A Snapshot of Dubai, Arab Melting Pot

It may claim to have the world's tallest building and biggest airport, but the Mideast city is also a truly global village with an odd cultural equilibrium

by Bernhard Zand

My friend Puneh from Tehran loved it, but Nazir couldn't stand it. She lived in a house in Dubai complete with lilac bushes and European aspens in the front yard, gardeners who kept the lawn manicured and neighbors from Europe, the Middle East and North America, who drove Volvos, Porsches and Jeeps.

"So many interesting people," says Puneh, an art dealer. "I felt so free, as a person, as a woman and as an individual."

"This pompousness, this manufactured perfection. There is nothing real about this city," says her friend Nazir, an artist. "I could hardly breathe anymore. I wouldn't have been able to paint a single painting there."

Nazir lasted in Dubai for eight days, precisely the duration of his first show, before fleeing back to Tehran. After that he would spend long hours talking to Puneh on the phone, begging her to come home. She did—and regretted it. What she gave up was a life in the most modern, fast-paced, flashy and superficial city in the Middle East.

When I went to Iran to visit the two of them and returned to Dubai with a high fever, I was surprised to be greeted by Filipino nurses, who immediately took me to the airport clinic. A Syrian doctor insisted that I stay there overnight while I was given infusions and he waited for the results of my blood tests. When I left the clinic, the Indian receptionist couldn't understand why I was asking for the bill. "The bill? What bill? The Emirate of Dubai is paying for your treatment."

A Watertight Security System

Like most people who live here, I got myself an "E-card," which allows me to bypass the passport control at the airport, where I simply place my index finger on a sensor, a door opens and I walk through. Before I pick up a visitor from the airport, I go online, type in his flight number and my mobile phone number—and receive a text message every half hour updating me on the flight's arrival status.

Water and electricity bills, dentist appointments, road toll—everything reaches me via my mobile phone. When there is an accident, the police record mobile phone numbers before they write down the vehicles' license plates. The mobile phone serves as a universal identity card in Dubai.

The inventors of this relatively watertight system refer to it as "passive security." It is unobtrusive, at least until something arouses the suspicions of the local authorities. "Although your wife has a German passport," an official at the agency that handles foreigners told me, "her name doesn't sound German. Please go upstairs. Colonel Ahmed is expecting you." A fellow journalist who used to report from Jerusalem was asked for her opinion on the Iraq War before she was permitted to retrieve her belongings.

Profilers and officials trained in examining documents work in the transit area at the airport, keeping an eye out for suspicious characters. There are people in prison in Dubai who were found with 0.02 grams of marijuana in their pockets.

A Strange Equilibrium

Dubai is not a city where I feel observed or monitored, and it has none of the annoying routines of places like Cairo, Beirut or Amman, with their metal detectors at entrances to public buildings and armed patrols in shopping malls. On the other hand, any hint of nudity in the copies of SPIEGEL for sale at newsstands has been blacked out, and anyone wishing to read the German tabloid Bild online is greeted with this message: "The content of this Web site is incompatible with the political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates." Paradoxically, print copies of Bild are for sale in Dubai supermarkets, for the equivalent of $4.