by Joe Bennett
‘There she blows,’ says Stephen an hour or so later.
‘She’ is a defunct Russian cargo plane, standing huge and white and stark beside the road. To me it’s another oddity in what is rapidly becoming a land of oddities, but to the ex-pats of Dubai this plane is a cherished landmark. It announces that they are within range of cut-price booze.
Just beyond the cargo plane we turn into the car park of the Barracuda Beach Resort. The resort has cabins and picnic areas and a swimming pool and playgrounds for the kiddies and at three o’clock on this weekday afternoon they’re all deserted. The Taal Indian Night Club is padlocked. But the car park is packed. Big expensive cars circle like sharks as they wait for a space to become free. What has drawn all these vehicles is a windowless barn, the existence of which is never advertised because it doesn’t need to be. Knowledge of it is part of Dubai life, a survival skill handed on from ex-pat to ex-pat.
I grab a trolley from the trolley snake, push through the glass doors and find myself standing amid walls of booze. The place is as well stocked as any liquor store in the West. Almost twice as well stocked, in fact, because it seems that for every well-known western brand there’s a rip-off Indian equivalent. Here is Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch whisky at ninety dirhams a bottle alongside Indian Green Label not-quite-Scotch whisky at twelve dirhams a bottle. The red label is red and the green label is green but the designs are effectively identical.
India doesn’t seem to make wine, however, or at least not yet. Here’s a Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc all the way from New Zealand. Beside it stands a display of a French red called Fat Bastard. At twenty-eight dirhams it’s more than twice the price of a Jordanian red described as Wine From the Holy Land. I put a couple of bottles of each in the trolley along with slabs of Scandinavian Carlsberg and Filipino San Miguel and a bottle of something sticky for Kay. Stephen adds several cardboard casks of South African table wine and I am surprised by my own surprise. Ten years ago I bought such casks myself. They tasted all right and did the job, but somehow, gradually, I have learned to look down my nose at cask wine, to see it as the sad resort of raddled divorcees on empty afternoons. How this happened I don’t know. I suppose in the end it’s just a bit of agreed ersatz wisdom that’s in the air of the society I inhabit, a meme of sorts, like knowledge of the whereabouts of the Barracuda Beach Resort.
I insist on paying for the trolley-load of booze. When Stephen resists, I tell him that I can’t think of a nicer way to pay rent. Moreover the total cost, which is roughly what I’d pay for the same trolley-load at home, amounts to little more than one night at a tourist hotel in town. The days of cheap Dubai are long gone.
Indians wrap our booze in opaque polythene bags and insist on wheeling our booty out and loading it into the car. A couple of men in sunglasses and immaculate clothes have filled a Hummer with more freight than it would have borne in Vietnam. Two chubby British golfing types in ill-advised shorts supervise an Indian youth as he humps case after case of Grolsch into their BMW. The golfers tip him and climb aboard, each involuntarily grunting as he collapses into the low seat. The driver turns the key, the smooth as honey engine responds, and they head off for Dubai. We follow them. And at the instant we turn onto the public highway we all become smugglers. It is illegal to transport booze between emirates. If we were stopped, we’d be in trouble. A bribe might be necessary. If, and this is far more likely, we were to be involved in an accident, the discovery of a boatload of grog would make us the guilty party in the crash, regardless of fault. On the road home Stephen drives with noticeably more caution than on the anarchic streets of Dubai, and with particular circumspection as we pass through the Emirate of Sharjah. For Sharjah is dry. To explain why requires a very much potted history of the UAE. This isn’t a history book, but as with anywhere in the world the present can only be understood through the lens of the past.
People have lived in these parts for thousands of years, but they saw no need to be a single country. Indeed they had no notion of countries. Everything was tribal. There were nomadic tribes, now generally known as the Bedouin, and there were tribes who formed more permanent settlements, almost all of which were on the coast. The two dominant tribal groups were the Qawasim who inhabited by and large the coastal area to the north-east of Dubai, and the Bani Yas tribe to the south-west. Dubai stands more or less on the boundary between the two tribes’ territorial areas. In consequence it was much disputed.
