 |
|
hardback £18.99
Hodder & Stoughton General Division
Paddyfield.com
ALSO SEE
The Guardian
More reviews by Peter Wood
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
|
|
|
A Diamond in the Desert: Behind the Scenes in the World's Richest City by Jo Tatchell
Globalisation, modernisation and Islam have been daily themes for the western media for some time. To the old question of whether Islam can be reconciled with modernity has now been added a new and powerful variable: money. JO TATCHELL has taken these preoccupations to Abu Dhabi in A DIAMOND IN THE DESERT: BEHIND THE SCENES IN THE WORLD'S RICHEST CITY. As the title indicates, Tatchell intends to take us backstage. Having been brought up in Abu Dhabi she returns, as she tells a customs official on arrival, to "see how much has changed." Lurking behind this initial question is another one, how much will it change. What kind of values will a modern Abu Dhabi espouse?
As described by Tatchell, Abu Dhabi is a place of tight political controls, acquiesced in by its citizens who receive largesse in return, courtesy of its oil wealth. It has got to this desirable point in its history thanks to wise leadership and the British, whose interventions, if not always benign, were nevertheless not malign. It has financed the construction of some enormous projects and has attracted some global brands, notably the Louvre and the Guggenheim. Abu Dhabi, or rather its leadership, has ambitions.
But Tatchell also finds that it is all rather complicated. Perhaps, she seems to say, it was always more complicated. When she was growing up in Abu Dhabi, there was a story of a young British girl who disappeared, perhaps kidnapped, causing anxiety among the expatriate community, and her brother was a witness to a fatal boating accident which was then hushed up. Tatchell also describes, without comment, an evening of partying and clubbing which began at the home of a wealthy Abu Dhabian watching snuff movies.
How much has Abu Dhabi changed and what will its future look like? The interest of the book lies in why we never get an answer. The subtitle -- "Behind the Scenes in the World's Richest City" -- is a good place to start. The claim that Abu Dhabi is the world's richest city is taken from a Fortune Magazine article in 2007, the author of which made a back-of-the-envelope calculation which reappears two years later on the jacket of Tatchell's book. There are other more complex measures which yield radically different results. UBS, for example, produces tables each year showing the world's richest cities broken down by purchasing power parity (Zurich in 2009) or by personal earnings (Copenhagen). Abu Dhabi does not appear in the top 50 on either list. Tatchell never probes behind the Fortune headline to ask what exactly it means or why western journalists trap themselves with such hyperbole.
But it is that phrase "Behind the Scenes", with all its connotations of inside and outside, which causes most difficulty. Tatchell could have taken as her starting point the writings of Edward Said or any number of other serious thinkers about the relationship between Europe and the Middle East, Islam and modernisation, globalisation and the nation state. Instead she invokes at various points a lineage of ambiguous figures, Doughty, Burton, T. E. Lawrence, Thesiger and the diplomat turned bagman for Shell, Edward Henderson, setting herself firmly in the tradition of the intrepid colonial explorer. There is something quaintly old-fashioned in this and it falls flat when the physical rigours of the desert have been replaced by the stringencies of a latte in the Hilton.
For Tatchell, as for the expats she meets and talks to, life in Abu Dhabi is elsewhere. Asked about the disappearance of the young British girl, one elderly British resident comments that it was an expatriate issue and therefore not of interest locally. Abu Dhabians were apparently more concerned about the Arab-Israeli War and the civil war in Lebanon. The contemporary cast of characters in Tatchell's book, including many who have arrived or returned from elsewhere, are as with previous generations of western expat immigrants riding a wave of global capital. They too have no interest in the future of Islam and certainly nothing to say about it.
In the end, Tatchell fails to get behind any scenes. Desperate to make sense of what she sees she observes a group of young men at a late night disco and decides that they represent an updated majlis or discussion forum. "To be in modern Abu Dhabi," she writes, "is like being invited to someone's baronial pile for the weekend, and finding everything there, servants, guests, roaring fires, turned-back beds, except the owners." At least this points us to the real reason for the Louvre and the Guggenheim: they are merely supplying the artistic trophies to go on the walls, art as the justification for power. Rather than a baronial pile, however, Tatchell at the end is left standing on the pavement, nosed pressed to the plate glass window of an upmarket boutique, peering inside to see what the rich people are doing. To get any idea of the forces at work in the Emirates, we need to go elsewhere.
Peter Wood
18/01/2010
|
Dr. Peter Wood worked for the British intelligence service in Asia for many years before becoming HSBC's Chief Business Advisor for China. He is now an independent China Strategy consultant, based in Hong Kong. |
| |
|
