view of desert, and I searched in vain for the majestic vistas I'd seen in Lawrence of Arabia and countless other films. A nineteenth-century traveler, Alexander Kinglake, described the desert much better: “Sand, sand, still sand, and only sand, and sand, and sand again.”
The wealth here had to be mineral, because there was nothing else, animal or vegetable, for miles.
Gazing out at the bleak expanse, it was easy to understand why Islam had caught on so quickly among seventh-century Arabs. For the faithful, the Koran promises a paradise “watered by rivers. Its food is perpetual, and its shade also” (heaven also offers its guests “beauteous damsels. . . whom no man shall have deflowered before them”). It was also easy to see why the oil-rich Gulfies had quickly discarded their camels and tents for Mercedeses and modern villas. At noon the temperature was 109 degrees. Turning on the air conditioner, I eased up the tinted windows and listened to Casey Casum play American top forty on Abu Dhabi radio.
The oasis of Al Ain announced itself with a billboard offering an unlikely bit of Mohammed's paradise here on earth: an indoor ice rink. There was also a squat villa shaped like a flying saucer, which had touched down on a lot so vast that it would have been zoned industrial in any other land.
Driving through town and into the desert on the other side, I couldn't find a trace of the camel race. The directions in the newspaper were vague, and there was no one out in the blazing midday sun to ask. About to give up, I spotted a dozen men seated in the shade of a cedar tree. They wore traditional garb: a white robe with a white headdress held in place by a ring of black cord, which had once doubled as a rope to tie camels' legs so they wouldn't stray. A few camels and goats milled nearby. It seemed I had stumbled on a genuine bedouin encampment.
I wandered over to ask directions. One of the men spoke English and told me that the races had ended a few hours before. But with typical Arab hospitality, he invited me to stay for lunch. The men were about to dig their fingers into a communal mound of meat and rice, and they indicated politely that I should take the first bite.
A southpaw, I instinctively reached my left hand toward the—
“La! La!” twelve voices cried in unison. No! A man put his left hand on his backside, reminding me of its proper use. The others laughed. I'd forgotten the first commandment of desert etiquette, but my hosts seemed good-humored about it.
Proceeding clumsily with my right hand, I bit into a piece of sinewy flesh. It tasted like overcooked sandal. I must have made a quizzical face, because the man beside me nodded his head toward the animals milling nearby. I had missed seeing camels run and was now eating one instead.
“Do you live here?” I asked Mobarak, the English-speaking young man who had invited me to eat. “Or do your people still roam through the desert?”
Mobarak smiled. “Today I am a bedouin,” he said. “Tomorrow I study business administration.”
He pointed to another cedar tree where a row of Toyota Land Cruisers was parked in the shade. The men, it turned out, were students and government workers from Al Ain. They came here only on Fridays to race their camels and picnic in the desert. Even the food had been prepared beforehand in Mobarak's kitchen. “It is nice sometimes to live in the old way,” he said, sipping Pepsi.
There was an older man seated beside Mobarak. His face was the color and texture of scorched almonds. Mobarak said this was his father, born near here and raised herding camels across the vast desert known as the Rub al Khali, or Empty Quarter. In those days, the Bedouin lived from well to well, relying on their camels for food, milk and hides for tents and water bags.
The older man spoke poor English, so I asked Mobarak what his father now did.
“Business,” he said. “Mostly he buys properties and builds on them. I cannot think of the English word.”
“Developer?”
The older man smiled, his mouth full of camel and rice. “Aywah,” he said. Yes, that was the word. Then he said something in Arabic I didn't understand.
“He says that this war between Iraq and Iran is very bad for business,” Mobarak translated. “It takes many years to grow a tree and only a minute to cut it down.”
After lunch, after a group snooze under the cedar tree, Mobarak led me a few miles across the desert to a place where other camel breeders were running heats in the waning sun. The track was a long spit of hoof-beaten sand, beginning at a cedar tree and ending at an oil rig. Bangladeshi grooms hoisted saddles made of toweling onto the camels, then hoisted on the jockeys, Bangladeshi boys of seven or eight. The boys were barefoot and secured to the saddles with Velcro straps across their calves. The owners, elegantly robed men like Mobarak, sat in their four-wheel-drives, windows up and air conditioning on.
When three mounts had been readied, the grooms hit the camels with bamboo crops and the awkward beasts humped their way through the sand. A moment later, three of the cars pulled out of the shade and took off after the camels, cruising alongside the track. Windows down, the passengers yelled encouragement to their riders. “Emsbee!” Move it! Fifty yards from the starting line, cars and camels disappeared in a cloud of desert sand.
“This is quite a primitive race,” Mobarak said, rather apologetically. Usually, the owners coached their jockeys through walkie-talkies, which were wired to radio transmitters strapped to the young boys' chests. The best camels eventually raced in a stadium with a five-mile track and seating for thousands. “It is like your Kentucky Derby,” he said.
I asked him if the jockeys were ever Arabs.
“These days, no,” he said. “It is a dangerous sport, and most families would not allow their sons to race. It is much safer to hire boys from Pakistan and Bangladesh.”
