At the end of April, I travelled to Dubai to observe a violin competition. It was a commission for which I was profoundly unqualified, except in one regard: I wanted to visit Dubai. The editor of a classical music website got in touch to offer me a place on the trip after another freelancer dropped out. My lack of musical knowledge would not, he explained, be a hindrance. In fact, it might even help. The aim of the commission was not to evaluate the performances, but to report on what happened, which would probably be strange. My interest was piqued, even more so when I learned that the week would be quietly bankrolled by the competition’s composer-in-residence, a wealthy Russian-Ukrainian former hedge fund trader who, in his early retirement, had turned to composing naive classical works and paying world-class musicians to perform them. Such a mad-cap lead seemed impossible to refuse.
The Palm Jumeirah – an artificial island in the Persian Gulf, built on sand imported from the Sahara and shaped to resemble the eponymous tree – is visible from space but not reachable by foot. I was driven there from Dubai International by a man in his early 20s, from Uttar Pradesh, who had come to the Gulf state three years ago in search of work. The emirate, one of seven that make up the UAE, has a population of around five million, 92% of whom are ‘expatriates’. The attraction of Dubai to foreigners can be summed up in a formula whose trade-offs depend on your country of origin and purpose in being there: no income tax–no labour, press or migrant rights. Its capital city is home to four million people, and is arranged in a continuous strip between desert and sea, a 4,000 km² promenade of property development along which adverts for condos, Gucci and crypto are punctuated with billboards displaying the face of the ‘CEO Sheikh’, Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum.
Beyond the strip, in the desert surrounding the airport, are the camps. The same highway that brought me to a five-star resort brings a transient and unprotected population of workers, mostly from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines, to build, serve and clean on behalf of an itinerant and shielded population of buyers from, mostly, Russia, Israel and Germany. In a recent diary entry for the LRB, Peter Talbot writes of the conditions in which the workers are housed: rickety shacks in the desert, surrounded by fences, with mealtimes and food assigned based on a hierarchy of disposability, or perceived lack of human worth.
The competition was held in the theatre of the Zabeel Saray resort on the southernmost frond of the Palm Jumeirah, built in ‘Ottoman’ style, whose halls were lined with pan-Asian restaurants, swimwear boutiques and hair-braiding stands. I arrived late, the night before the competition started, and rode the gold-minareted elevator to a room on the fifth floor. I had been given a suite overlooking the Dubai marina, with a bathtub the size of a boat and a TV nearly as wide as I am tall. I flicked it on and moved through the channels, past Karl Largerfeld TV, dispatches on the Pope’s death, the in-house video stream advertising spa treatments, a Chinese state television service broadcasting in Arabic, and fell asleep to a frontline report on Russia Today.
Outside the hotel was an empty pink tar boardwalk, the baking heat already melting its edges at seven the following morning. The sea, too, was empty, only the stacks of what Google informed me was Jebel Ali port just visible to the west. I zoomed out on the map, trying to grasp my position on the earth. I opened another app, designed to track ships, and saw an image of a sea teeming with vessels from across the world, queuing for entry to the port at the edge of the horizon, the marine traffic arranged just beyond the scope of the naked eye. A lone jet ski roared past, creating the day’s first waves. On either side of the resort, more construction was taking place – another hotel, it seemed – with hundreds of Indian labourers already moving around the scaffolding. In the shade stood a handful of Arab men, speaking on mobile phones; tanks of water stationed along the road, the logo of the state development company, Nakheel, stamped on their sides, on cinderblocks, on the backs of the neon vests worn by the workers.
On Friday and Saturday evenings, the Dubai marina fills with yachts. A few tentative prows at first, circling the flat, hot bay, then a dozen more slide into view and multiply; a shoal filling the Gulf. Dull pulses of remixed pop songs float through the sand-laced air, intermixed with a call to prayer, the growl of motorbikes and staccato birdsong. On a dark promontory, erected between the artificial island and the ziggurat skyline of the city-state’s downtown, an enormous stage flickers into life, sending waves of fluorescent pink across the lilac sky. I watched from my room’s balcony, looked up the price of a ‘luxury’ dusk cruise: around $30 per adult. The hotel was populated by families from Moscow, Munich, Milan and the -stans. They seemed, for a certain value of the word, normal. For all its reputation as an entrepôt bolthole of a shady international elite, Dubai is a simpler proposition, one embodied by the sight in front of me, of countless revellers playing at the lifestyle of oligarch wealth, saving up for a year to be waited on by modern-day slaves for a fortnight.
