I was there the night they blew it up. The Burj Dubai was to be the tallest building in the world, but it never happened; they changed its name to the Burj Khalifa at the last minute, and then the explosions started.

My career has been advancing swiftly over the last few years, and I arrived at the Dubai airport that evening with my mind still reeling from the news that a concept paper I had contributed to was making the rounds among certain Washington-level individuals. Certain other people were keen on hiring me, possibly for some very exotic work. I was trying to decide what to make of all this, and as my Indo-Pak driver whisked me to my hotel, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit like a big shot. It was an uneasy feeling.

The streets were thick with cars, and Dubai’s invisible army of laborers thronged the sidewalks and bridges. They were all crowding for a sight of the fireworks that would be starting soon.  The last few years have been good to Dubai, too, and it has sunk its fortunes in the most grandiose building projects imaginable. The citizens of Dubai are too well-off to engage in anything so low as labor, and so triumphs like the Burj Dubai have been built by architects, engineers, builders, and construction workers brought in from all over the world. Some 80-90% of Dubai’s population is foreign expatriates.

Amplifying my illusion of importance, my company had arranged every detail of the trip in advance. This driver, my hotel, tomorrow’s business—they’d paved the whole way. The hotel already knew I was coming and had me checked in within minutes. I was on the rooftop lounge sipping a fruit smoothie fifteen minutes before the Burj Dubai’s ceremony. I had a clear view of the tower, and few other guests were up here; it was me, a plush chair, my drink, and the wait staff.

I had time to reflect on life’s vicissitudes. If I had ever strived for worldly success, here it was. I didn’t have to move a muscle. I was, in that moment, sought after and chauffeured and catered to and pampered, and about to witness the same spectacle that all the other big shots had come to see.  I had arrived. Now that I was here, was this where I wanted my life to be?

Unhesitatingly, no. Dubai was the perfect symbol for what I faced, because the city itself was soulless glamour. Yes, they had the tallest building. They had an indoor ski slope, a three-story fish tank, and the world’s biggest shopping mall. Anything man could build, Dubai could have. The sheikh was very proud of that, and on this night all of Dubai had gathered to celebrate their triumph of artificiality, to celebrate this building that had already garnered obvious and justified comparisons to the Tower of Babel.

Dubai can have anything man can build, but man has never built a tree. Man can’t build the blood in your veins or the air in your lungs or the passions in your heart. Man can rear children and raise them up, but the souls of those children come from a source deeply inscrutable to us. There is more, Dubai, in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your materialism.

On the other hand, God had placed me in this moment, on this roof. The things man does create are not entirely without merit, and luxuries are meant to be indulged in once in a while. This was the day God had made. I was allowed to enjoy it.

The lights of the skyscraper sprang to life, and the pyrotechnics erupted all along the sides of the building. It was a windless night, and so the smoke accumulated as the fireworks continued. The building looked like it was getting blown to bits. I enjoyed the show, and it was a good drink, and it had been fine weather on the roof that evening. But I felt dizzy and unsettled as I left.

~

My feet took me to the lobby, and when I saw her I felt drawn to her right away. I don’t know why that was—maybe something about her clothing or her face, or maybe it was some intangible thing in her demeanor. Anyway, she was an expatriate like me, but she was one of these Dubai expatriates and from the Philippines, while I was an American working in Afghanistan. A simple hello turned into a few seconds of banter, which turned into a few minutes of chatting, which stretched into several minutes of talking, which lasted two hours. It was one of those. They don’t happen very often.

We had a lot in common; similar concerns about our jobs and being away from home, similar unease about the same unsettling things we had seen during our time in the Muslim world, similar disappointment with Dubai’s superficiality, and similar yearnings for something more real. I talked about my mixed feelings about my own success. She discussed a historically significant ancestor of hers.

It occurred to me that she and I were two threads of history, crossing by chance. She was part of this great population of expats participating in Dubai’s grand experiment in building. Dubai will succeed or fail, but future historians will study this phenomenon of imported labor that outnumbered the natives 5 to 1. The contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan are their own historical phenomenon.

As for the natives of Dubai, she told me about one person she knew of who did nothing all day. Elaborate meals were laid out for him at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and when he wasn’t eating he was smoking his water pipe. All his waking hours, he would sarcely move from his seat. I told her that this sounded like the Koran’s description of the afterlife:

These are they who are drawn nigh to Allah, in the garden of bliss. A numerous company from among the first, and a few from among the latter. On thrones decorated, reclining on them facing one another. Round about them shall go youths never altering in age, with goblets and ewers and a cup of pure drink; they shall not be affected by headache thereby, nor shall they get exhausted, and fruits such as they choose and the flesh of fowl such as they desire. And pure, beautiful ones, the like of hidden pearls: a reward for what they used to do. They shall not hear therein vain or sinful discourse, except the word peace, peace.

