- Part 1 –
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I met and spent time chatting with a Pakistani currently trading in goods at one of Dubai’s markets. He shared with me stories from his previous job, working from 1998 to 2006 as a police officer in Qatar. He lost his job as the country moved towards “Qatarization,” the favoring of local nationals for public sector jobs, but he seemed happy enough in his new business, which has him occasionally travel to China, the place of manufacture for the products sold at his business. (Our conversation began when he noticed Japanese language material on me, which prompted him to ask me, “You speak Chinese?”)
I persistently asked him for stories about his old job, and he shared with me a few stories. The most amusing story he had was when one day, he was patrolling the car park of one of the few hotels in Doha where Westerners could drink alcohol. A clearly intoxicated 40-ish Western woman walked out of the hotel and said to him, “You’re my husband!” He told the woman he was not her husband, and tried to calm her from being so blatantly intoxicated in public, but his partner, initially some distance away, walked over and interrupted them to say, “I’m your husband!” The two left together, with his partner ordering/pleading with him not to report the incident.
Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games. Perhaps the worst thing he ever saw was a person who tried to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan through the airport wrapped with and inside the body of a dead baby, aged only several months. He thought it likely that the smuggler/mother was sentenced to death, considering the amount of drugs they found. Drug abuse is a big social problem in many countries in the Middle East, and he said there were three primary reasons that smuggling persisted—first, the money available from its sale means that poor and desperate people can always be paid to act as mules; second, no matter what the police and authorities try, the criminals are always adapting and changing their methods; and third, there are so many migrant laborers regularly pouring into the Middle East that it is inevitable that mules/smugglers will slip through their checks.
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I met a Swedish teacher at one of the middle schools in Dubai has a unique story of life in the Middle East. At age 20, ten years ago, she met a Libyan man in Sweden and they moved to Tripoli and got married. He worked there in cross-border business and they lived together in Tripoli for five years.
Her years in Libya started out great. Her husband was wealthy and involved in international business, and she had all the money she wanted to spend on shopping and travel. She visited every corner of the civilized Muslim world and regularly returned to Sweden during the hot summer season. She even met Gaddafi, who she described as “wearing crazier headdress than I had to wear.” But over time, she found her time in Libya to be exhausting and demoralizing. Outside the home, she had to cover her hair, showing only her eyes and nose with the local garb, and her husband, who was barely religious when they met in Sweden, slowly became more devout and restricted her freedom. The last straw was their twenty day pilgramage to Mecca, which she described as a “nightmare.”
They ultimately got divorced and she moved back to Europe, earning a junior degree in education, but she found that she found people in Western society difficult to relate to and felt an undefinable frustration living in Western society. So she moved to Dubai and now works in an international middle school, teaching students aged 10-12.
She said she shuddered when she heard Western women idealize relationships with rich Arab men—“Think of the most abusive emotional relationship you could have with a Western man, and the worst possible relationship you could have with your in-laws, and that is the best you can expect with a relationship with an Arab man in the Arab world.”
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I was being driven to a work meeting with some colleagues, and while manuevering in the very tight parking lot, our Indian driver brushed the backside of an Arab man with the front right bumper. The man appeared unhurt, but he spun around and was furious—”Can’t you see where you’re going!” Our driver rolled down the window and mumbled an apology, and the Arab man waved his hand at him telling him to get out of the car.
It’s probably worth noting that he was aged somewhere between 40 to 60, dressed in a dish dash and kafiya, and getting into a Porsche. Lesson number 1 of life in Dubai is to never piss off a local—especially not a wealthy local.
I was sitting in the back seat with one other colleague and slowly got out of the car to make sure I was watching what happened, but a more senior colleague in the front seat got out and joined the driver in conversation. The Indian driver acted like a social retard, saying “Sorry, but…” and then telling the angry victim why he couldn’t see him and it wasn’t his fault, which prompted an explosion. Fortunatley, my colleague interupted by saying, “I’m terribly sorry sir, it was an accident, he’s ordinarily a very good driver and we’re really sorry.” At the word “sir,” a smile crept on to the man’s face and the incident was over—he said OK, got in his car and drove away. My colleague remarked, “All he wanted was to see a Westerner in a business suit be respectful and apologize.”
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