Relevant modern history began with the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. The Portuguese held much of this area for a while, and the French and the Dutch also sniffed around. Then came the British. The reason all these nations took an interest in the region was that it lay on a vital trade route. The Europeans were concerned simply with making money – a fact which the people who condemn Dubai as a mercantile monstrosity would do well to remember.
In the eighteenth century the British owned India. They ran it through the agency of the British East India Company, which conducted a lot of its trade through the Gulf, passing by here on the way to the port of Basra in what is now Iraq. The Qawasim tribe were very keen to muscle in on this trade; the British East India Company was just as keen that they shouldn’t.
The company repeatedly complained to the Admiralty in London that the Qawasim were raiding British ships. A few of the reports may even have been true, but in general it seems that the locals were simply taking trade from the British by being better at it. They were expert sailors and intimately acquainted with the local waters.
Nevertheless, the company’s propaganda worked and in consequence this region came to be known as the Pirate Coast. Eventually, in the early nineteenth century the Royal Navy was sent in to teach the natives a lesson. The Brits flattened a few forts, engaged in a few skirmishes, and prevailed because of the size of their guns, but they did not want to absorb the region into the British Empire. So, over the course of the rest of the nineteenth century, they made a series of truces with assorted sheikhs in the region. Essentially the terms of the truces were that the British would endorse the ruling sheikhs and even come in to bat for them militarily if required. In exchange, the sheikhs would leave British ships alone, acknowledge British interests in the Gulf, and take important decisions only after consulting with the British agent in the Gulf. Whereupon the region stopped being the Pirate Coast and became the Trucial States.
The effect of these truces on tribal politics was considerable. I am grossly over-simplifying a long and complex business, but essentially the British created royal families. Any sheikh who signed a truce with the British fixed his family at the top of his tribal tree, more or less in perpetuity, because of the backing he now had from the greatest military power on earth.
Though the local tradition of feuding didn’t cease, and many a sheikh was still stabbed or deposed, he was generally replaced by someone from his own family. And those families grew rich – very rich – because of the various concessions and licences that the British afforded them. Pretty well all the current ruling families of the UAE became established in power through these truces, and the regions under their rule became emirates. British influence, in other words, did a great deal to shape this region’s current organization and politics.
After the Second World War Britain went into decline. Its empire shrank and eventually the British were obliged to withdraw from everywhere east of Aden. The Trucial States were east of Aden. With that withdrawal in the offing, the various sheikhdoms, most of them smaller than English counties, began to sniff the chilly wind of isolation. And although they had often fought with each other, and although there remained unresolved enmities between them, they wisely began to consider the possibility of confederation. And in 1971, when I was still wearing shorts in the third form at Brighton Grammar School, the UAE was formed and recognized as an independent nation by the UN. It’s a very young country.
The Emirate of Sharjah, like the Emirate of Dubai, is essentially just a coastal town built on a creek. T
hroughout the early days of the Trucial States and indeed up until the Second World War, of all the emirates Sharjah had the closest ties with Britain. It had the only airstrip in the region and more ships docked at its port than at any other. So foreign nationals who came to the region came first to Sharjah and they gradually established a sizeable ex-pat community. But Sharjah was not well led. Sharjah screwed up.
The problem was dredging. Sharjah’s creek grew shallow and became impassable to shipping for several months of the year. The ruling sheikh did next to nothing about it and the problem got worse. At roughly the same time, Dubai’s creek also silted up. But Sheikh Rashid of Dubai immediately understood the urgency of the problem, borrowed money and got the thing dredged. In consequence much of what had been Sharjah’s shipping was soon coming to Dubai and a lot of Sharjah’s merchants followed it.
Sharjah remained, however, the hub of such tourism as happened in the Emirates simply because of its airport. Then, in the early Eighties, following a coup or two within the ruling family, the State got into financial strife and Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich sugar daddy of the UAE, had to bail it out. More financial strife, and Abu Dhabi bailed it out again. Then the Sharjah government defaulted on some juicy international loans and this time Abu Dhabi did not come to the rescue. Saudi Arabia did.
