Dubai has skyscrapers like New York has pretzels.

Oman’s tranquility is either its best or its worst quality, depending on who you ask. I happen to like living in a relatively quiet neighborhood, but most residents of the Muscat crave an occasional change of scenery.  That’s what bus trips to Dubai are for.  In case you aren’t familiar with this oasis of debauchery, Dubai is the region’s go-to destination for all sorts of hedonistic activities that aren’t legally or socially permissible in more conservative Gulf societies.

Dubai has compensated for its shallow oil reserves by building a thriving tourism industry around the principle that people will pay to see the world’s only (fill in the black). That’s why Dubai is a veritable playground of overpriced, overexposed, but nonetheless one of a kind destinations including:

- The world’s tallest building (still under construction)

- The only indoor black diamond ski run

- The only manmade archipelago (it’s visible from space, by the way)

- The only refrigerated beach

- The first cloned camel (No really, I’m serious.)

Reading The Time Machine in Dubai

These end products sure look cool, but development is one noisy, dusty process. Don’t be fooled by the luxury department stores and air-conditioned bus stops: Dubai feels suspiciously like a construction zone. Everything seems to be in motion, even the skyline — where cranes manipulate cages of scaffolding like skeletal chess pieces. Projects of this scope require a massive labor force, and it‘s impossible to ignore the throngs of foreign workers — brought in by the busload — who make this city tick. With only a small population of native-born Emiratis, Dubai has relied on a steady influx of foreign workers to sustain its steroidal growth rate. Since foreigners don’t have labor unions or legal standing, it’s easy to get taken advantage of. Throughout the very brief trip, I couldn’t get labor issues off of my mind — probably because I was reading an Arabic translation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Most of the Arabic texts I read these days are research-related and a decent number are migraine-inducing, so I’ve been trying to reintroduce “fun reading” into my rotation of ethnographies, feminist diatribes, and literary criticism. A few pages into the book, I remembered that “fun reading” isn’t always a cakewalk. This retro sci-fi gem (originally published in 1895), tells the story of a wildly ambitious experiment gone awry. An English scientist, identified only as the Time Traveler, builds a machine capable of traversing the “fourth dimension” of time. Naturally, the trigger-happy fellow ends up catapulting himself into the year A.D. 802,701, where he finds that the human race has evolved into an androgynous, frugivorous species known as the Eloi. Scientific progress has long since eliminated resource scarcity and other threats to civilization, so the Eloi have lost the physical and mental capacity to innovate. Basically, the fragile Eloi enjoy endless leisure time while a subterranean underclass — The Morlocks — does the industrial dirty work needed to sustain the above-ground utopia. Wells describes a bifurcated society, in which a laboring class and a parasitic elite inhabit adjacent but wildly disparate environments.

“The exclusive tendency of richer people … is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion. And this same widening gulf … will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour (The Time Machine, Chapter 5)”

The skyline at night.

So the Eloi frolic around under fruit trees, while the Morlocks toil in putrid tunnels. It’s comforting to know that thousands of years into the future, life will continue to be unfair.  The  Time Traveler’s story, with its frequent allusions to the exploitation and isolation of a laboring underclass, betrays the author’s well-known socialist bent. After spending a six-hour bus ride immersed in this book, everything started to look like class conflict. it was impossible to ignore the parallels between Wells’ futuristic utopia — built on the backs of a literal underclass — and the extravagant skyscrapers of Dubai, brought to life by foreign workers who will never get past the periphery of the paradise they have built. At the UAE border, men in orange jumpsuits smeared concrete over cinder blocks with a plastic spoon, while their Emirati supervisors reclined in padded chairs under a nearby canopy. Is it possible to build towers and subways and skating rinks without degrading the dignity of human labor? If this is the price we have to pay for development, then maybe Dubai isn’t worth it.