Las Vegas + Nanjing + Colonial India × Islamic Arabia

I have a habit of recalling and comparing cities when visiting a new place. This is a habit shared by my learned colleagues—I’ll never forget the moment back in 2005 when Younghusband visited me in Newark, NJ and he said the city skyline reminded him of Urumqi, China, which is the same comparison that had come to my mind a year earlier. In my first few days in Dubai, the city has reminded me of a few different places:

Las Vegas
This comparison is obvious. Las Vegas rapidly constructed enormous buildings in the desert, like Dubai. And much of the construction in both cities is tacky and gawdy in appearance and design. Yet another similarity is that Las Vegas markets itself as the “Entertainment Capital of the World,” and is famous for not just its casinos, but adult entertainment and theme-park like environment. Dubai has this as well in ironic contraditions—anything even mildly pornographic on the Internet is blocked, but prostitutes from all continents lurk in parking lots and street corners after dark without any intervention by the authorities, even during Ramadan.

Nanjing
I first visited Nanjing in 2003 and saw a filthy industrial town with thick and filthy air that boasted the consistency of clam chowder. Dubai doesn’t have noticable industrial pollution, but the exhaust from cars and the dust and sand kicked up by the dry weather and wind means that the cloudless sky is never blue.

Dubai on a clear morning; Dubai on a dusty afternoon.

The other element that reminds me of Nanjing is the construction. On the one hand Dubai is the site of awe-inspiring skyscrapers such as the Burj Dubai, the largest manmade structure in the world which towers over the skyline in the above picture. But the image of Dubai as a city of skyscrapers is not the whole story—once you escape the business center and the luxury residential complexes, the city is like Nanjing, a sea of new but sloppily constructed modern buildings, and sometimes concrete building frames that have been abandoned, often in advanced stages of construction.

Colonial India
Notwithstanding the pen name used by this blogger to anonymize his internet presence, I have not personally experienced India during the era of British colonial rule. But the feeling is very similar. Migrants from India and Pakistan constitute as much as 75% of the entire population of the Dubai metropolitan area. And it is a fierce class distinction as well. Wealthy Arabs and Westerners dine at expensive restauarants, stay at 4 and 5 star hotels, and run the banking, financial, business, and legal superstructure. The worker bees who keep the city running are all from South Asia. The Uncle Tom-esque friendliness of these South Asian service industry workers in the face of borderline abusive rudeness by Arabs and Westerners is unnerving, even for this most superior person.

Of course, the stage of this fusion is the coastal Arabian peninsula where conservative Islam is the religion of the nation. Native women cover themselves, often in burqas that only reveal their eyes. The minarets of mosques line the skyline. And it’s Ramadan, meaning that all restaurants and shops are closed until the sun sets.