City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (32 page)

Sheikh Mohammed is unique in the world, someone with the confidence, energy, and money to create. He’s secure enough to ignore his critics and unafraid of borrowing ideas. Tom Wright, the Burj Al Arab architect, believes Sheikh Mohammed is the greatest builder alive, akin to the great kings who built Barcelona and Rome, or the temples of India
and Egypt. Others hold him responsible for covering the desert in Disnified chintz, more appropriate for a bygone era when energy was cheap and global warming wasn’t understood.

“Who else has done it?” Wright asks. “Other places, like Saudi Arabia and Libya, they have loads of money but they haven’t got the vision.”

Unlike royals elsewhere, Sheikh Mohammed manages to keep his private life private. The tame UAE news media know that his wives and children are off-limits except on rare occasions. It is widely held that discussing the antics of Sheikh Mohammed’s children is not the way to get ahead in Dubai. My questions on the topic were nearly always rebuffed.

What is known is that the Dubai leader has not followed in his father’s more modest footsteps of taking just one wife. He is a polygamist who has fathered nineteen children, give or take, by at least two women.
¹¹
His first marriage, to Sheikha Hind bint Maktoum al-Maktoum, was an arranged one and the dominant relationship responsible for most of his children. Sheikha Hind is the ruling family’s chief matriarch who lives with her brood in Zabeel Palace.

In 2004, Sheikh Mohammed married again. His bride was the Jordanian Princess Haya bint al-Hussein, the half-sister of Jordan’s King Abdullah. Princess Haya is Sheikh Mohammed’s public wife. Haya, a beautiful former Olympic show jumper with sun-streaked auburn hair, maintains an office in Dubai’s Convention Tower and practices her horsewomanship in a pair of rings at the Zabeel Stables across the street. She travels frequently with Sheikh Mohammed, and the two are pictured together buying horses in Kentucky or cheering on their steeds at Ascot. When he has time, Sheikh Mohammed collects Haya at work, riding her private elevator to the ground floor and then walking her hand-in-hand to his Mercedes.

The two wives lead separate existences. Hind, whose photograph has never been shown publicly, oversees the upbringing of her children and a smattering of orphans she has adopted in the name of charity.

Sheikh Mohammed’s children range from one-year-old Aljalila, born in 2007, Haya’s only child as of this writing, to Manal, probably the oldest, in her late twenties or early thirties. A few bear mention.

Rashid, the eldest son of Sheikha Hind, has a difficult relationship with the family. As the oldest son born into wedlock, he was a natural candidate to take over for his father as Dubai’s crown prince.
¹²
Like his father, Rashid is a champion endurance rider and racehorse owner. But Sheikh Mohammed passed over his first son in 2008 and gave the crown prince title to the younger Hamdan. Neither was Rashid named deputy ruler, a title that went to the Dubai leader’s third son, Maktoum. Sheikh Mohammed’s decree naming his number two and three sons did not mention his first son, and the reasons behind Rashid’s fall from favor are unclear. His father in the past had lavished him with public praise, once writing a poem in his honor titled, “Became, Oh Rashid, of the People a Leader.” But Sheikh Mohammed’s hopes for his son appear to have dimmed. In May 2008, young Rashid’s home, a palatial villa in a walled compound in the city’s Umm Suqeim section, was demolished without explanation. The trees, bushes, and driveway were torn up, the swimming pool filled in; the Japanese pagoda and garden bulldozed. One evening in June, I drove past the empty lot. Wires and pipes poked out of the groomed rubble where the mansion once stood. An Indian man who told me he once worked on the grounds said Sheikh Rashid’s home had been razed because of a “royal family matter.”

“Something bad happened?” I asked.

“Something bad happened,” he said. He declined to elaborate. Rashid appeared to be spending the summer of 2008 in England. His personal Web site said he’d been given leadership of the UAE’s Olympic committee.

Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, the twenty-seven-year-old crown prince, is a simpler topic. In February 2008, his father named him Dubai’s crown prince, the emirate’s next ruler. Immediately, the family began to create a personality cult around the young prince. Hamdan’s round face, with prominent ears and five-o’clock shadow, popped up on billboards around the city, a red-checked scarf wrapped around his head in the youthful style. His eyes stare skyward in the manner of Barack Obama. The signs carry no messages other than his moniker Fazza’, and his Web address,
www.fazza3.com
. A smattering of Hamdan videos appear on YouTube, including one of the crown prince being mobbed in a Saudi shopping mall. The bemused prince, dressed in a knotted headscarf and brown robe, is surrounded, practically held captive, by a pack of squealing girls in black
abayas
. Perhaps they’d heard
Forbes
magazine
ranked him number six among the world’s Hottest Young Royals. Hamdan’s female escort, sheathed totally in black except for a slit showing her eyes, glues herself to the crown prince’s side and screams “Please get away from him!”