That sounded nice the first time I read it, but only the first time. It is the life of an invalid. Perhaps this is what Muslims aspire to, but it is not for me. I have a physical body and I exist in time and there is good work to do, as I’ve described elsewhere. (http://alamanach.com/2008/12/26/on-time-part-two-hope/) Anyway, a doctrine of idleness will find little resonance among expats; we have come to work. It is our reason for being away from home, our reason for being expats.

~

5 to 1. Most of Dubai’s population has no stake in the place. Polls show some 90% of Dubai expats intend to make their money and leave. This is a problem the sheikh seems to have overlooked. With no emotional investment, workers will invest their time in Dubai, but not their hearts. Without that there is no cultural development, no arts, no reaching beyond one’s grasp. Emotional investments are too expensive to be risked on Dubai; that kind of energy needs to be reserved for life back home.

The skyscraper was a statement to the world that Dubai was modern, advanced, and a world-class city. Dubai has, I think, missed the point. Wealth does not make cities great; greatness comes from those intangibles, the spirit of the people and spirit of a place. One of the most celebrated eating establishments in Chicago is a grungy, greasy diner under Michigan Avenue called the Billy Goat Tavern. People don’t love it for its towers of steel and glass (it doesn’t have any), they love it for the stories connected to the place. People love Paris not because of the Eifel Tower, they love it because it’s Paris. The spirit of the place gave rise to its landmarks, not the other way around. Dubai is all landmarks, no spirit.

In an earlier post, I made the claim that the sword is mightier than the pen, and went on to show why muscle is more capable than brains. (http://alamanach.com/2008/06/20/the-sword-is-mightier-than-the-pen/) This tension between the physical and the intangible causes no end of difficulties for people, and my favoring muscle over brains might suggest that landmarks trump spirit. I have come to realize lately that when resolving the dichotomy, the scale of things needs to be taken into account. When material quantities like time and space are small, such as over the course of a war, the physical trumps everything; justice is meaningless to a bullet. But when the scales become large, such as over the lifetime of a society, the intangible makes itself felt; one bullet is not enough to make an unjust society into a just one, no matter how perfectly that bullet is placed.

Genghis Khan, of all people, demonstrates this for us. He saw the need for law, and perceived that an intangible yoke of ordinance would unify his unruly clans and give them organization. Organized, his people had it in them to create the largest land empire the world has ever seen. Their mounted archers were undefeatable, their physical hardiness and speed of movement uncanny. But without intangible law, they were nothing.

All other great leaders, too, have benefited from a vision of one sort or another. Captain Bligh led 18 men in a lifeboat across a thousand miles of open ocean, driven by the burning need to see justice done. Ulysses S. Grant, unconcerned with his own career and possessing an uncanny ability to see his opponent’s intentions, defeated Confederate armies at every turn. Captain Robert Scott, as a tragic example, led his men to destruction after his vision couldn’t accommodate his becoming merely the second man to reach the South Pole. Amundsen had reached just it days before they did, and Scott’s disheartened team perished during the long hike back to the sea.

Ghengis, Bligh, Grant, Scott—these people have something else in common. They struggled. Dubai does not do this; Dubai hires expats to do its struggling for it. (The lead architect for the Burj Khalifa, an American, has said that a lot was learned from this skyscraper, and that at this point he would probably have no trouble building something 1 kilometer tall. Note who it is that has the benefit of these lessons.) One does not see big shots struggling, either; that’s part of what makes them seem big.

~

Would I like an end to struggle? It seems to me there is still blood in my veins, air in my lungs, and passions in my heart. Whatever I may have achieved so far, there is still more I could be doing. God has given me much—I’d had my own taste of Islamic paradise on the roof the other night—but for all that, God doesn’t seem to be finished yet. Well then, I guess I’m not finished either. If I want to stay humble in the face of success, I might start by reminding myself that there is yet more I could become.

So the next day I went to the bookstore. I’d been planning this anyway; I picked up the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, and I also bought Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger and The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. These were normal purchases for my own professional development. I then went to a different section of the store. I have a knack for getting to some pretty off-the-wall, remote places in the world, places almost nobody else can reach. Someday I’ll tell you the Registan story. Wherever I go, there are usually people. Some people are so remote that there is nothing discussed in Foreign Affairs that will ever touch them. But they are still people, and they are affected by other things. I bought Essential Clinical Immunology, Microbiology; A Systems Approach, and An Introduction to Clinical Emergency Medicine. Let’s see what else I can learn how to do.

I also bought a book of poetry by Pablo Neruda, but that was for my new Philippina friend.