*
I went to Dubai wrongheaded. I learnt nothing and left nauseated. I had thought it would be fun – funny, even – to experience the disorientation of standing at the pivot point between two world systems. Instead, it was merely disorientating – sickeningly so. There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies. Its hellishness cannot be laid solely at the feet of the oligarchs, whose wealth it attracts, nor the violent organised criminals who relocate there to avoid prosecution. It is hellish because, as the self-appointed showtown of free trade, it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world – and not be blamed openly for this desire – visit Dubai. But know that you will not be blameless for doing so. Every Instagram post, every TikTok video, every gloating WhatsApp message sent from its luxury is an abomination. A PR campaign run by those who have already bought the product, and now want only to show you that they can afford it.
I am ashamed to have visited. There are some experiences that journalism cannot excuse. I add nothing to the record by having gone. I thought the trip would present a grotesque tapestry that might disclose some new truth about the reordering of the world. It got the better of me. I imagined a gonzo-style reveal about ordering a mojito in Russian from an Indian barman while gazing towards Iran. All of this is possible, but none of it makes my visit worthwhile.
If you try to humanise the place you will lose your mind. If you ask yourself what the woman at the hair-braiding stand left behind to be here, and why, you will lose your mind. If you accept the kindness of the staff with whom you make a paltry effort to speak each morning as they clear your dirty breakfast plate, you will lose your mind, because your tip is the only kindness you can meaningfully offer in return. Trying to attend to your own towel by the pool might cause the man who stands for hours in the ferocious sun to do so for you to lose his job. Being served makes us cruel infants. It demeans us all.
Perhaps other Gulf states are just as bad. But there is no plausible irony in visiting Saudi Arabia, with its theocratic brutality. In Qatar, some reason of press might excuse you. In the other emirates, perhaps a cultural snobbishness offset by the need to ameliorate declining wages in the West provides sufficient personal cause to enter Abu Dhabi and consult its sheiks on their art collection, or Sharjah to write catalogue text for the biennial. But in Dubai there is nothing to do, and I mean nothing, other than to feel rich and be waited upon.
Should you go, and from London as I did, you will fly over the region called ‘the Middle East’. Do not take your eyes off the onboard cameras. Below, you will see Basra. Perhaps, like me, this will be the first sight you have of Iraq. The first time that nation exists as a reality, of land and rivers and conurbations, not just as a chant or a reference point in a political argument. You will see it as, perhaps like me, you have seen it for most of your life: an aerial view, as if you were looking for oil or dropping bombs. When you land, it will feel impossible to grasp that you are in the Middle East. The competition I observed confirmed the anecdotal truism that Israel is the Middle Eastern state with the strongest cultural ties to the emirate. Zionism is washed in Dubai for export around the world.
Six weeks after I returned, war broke out in the Gulf. I had been trying, and failing, to write up my Dubai experience into a witty, long-form narrative for a second publication, an American magazine, an account of a ‘Russian Tár’, a Fitzcarraldo in the desert. But the further I got with the draft the more I fell into despair. There was no point to the piece, except to prove that there is little, now, that money can’t buy. Human chattel or gritted-teeth legitimacy from the world of classical music, both are freely for sale in Jumeirah. We know this. But we know, too, that there are things that should not and cannot be bought and sold. Love, dignity, freedom, creativity, respect for ourselves and for others. If, in the coming world, there is something for which to fight, it is the belief that these principles are the innate foundations of that which makes human life worthwhile. For everything else, there’s Dubai.
Read on: Mike Davis, ‘Fear and Money in Dubai’, NLR 41.