Another YouTube clip purports to display Hamdan’s car collection. The jerky video rolls past a fleet of Rolls-Royces, a metallic blue Hummer, and a dozen of the world’s rarest sports cars, each with single-and double-digit Dubai license plates that point to royal ownership.

Whatever the hype, Sheikh Hamdan is already taking on leadership duties. The twenty-seven-year-old sits at the head of the Executive Council, his father’s cabinet. And he has begun making speeches on Sheikh Mohammed’s behalf. Like his father, Hamdan graduated from Sandhurst. He then went on to study at the prestigious London School of Economics. He has agreed to head the alumni association at the Dubai School of Government, where the first master’s degrees will be awarded in 2010.

Less is known about Maktoum bin Mohammed, named Dubai’s deputy ruler. Maktoum, twenty-five, earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the lackluster American University in Dubai, and went on to take leadership seminars offered by Harvard University and the Dubai School of Government. He’s the ceremonial head of the governing body of Media City and Internet City.

Sheikh Mohammed’s best-known daughter is Sheikha Maitha, a twenty-eight-year-old world tae kwon do champion who won a gold medal at the Asia Games in 2007. Maitha is still the most public of the children, comfortable giving interviews and being photographed by the press. In 2007, she traveled to southern Sudan as part of the Dubai Cares charity. Local papers ran front-page pictures of the young princess amid a swarm of Sudanese schoolchildren. Her arms were bared in a short-sleeved polo shirt, her olive face and black hair uncovered.
Forbes
magazine chose her as number seventeen of the world’s twenty Hottest Young Royals.

Maryam Behnam is an eighty-seven-year old Iranian woman, a diplomat under the shah. She fled Iran in 1979 and resettled in Dubai, landing
UAE citizenship. She’s written several books about her adventures. But she’s never stopped thanking Sheikh Mohammed for his family’s kindness in her hour of need. She prays that the ruler might attain his dreams for the city.

“How can you find someone with more love and passion for his country? He wants a cultured country. He wants to be a precious stone in a vicious ring, in the Middle East,” Behnam says in an elegant voice soaked with pathos. “He’s putting his entire life on this dream. Let him try. If you aim for the moon, you know, you may get some stars.”

BLOWBACK: THE DOWNSIDE

LABOR PAINS

THE CHILDREN OF
Mother India form the largest and most important ethnic group in Dubai. As many as 1.9 million Indians live in the UAE
¹
—about twice as many as the roughly 1 million Emiratis. Roughly half of those Indians live in Dubai, where they outnumber Emiratis by around seven to one.

India supplies much of Dubai’s brainpower: many of the accountants who balance Dubai’s books, the engineers who design its structures, and the chief financial officers who crunch the numbers. Indian doctors wield the scalpels and deliver the babies. Indian bankers and brokers count the cash and manage the portfolios. Indians own eleven thousand UAE businesses, more than any other group beside Emiratis.
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They’ve controlled a wide swath of Dubai’s retail sector since the 1940s.

India also supplies the largest portion of the UAE’s 1.5 million construction workers. Their muscle is the lever that has raised Dubai up from the sands.

The word “hero” gets bandied around too often these days, especially in America. But these laborers are some of the most impressive people anywhere. They toil in difficult and dangerous conditions, but not for personal benefit. They live like ascetics in a city that claims ostentation
as its brand. The scraps of cash they squeeze from their employers are immediately dispatched home. To their families, at least, they are heroes.

Dubai isn’t kind to these men. It gives them no recognition. Their feats of construction don’t mean they share the wealth their projects generate. Instead, Dubai hides them from view. Most eat and sleep in hard-scrabble labor camps in the desert, with a distant view of the skyline that they’ve sacrificed so much to build.

The laborers who build Dubai aren’t just Indian. They come from Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, North Korea, and a few other places. They earn salaries measured against those in their home markets, just enough to entice a man to leave his wife and children to toil sixty-hour weeks in the world’s fiercest heat.

“They are like candles burning and melting to light others,” says K.V. Shamsudeen, a counselor who deals with the financial problems of Dubai’s Indian workers. “Love becomes money for their families. They say, ‘My life is gone. Let them live in comfort.’”