We stood there watching the camels and cars take off, three by three, until the sun became a dull red flame, sinking into the desert.
That evening I accepted Mobarak's invitation to visit him at his home near Al Ain. The villa was tucked into a tidy subdivision with its own small mosque. Two white Mer-cedeses were parked in front, alongside the Toyota Land Cruiser I'd seen that afternoon.
A Filipino servant led me into what seemed a ballroom, with carpet and walls merging into a vast ocean of baby blue. The room smelted antiseptic, as if the furniture had just been unpacked or sprayed with disinfectant. An over-stuffed sofa ran the perimeter of the room, with a small coffee table forming an atoll at the precise center. The space was so vast that our voices echoed and I had to lean forward to hear Mobarak's words.
“You see, we can live here or in the desert, it makes no difference,” he said, as the servant poured sweet tea from a waist-high pink pot into tiny glasses. Mobarak wore a freshly pressed robe, or dishdasha, and seemed as much at ease in air-conditioned splendor
as he had that afternoon squatting in the sand.
“How many people live here?” I asked.
“Three. Myself, my brother and my father.”
“And none of you are married?”
He paused. “Of course, we have all taken wives.” He rearranged the folds of his robe, offering no further details. I had shown bad manners for the second time that day. In traditional Gulf homes it is impolite to inquire directly about womenfolk. Queries about family, I later learned, are phrased in a way that translates “How many sons do you have?” or “How are those that stand behind you?”
But Mobarak was broad-minded, and curious about “women's liberty” and other peculiarities of Western culture. I obliged by giving a thumbnail sketch of life in urban America, touching only lightly on drugs, AIDS, crime and other blights.
“Forgive me, but I think your culture is too free,” he interrupted. “Man is not a perfect creature. He must live under certain rules.”
Everything Mobarak read and saw on television confirmed what his own culture taught him. Westerners drank too much and went on shooting sprees; much better not to drink at all. Men gambled away their earnings—even their wives, he had heard. Here, gambling was forbidden. He had seen a television program on New York that showed walls topped with razor wire and buildings guarded by snarling Dobermans. Here no one needed to steal, as everything was provided: free medical care, free education, a free plot of land and a job for any university graduate.
The balance and civility of Mobarak's vision was appealing, at least for the men. The only women I'd yet seen were black ghosts in head-to-toe veils, herding children through the streets. I asked Mobarak if women resented the obvious restrictions on their dress and activity.
He smiled. “In the West, you are obsessed by our women. Do not worry. This too is changing.” Islam allowed a man to have up to four wives, but marrying more than one was frowned on by the younger generation. And though technically a husband could divorce a wife by 'saying “I divorce thee” three times, this too was discouraged, unless the wife was barren. “Women must be protected and cared for because they are controlled by emotions,” he said. “Surely man is not woman and woman is not man.”
We finished the tea, and the cardamom coffee that followed. Then Mobarak explained that he had to retire, because classes began early the next day. “I must work on my accounting,” he said. “In the West you have learned to use Arab numbers. But we must learn to use your computers. After all, this is a modern country.”
In fact, the United Arab Emirates hadn't been a country for long; like everything else, the state itself was newly minted and rather insecure. Before uniting in 1971, the seven shiek-doms often took up arms against each other, usually over land, and the map of their confederacy remained a crazy quilt of neutral zones and lines marked “border disputed” or “boundary undefined.” One of the emirates covered an area of only one hundred square miles. Here, in microcosm, was the Arabia of “tribes with flags” the Egyptians so disparaged. Abu Dhabi, the biggest and richest of the city-states, was the center of power. But Dubai, ninety miles down the coastal superhighway, was the country's brash commercial hub. It was to Dubai that I headed to find some way out onto the Perian Gulf.
The official at the Dubai Chamber of Commerce had tinted glasses and six pens clipped to the breast pocket of his disbdasha. “We are the black camel of the Emirates family,” he said, grinning broadly. “We love the West. We love capitalism.” He stuffed my shoulder bag with glossy promotional literature, each page of which assured the prospective businessman that Dubai's port was duty-free, regulation-free, everything-free. Dubai hadn't let the Gulf war get in the way of its longstanding trade ties with Iran, whose territory lay just fifty-three miles offshore. There were daily flights to Tehran, shell-pocked Iranian tankers limping into Dubai's drydock for repairs, and Iranian traders pulling up in graceful teakwood sailboats, called dhows, as they had for centuries.
“We love business, we love tourism, we love everybody!” the Chamber of Commerce official exulted, seeing me to the door. I found myself grinning stupidly back at him, saying, “I love Dubai, too!”
And I did, though its real appeal was diversity. Outside the scrubbed white skyscrapers and gleaming white Mer-cedeses, the white-robed natives were lost in a stew of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, tall-turbaned Sikhs and a host of others whose homelands I would have been hard pressed to find on a map: Tamils, Baluchis, Pathans, Keralans, and Singhalese. Caste signs were more common than veils on the narrow alleys of the souk; Hindi and Urdu more commonly spoken than Arabic. At the oil boom's peak in the late seventies, imported “guest workers” outnumbered natives five to one.
