Scenes from a Dubai Mall
ABC’s Bill Weir blogs as part of the Key to the World series:

Interrupting the Musak, the Islamic call to prayer rings out from speakers above the Victoria’s Secret. A gaggle of abaya-clad teenage girls shops for lip gloss and cell phones. A German couple is waylaid between competing kiosks, one selling perfume and the other, island villas.

Subtle differences aside, Dubai could be Miami with camels and better race relations. People from 150 different countries live together in productive harmony. There is transparency and rule of law and hard work is likely to be recognized and rewarded. Bikinis are on display on the beaches and $1000 bottles of vodka flow in the nightclubs yet the threat of fundamentalist terror seems distant.

Wandering past Hugo Boss and through the Apple store, one wonders, "Why can’t this happen in the rest of the Middle East?" I asked this question to everyone I met on this journey. They all listed three rare ingredients.

1. A history of openness. At its core, Dubai is a port. They have been swapping goods and ideas with foreigners for more than a century.

2. Leadership. The man who runs this place, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum is a businessman first and politician almost never. He looks at China’s economic rocket ride and sets out to double it. And much like China, when an all-powerful ruler has a vision, it gets built…for better or worse. They don’t do market research here. They put up 5,000,000 square feet of office space every few months with the confidence someone will eventually move in.

3. No oil. When you can tap another well and build another palace, there is very little incentive to build a middle class and diversify. Here they have no choice. What little oil there is under Dubai will be gone by the end of the decade. So they’ve used what they have to build a Singapore-meets-Switzerland center of international finance.


In order to keep that money flowing in, Sheik “Mo” has to maintain Swiss-like neutrality in a region of thousand-year-old grudges. To lure foreign brains and brawn, he had to relax Islamic taboos. As a result, the most prosperous place in the Middle East is also the most apolitical and tolerant.

But it is not all sunshine and lollypops. There have been serious rumblings of labor unrest among the South Asians who build the skyscrapers in the desert heat for less than a dollar an hour. Dredging the sea floor to build luxury islands is taking a serious environmental toll, the press is far from free and all signs point to a catastrophic real estate crash.

Still this place remains a beacon for those yearning to live Dubai’s version of the American dream. Which raises another question in one’s mall-wandering brain: Could American-style democracy flower here? Won’t the rising middle class demand a say in how their city is built and how they are governed? According to everyone I talked to the short answer is...no. "One man, one vote" is a novelty in a tribal society and rulers are rarely questioned, especially those who help everyone get rich.

Abdulkhaleq Abdulla is a political science professor at Emirates University. “I think democracy is a process,” he told me. “I think voting and participation and political rights are a universal thing and we should all enjoy it across the board. Having said this, democracy brings so many things but it might also have unintended consequences. Look at Iraq. America might not like it but we have to do it in our own pace rather than an American pace.”

In the meantime, a kid with Justin Timberlake t-shirt buys a new American skateboard and strolls out of the mall and into the desert heat. At his own pace.