A Saudi consortium paid off the debts, but it charged for the service. Its price was influence, and that influence was of a heavily Islamic nature. Sharjah found itself obliged to pass a series of laws enforcing Islamic propriety. The most significant of these banned alcohol, not only in hotels but also in private houses. (The only place in Sharjah where you can still get a drink is the Wanderers, the local rugby club, founded by and for ex-pats and granted a liquor licence by sheikhly decree. Sheikhly decree can be revoked only by sheikhly decree.)
Dubai couldn’t believe its luck. ‘Oi,’ it shouted to the thirsty western tourists, ‘over here. The bar’s open.’ And thus an industry was born.
Sharjah has since striven to rebrand itself as the cultural capital of UAE, but with a bootful of contraband grog we don’t stop to assess the merits of that claim. We keep to the outskirts of the city, which are little more than a dormitory for its prosperous neighbour Dubai and quite without charm. They resemble the formless edges of one of China’s new-built cities, with blocks of flats rising unadorned and unloved out of rubble-strewn spaces. The air is granular. The shops look wretched. Stephen’s car, a sleek beast, with a video screen on the dashboard that serves as navigation device, mobile phone and rear-view mirror, struggles, for all its sophistication, to cope with the potholes. But we reach home with contraband intact.
I spend the evening at Arabian Ranches researching on the internet the Islamic prohibition on alcohol. It is founded, as all Islamic law is founded, on the Koran, the word of Allah as recounted by Mohammed fourteen hundred years ago, as written down by his followers, and as then interpreted by generations of scholars, all of which takes it a long way away from the modern international brewing industry.
Mohammed’s stance on drinking apparently hardened as the years went by. His earliest pronouncement was merely that a man shouldn’t pray when intoxicated. He also said that habitual drunkards would never make it to paradise. Only later did he issue a prohibition on booze, or rather on khamr.
Khamr derives from an Arabic word for fermentation and is generally interpreted as meaning wine, which was presumably all they had in the seventh-century pubs. By interpretative extension khamr has now been taken to mean everything from Advocaat to Zambucca. Muslims may not drink.
Nor may they take drugs. Scholarly interpretation has extended the meaning of khamr to embrace all intoxicants, arguing that Mohammed only failed to mention crack cocaine by name because it wasn’t around at the time. That’s a reasonable argument but a dangerous precedent. Dangerous because it gives almost unlimited power to the scholars.
Of course, if you accept that the Koran contains everything human beings need to know and that the answers to all questions on earth are held within its pages, then the pronouncements of scholars are law. But if you don’t accept that, then the system seems set up for those in power to retain that power and abuse it in any way they wish. Which seems to me to be how every organized religion in history has always operated and continues to operate.
5
Dancing in Sand
I wake on 31 December to discover that New Year’s Eve has been cancelled. The sheikh has cancelled it. As an ostensible gesture of solidarity with the suffering people of Gaza, there are to be no celebrations in Dubai. The spectacular hotel bashes that normally take place, won’t. A reputed one hundred and twenty million dirhams-worth of fireworks will be returned to the manufacturers or put into storage for next year.
I don’t know whether the reason given for the ban is the real reason for the ban. Nor do I know how the suffering citizens of Gaza will benefit from this ban. Nor yet why the sheikh doesn’t stick a ban on all things American, given that country’s unwavering support for Israel. Nevertheless I get a minor thrill from it. This is my first taste of autocracy in action. For someone who has lived always under lumbering consultative democracies it’s excitingly decisive.
But one party is still going ahead, the one I’ve been invited to, a masked dinner and dance in the desert. For to mark the importance of this once-a-year roll of the Gregorian odometer, we are leaving civilization and tar-sealed roads behind and trekking into the barren dunes, accompanied only by booze-laden, air-conditioned 4WDs, for a distance of about four hundred yards. And at ten in the morning, at the point where the tar seal ends, half a dozen 4WDs have already gathered. With all men bar me being at work, the drivers are all women And, just as I would, they are hesitating before driving onto sand. But the several children and dogs who have come along for the ride have not hesitated at all. They’re already romping on the dunes.