There were also Westerners, most of whom hung out at a mock-Mexican bar called Pancho Villa's. It was there that I found Jim and Johannes, well into their third pitcher of beer and second basket of double-cheese nachos.
“About the only thing I've never met in this city,” said Jim, an oil worker from Oklahoma, “is a native Dubai-ite.”
“Dubain,” Johannes corrected. “Rhymes with Hawaiian.”
“Dubain, Dubaier, Dubai-ite—who gives a fuck?”
The two men laughed. Even their giggles seemed to slur.
“Hombre!” Jim yelled, calling the waiter. A Filipino barman clad in sombrero and bandolier scooted up with another pitcher of beer. It was “ladies' night,” but there wasn't a lady in sight. Men outnumber women in Dubai by three to one.
“Money honey,” Jim said, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “That's the only reason anyone lives in this hole.” He gestured at the wall, which was adorned with two bumper stickers: “If you don't smoke, I won't fart” and “Beer drinkers get more head.”
“The last time I got any of that, jeez, it's been centuries,” Jim moaned, staring into his beer. “Must have been Bangkok. About 74.”
“76,” Johannes corrected. “I was the one who gave it to you.”
Jim giggled and reached over to fill Johannes's mug, spilling most of it on the floor. I asked Johannes what kind of work he did. “Sit here and wait for hell to break loose,” the Dutchman said, handing me a business card that read “Tugboat owner and salvage operator.” His boats tugged tankers out to sea, then tugged them back in after they'd been riddled with missiles and mines.
“I am like a wrecker driver on the highway,” he said. “I make money from other people's distress.” American destroyers had flattened an Iranian oil platform earlier that day; tension was the highest it had been for months. “At the moment,” Johannes said, flashing gold incisors, “business is very good.”
I told him I was a reporter, looking for a little distress myself. Could he get me out on the water?
Johannes shook his head. Lloyd's of London had recently raised its war-risk premium by fifty percent, and insuring another passenger was costly. But he knew someone who might help and scribbled the agent's name on the back of a soggy napkin. “Say you're a friend of mine.” He laughed. “And if you get into trouble, you know who to call.”
The shipping agent from Bombay worked by the Dubai Creek, the narrow channel that snakes through the city and into the Persian Gulf. Teakwood dhows were moored three deep along the dock, jostling for space with a workaday fleet of trawlers, tugs and supply boats. Most of the dhows were manned by Iranian traders who stuffed their hulls with pistachios and carpets, forbidden exports from Khomeini's Iran.
The shipping agent gazed out at the creek, then lowered his teacup and whispered, “I know a vessel that leaves tonight. If the Persians cause no trouble, you will reach the Strait of Hormuz after dawn.”
He waited for a colleague to take a radio call, then slipped a piece of paper across his desk. “You have never met me and do not know my name. I do this for you only, as a favor.” He nodded his head toward the door.
The rendezvous was set for three in the morning at the Dubai Creek. Sleeping Iranians now littered the decks of each dhow, bundled like mummies in the aisles of their
seaborne bazaars. Outgoing traders were already awake and piling their teakwood ships with Marlboros, Levi's and Panasonic boom boxes for the sixteen-hour run back to Iran. The water was thick with smugglers.
I was scanning the dark for the Bombay man's boat when an Arab official stepped from the gloom, demanding identification. He weighed my passport and visa in his hand, barely glancing at their contents. “Your papers,” he said, “I think maybe they are not in order.” He looked as though he might bite one corner to test for counterfeit.
I forced a nervous smile. “Perhaps I have caused some inconvenience by arriving at this late hour.” Overblown language is the Musak of Arab officialdom. So is baksheesh, at least in Cairo. “Certain arrangements of ;
“Please, no,” the man said, recoiling. Here in the world's richest country, offering a bribe was insulting. He handed back my papers and disappeared into the dark.
I spotted the name of the Bombay boat on the back of a sixty-foot workhorse, snub-nosed and broad across the beam. On the deck stood a muscular young Indian with curry on his breath. “I am Lawrence of Goa,” he said, helping me on board. “Do not be afraid. The captain knows where the mines are. Maybe.”
A dim light showed from the bridge, and a fine-boned man with black curls and a pierced ear sat cross-legged before the wheel. “I am Captain Kochrekar,” he said. Still chewing on Lawrence's “maybe,” I asked the captain if there was much danger traveling through the Persian Gulf at night.
“Wherever there is darkness there is also light,” he said, staring into the night. “A man must make his own map for the shadows.”
Lawrence of Goa untied the boat and Captain Kochrekar steered us toward the shallow black water of the Persian Gulf.
Lights blinked from a container terminal towering at the mouth of the Dubai Creek. Offshore oil terminals blinked back. Then we were swallowed up by the night. Faint points of green blipped across Kochrekar's radar screen. Otherwise he navigated without lights. The Persian Gulf wasn't the sort of place where mariners sought attention.