DUBAI: Not a time for ridicule
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Its financial markets shaken, its confidence dented, Dubai, which once offered the promise of an Arab renaissance, is less inspiring these days. The emirate and its state-owned companies are $80 billion in debt, and investors speak less of Dubai’s glamour than of its woes.
There have been jokes too. Dubai boasts the tallest building in the world. But with the real estate market battered, while jobs disappear and expat workers fly home, some are wondering if the tallest building will now be fitted with the dubious distinction of the being the world’s emptiest building.
Emad Fawzi Shoeibi senses something unseemly in this rush to ridicule. Writing in Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly, the director for the Center of Strategic Information and Studies in Damascus, urges the Arab world not to disparage an emirate that turned tribal lands and a desert into a glittering metropolis by the sea.
Dubai he says “tried to speak the language of the capitalist world, without having staged a bourgeois revolution, without engaging in sectarian or religion wars, and without following the usual pattern.”
He continues:
“One has to respect the Dubai mindset. One has to respect Dubai for surging ahead with no thought for the conventional constraints of development everyone talked about. While the rest of the Arab world dithered, Dubai acted. ... Arabs with dreams of full-scale development mustn’t ridicule Dubai. To mock Dubai is to approve of the restrictions placed upon us. Dubai belongs to all the Arabs. It is a model that deserves support, not indifference.”
Lenders and investors may think so too. Dubai’s stock market rose by 7% on Thursday, the highest jump since the financial crisis began last month. The surge was fueled by the cancellation of a proposed risky corporate real-estate merger. But there’s a lot of ground yet to make up: The market has dropped nearly 25% in recent weeks.
-- Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo.
