Dubai searches for identity as it grows worldly

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Along the creek that runs through the heart of old Dubai, hundreds of smartly dressed Indians waited in line barefoot to enter a Hindu temple on a recent weekend. Nearby were joggers, romantic couples, picnicking families — but hardly any of Dubai's Muslim Arab citizens.

Across the waterway in the Deira district, thousands of young Asian workers were out on the streets, drinking tea, shopping or just chatting. Some were calling family back home, shouting into cellphones in Hindi, Urdu, Pashtu and Dari.

The only Arab presence was a pair of policemen cruising through in a patrol car.

Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers — from taxi drivers, cooks and housemaids to doctors, bankers and judges — have been imported to Dubai, mainly from South Asia, to run what is perhaps the world's fastest-growing city.

Amid this flood, Dubai's natives — about 20 percent of the emirate's 1.2 million residents — find their way of life threatened and often react by isolating themselves.

They once lived on or close to the shores of the Persian Gulf, which provided past generations with livelihoods from fishing or pearl diving. Now they mainly dwell in closed communities of luxury villas on the desert fringes of Dubai, bound by an unspoken pact not to sell or rent their homes to foreigners.

Where their old homes once stood are gleaming skyscrapers, shopping malls and fast-food restaurants. The few traditional Arab houses that remain — one-story, flat-roofed structures with interior courtyards — are home these days to poor Asian workers, living six or seven to a room.

Arabic, Dubai's native tongue, is another casualty, with English now the lingua franca for the estimated 200 nationalities living in the emirate.

"We feel like strangers in our own country," said Mohammed al-Roken, a lawyer and human-rights activist whose calls for political reform and views on development have gotten him banned from writing in the press and teaching at his university.

"We cannot safeguard our identity without raising our percentage of the population," said al-Roken. He wants longtime Arab Muslim residents to be naturalized, as well as the children of emirate women married to foreigners.

Al-Roken and other Muslim Arab natives have been the chief beneficiaries of the city-state's rise to global banking and business hub with double-digit economic growth. But they also feel a loss of identity and way of life.

The citizens' grumbling reflects just one downside of success. More dramatically, poorly paid South Asian construction workers are showing signs of unrest, striking and protesting more frequently over pay and living conditions.

Dubai today is the product of its ruler's ambitions.

"We want Dubai to be the world's number one city for commerce, tourism and services," Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum wrote in a book titled "My Vision."

That vision has turned the city-state into one of the most contradiction-laden societies in the Middle East: a Gulf state that doesn't produce much oil, a multicultural society with religious and social freedoms unseen elsewhere in the conservative Gulf, yet lagging in political reform.

Despite spectacular growth, many complain Dubai has become a soulless place where everyone seems to be in transit. A skyscraper boom has turned the city into a massive construction site with virtually round-the-clock traffic congestion. Residents say they find the skyline changed each time they return from a month or two away.

Abdul-Khaleq Abdullah, a political-science lecturer and a native of Dubai, says his home city's progress fills him with pride.

"But there is a deeply buried sentiment — it is not alienation, but rather fear — that we may lose everything that we have built," he said. "This feeling comes from the fact that we are a small minority in a city that's full of foreigners. We are very scared."

Citizens — but not foreign residents — get cradle-to-grave welfare that includes free education and health care plus business and housing loans. Now the government has moved to address the fears that Dubai is losing its Muslim and Arab identity.

It has declared 2008 "The Year of Identity." It sponsored a two-day conference on national identity last month and has created an independent body to promote indigenous art and culture, and is celebrating one of the country's traditional products by publishing an illustrated encyclopedia of the date palm.

In other ways, too, Dubai seeks to remind everyone it's a Muslim state.

Stores and restaurants close Friday mornings until after the noontime Muslim weekly prayers. In the Mall of the Emirates — the largest in the Middle East — the music dies down five times a day and the muezzin's call to prayer fills the trendy shops.

Yet permissive ways that are frowned upon by the more conservative six other sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates appear to prevail.

Prostitution, for example, is so widespread that many suspect that it operates with at least some degree of official consent. In one downtown bar, prostitutes cluster along ethnic lines, with women from former Soviet republics at one end, Chinese in the middle, and east Africans and Arabs on the far end.

Foreigners on the beach in bikinis and on the streets in shorts and tank tops are a source of concern to the native Arabs.

"No kissing or overt displays of affection," advise large stickers recently plastered on the mall's doors.