Now that the worst - and most ignorant - of the stream of articles which collectively came to be known as 'Dubai Bashing' has abated, one can actually sit down and analyse them. Not specifically the allegations, those that are true are well known to the powers that be and those that were severe exaggerations and massive inaccuracies spoke for themselves.
Some other writers from the UAE have attempted to react to those articles; some were more successful than others. However, there is a general misunderstanding about what the root of the predominantly occidental wave of opinion pieces on the city is.
The Emirati and Dubai-based articles and comments that replied to them scratched only the surface of the issue.
Sultan Al Qasimi begins his response to the now famous The dark side of Dubai piece saying "I recently figured that if British journalists such as Johann Hari (Tuesday, April 7), who come to Dubai don't send back something sensationalist it won't get printed and they won't get paid. After all, sleaze sells."
Maryam Alhamly who wrote a more general commentary on 'Dubai Bashing' said, "Foreign journalists come to Dubai, and choose to see what they wish, then write what they wish. When the going was good - which is to say, before the global financial crisis that washed across the world last year - these very same journalists couldn't find enough good things to say about Dubai. Now that there's been an economic downturn here - as elsewhere - these writers list Dubai's shortfalls."
While Al Qasimi and Alhamly both make some strong points in their articles, I believe the real reason behind these articles is a lot more fundamental.
Andrew Niccol's Gattaca, a biopunk vision of the future, predicts that people's roles in society are predetermined by their hereditary traits. A genetic database instantly identifies and classifies those created with superior genes as valids while those conceived by traditional means are derisively known as in-valids.
The state of the nations' place in the world today is not very different from that of the film's characters.
Economic history departments, public policy think-tanks, and other similar research and academic institutions have traditionally split the world in two; the developed and developing world.
The Middle East has collectively been considered very much part of the developing world, and with little success at attempting to 'develop' per se. The Middle East seems to be trying to catch up, but the poor things don't know how to do so and take one step forward. For example, the Arab peace proposal and take two steps back or Lockerbie and more recently Darfur.
Needless to say, the world is very comfortable with this breakdown.
This simplistic reading is based on 'symbolic geography' and has come under increasing criticism of late, informing everything from travel guides to public policies for over a century now. It has been employed to distinguish which countries are to be awarded the 'modern' adjective and which are not.
It operates according to a symbolic fault line that usually takes 'the West' as the bastion of all things modern, while leaving 'the rest' of the world to choose between either emulating it - and forever attempting to catch up - or staying put.
This train of thought has considered the Middle East as a place of exoticism, religious fervour, and old traditions. The 'clash of civilisations' theory - pitting so-called modern nations against Muslim ones - draws upon precisely this way of thinking and its simplistic generalisation and categorisation of entire societies and their intricate histories.
Enter Dubai, it comes from this region but for some reason it defies all odds and works. Not only does it work, it also successfully marries market economy with benevolent tribal rule doing away with a liberal political model. This is extremely problematic for historians and academics because it means the lenses by which they see the world do not work anymore. In short, the very existence of Dubai serves as an anomaly to the equation that is the world.
Enter the global economic crisis, Dubai is affected by it and the historians release their breath again. Dubai, like the Middle East, was nothing but a one hit wonder, of course they knew it all along, you see!
Result: Dubai Bashing. You see the thing about the thrashing Dubai has been subjected to recently is that its not personal at all, in fact it has nothing to do with Dubai; if anything these journalists are projecting their history professors' frustration with non-linear change in the world.
Gattaca's Vincent Freeman, the man with no superior genes, is told he has a life expectancy of 30.2 years due to a severe heart condition, but he challenges the expectations of himself and the place he must accept within society.
This is the real reason Dubai has been 'vilified' and 'demonised' according to other Emirati writers.
http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/colu.../10309738.html