Enter Lynn, the jovial South African hostess, a born organizer. She is not the hesitant type. Straight onto the sand she goes in her Pathfinder. She drops over a ridge and out of sight and everyone follows. The party site is immediately below the ridge in a shallow depression. All vehicles make it, and with the sense of a tiny adventure having been had, a niggling fear surmounted, people set to work preparing for the party with an air of merriment. They set up tables, roll out mats to form a dance floor, and pitch tents around the periphery, for not only are we going to eat and drink and dance beneath the stars, we’re going to sleep there too. Jokes fly, though some of the South African accents are too thick for me to penetrate.
Indian caterers arrive to set up under Lynn’s authoritative supervision and I find myself chatting with an Englishwoman who’s been in Dubai a couple of years. She tells me she’s from Yorkshire, though her accent has already broken that news. I ask her what she thinks of the party ban.
‘What party ban?’ she says.
I explain.
‘Does that mean this one’s off too?’
‘Doesn’t look like it.’
‘Oh good,’ she says.
She tells me she relishes living in Dubai, but she expresses that relish in the tone of one admitting guilt.
‘I’m shallow, me,’ she says, ‘but it’s lovely having a maid, and the weather’s good and I just love me bling, you know, the diamonds and that. Yes, I love me bling.’ As she speaks she fingers a pendant at her neck.
‘That necklace,’ I say, ‘I think it’s lovely.’ And I do.
‘Oh, you’re so nice,’ she says, ‘thank you,’ and she blushes sweetly. At which point a white 4WD lurches over the dune and halts fifty yards away. Everyone stops working to stare.
The man who gets out of the cab is Saddam Hussein’s double. He’s wearing a uniform of sorts and carrying a clipboard. Is it possible that the sheikh has already mobilized a squad of petty officials to scour the emirate for parties?
‘I don’t like the look of him,’ whispers Mrs Yorkshire. Nor do I. But Lynn is undaunted. She strides across the sand towards him.
‘I bet he doesn’t like the look of her either,’ says Mrs Yorkshire and she giggles.
Lynn and the man engage in earnest colloquy and the rest of us busy ourselves on any pretext we can find, unloading firewood from a truck, trying to assemble tent poles, pushing pegs into sand, though this last activity seems close to pointless. The sand is so fine and dry that the lightest breeze would rip the pegs out and send the tents bowling across the wastes of Arabia like spent hot-air balloons.
When Lynn returns to the gathering, several women cluster round her. I hang back, feeling awkward, an outsider, but the news soon filters down to me. The problem is not the party but the location. It seems that this arbitrary bit of desert belongs to someone and we are trespassing. The someone in question is a conglomerate that plans to build hotels here. Lynn has pointed out that there isn’t a hotel here yet and that we’re hardly jeopardizing its future construction, but landowners are landowners the world over and if she wants the party to happen she has to supply a list of all the guests and then drive into town to sign some sort of indemnity.
The pre-party zest has gone. Saddam’s visitation has cast a slight pall on the mood, as officialdom always does and probably likes to do. When we’ve done what we can by way of getting everything prepared, the women gather their children and their little dogs, all of them panting, strap them into the 4WDs – the children, that is, the dogs being left to take their chances in a crash – and head away one by one over the single dune and back to town for the last day of the year. Which I spend doing my washing and feeling vaguely guilty.
It was Paul Theroux, I think, who said that travel is only glamorous in retrospect, and I am with him. I have travelled a bit, and I’ve always considered it a test of self as much as a pleasure. But I like the way travelling puts home into perspective. Home is a nest that we have built to fit us, in the manner of a dog trampling a bean bag before lying down. Our routines are stamped throughout our homes like the paths of a pygmy tribe through the bush. Here’s the cutlery and the wardrobe and the shampoo, all of them just so to suit the convenience of our habits. Those habits become a cocoon, a cocoon that only travel can free us from.
