Those who used to sing the praises of the Arabs, of the vast starlit desert, and the presumed effect of that vast starlit desert on the leather-faced noble Bedu, hawk on hand, standing barefoot on an outcrop of rock (see Freya Stark, see Wilfred Thesiger, see Lawrence, see them all) did not live to see what the children of those noble Bedu have done with the unmerited wealth that came from an accident of geology. They never imagined what the Arabs have managed to do -- in Riyadh, in Jiddah, in Dubai -- with their vulgar pleasure-palaces out-topping one another, the xanadus that mimic Western buildings, and then some.
Dubai, by the way, is full of Iranians and hundreds of billions of dollars in Iranian investments. It is, in atmosphere, much above the other, entirely Arab-controlled sheikhlets of the Emirates. While the Sunni Arabs have had to worry about the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and about Bahrain (where the Sunni ruler worries about the 75% of his subjects who are Shi'a and don't much care for the present governing arrangement -- so much so that he is trying to give instant citizenship to 50,000 Iraqis, as long as they are all Sunni Iraqis), they didn't worry about Dubai.
After all, wasn't this Iranian capital in flight from the Islamic Republic? And aren't the kind of Iranians who live and invest in Dubai the good kind, the kind who only want to make money? In other words, Sunni Arabs make the same mistake with Shi'a Iranians as Infidels do when they swallow the akyolish nonsense about the swellness of Erdogan et al. because of "economic growth" -- or when they swallow the d'souzaish nonsense about the swellness of those law-abiding, straight-as-Mitt-Romney "traditional Muslims."
Dubai may be an offense to Muslim sensibilities, both Sunni and Shi’ite, but for other reasons. It is an offense to good taste and a sense not only of aesthetic, but moral proportion. The whole project of modern, empty Dubai, hollow Dubai, nothing Dubai is offensive. Each building represents an attempt to outdo another with gimmicks: this building turns with the sun, and that one can stand on stilts, and this one prostrates itself five times a day. The most grotesque and unappealing luxury (Warren Buffett won't be impressed) merely puts on display all the comic bad taste of the Arabs and Iranians who, with the money they do not spend on mosques and madrasas around the world and on weapons purchases and weapons projects, and on buying armies of Western hirelings, build the kind of thing, more or less, on display in the picture here.
In the rich Muslim states, the best of the West -- which has nothing to do with money, but with intellect and the imagination -- is not being emulated. Instead, much as they denounce that West, it is the worst of that West that in the rich Arab and Muslim states is being sedulously aped.
The luxury of Dubai is nauseating to contemplate. There is nothing there but that. No art, no science, no thought. Luxury, money, gold in the souks. Perhaps the locals will rent some paintings for display from the Louvre, or rent a succursale or two of Western universities looking for loot, in order to pretend there are minds to be cultivated and something like civilization to be found in Dubai. But it's not to be found. All of Dubai is not worth a single star in your personal Michelin. Dubai is merely a cheesy holiday resort with elephantiasis, the result of the hundreds of billions that are so freely spent because they have been not earned, but merely accidentally acquired.
That photograph (here it is again) tells you all you need to know not only about Dubai, but about all the other pleasure-towns that the Arabs have built up with the oil money lavished upon them.
Civilizationally, they remind me of the story -- a true story, told to be by a former member of the staff -- about the famous London bookseller Hatchard's. One day a rich Arab entered the store. It seems he had bought a country estate with a large library, and he asked that that library now be filled -- he motioned around the vast bookstore -- with "one of each."
When ever one thinks of Dubai, see exmaples of the architecture, or that famous picture of tiger woods hitting a golfball off the helipad off the Burj al Arab Hotel - think slave labor.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/11/dark_side_of_du.html
If one does a google image search for "helipad", you will see as the first couple hits Agassi vs Federer playing tennis on that monstrosity.
There should be a boycott.
There are great divisions among the different sects of islam that can be exploited in thiswar by islam on all others its time we used it .
WE NEED TO ENCOURAGE BATTLES AMONG THEMSELVES IN THIS WAY WE CAN TAKE THE FOCUS OFF ALLOTHERS AND PUT IT ON THEM.
Dubai is simply Las Vegas as done by Arabs with even more money than the Mafia and maybe a little more taste. At least Las Vegas doesn't pretend to be anything but a show.
..............and we don't pretend that Las Vegas is anything more than Las Vegas.
Ha ha, good one!
I presume it faces Mecca? Very funny!
Dubai is certain not an 'examined life', is it? Ha ha ha!
Last I heard, more terrorist-supporting money goes through Dubai than any other God-forsaken, heathen city/nation on earth.
I say we bomb these bastards back to the Stone Age and then; c'mon, say it with me...
BOUNCE THE RUBBLE.
After all who was Mohammad a looter, robber and pedophile who was after the riches of other civilization and their women. I mean even their heaven is about carnal pleasures. There is no higher thought in Islam.
Couldn't agree more spcbat. How do you propose it be done?
From my limited experience of Dubai it appears that most if not all of the lucrative technical, commercial, engineering and professional infrastructure that is provided from outside the region is from Europe, not the USA or elsewhere.
If so, this would tend to confirm a key part of Bat Ye'or's Eurabia thesis.
But somebody more intimately involved with Dubai than I might care to comment?
He sliced the gaggle of apologists with the sword of Fitzgeraldic fiskage, reducing those gullible dupes to mere adjectives and verbs, at one time men who held exalted opinions of themselves, who vainly defend the indefensible, only able to be used as verbal fodder. My face glows in Hughs of unfettered mirth.
"In the rich Muslim states, the best of the West -- which has nothing to do with money, but with intellect and the imagination -- is not being emulated. Instead, much as they denounce that West, it is the worst of that West that in the rich Arab and Muslim states is being sedulously aped.
... Dubai is merely a cheesy holiday resort with elephantiasis, the result of the hundreds of billions that are so freely spent because they have been not earned, but merely accidentally acquired.
So damn true! The wealthy of the Middle East - when not pulling a bin Laden - seem to act like the Hilton sisters.
Where are the world class institutions of higher learning? The research facilities? The technical breakthroughs? The world renown hospitals?
"see Freya Stark..."
There is (was) an amazingly and grossly romantic and naive article about southern Arabia by Freya Stark in The Geographical Journal, Vol XCIII No. 1, January 1939, pp. 1-17, " An Exploration in the Hadhramaut and Journey to the Coast". The chatty article contains the words of a talk given to The Royal Geographical Society in London on November 28, 1938.
The article includes the following on page 2: "...He [a Mr. Ingrams] asked me to cooperate by adopting local methods and traditions wherever possible. I cannot help thinking that many of the troubles between East and West would be avoided if this system were and had been more universally followed; it certainly had the happiest results in our case as far as our relations with the natives were concerned. By the end of the month I found myself practically a member of the parish council in our little town of Hureidha..."
Leaving alone her lack of knowledge of islam, and her assumptions about the formerly pristine "natives", for her to think that she, Freya Stark, a strange infidel female, could waltz into a small town in Yemen and, ever at all, or even moreover, within a month, practically become a member of the local "parish council", is plain stupefying.