"The hotel shaped like a sail? Oh yeah, take a left past the 180-story building..."

Time Magazine wrote this article on the recent financial difficulties in Dubai… an area that many of us know surprisingly little about.

Dubai stands like a capitalist’s dream given form… a land of skyscrapers and insultingly large hotels which seem to spring almost on their own from the sands. Malls, restaurants, racetracks, casinos… anything and everything that is a symbol of excess and rampant capitalism is in Dubai.
Artificial island? Check.
Hotel the size of the Eiffel Tower? Got that.
Fireworks visible from space? Oh, you better believe it.

And yet last week Dubai officials asked for a 6 month “repayment standstill” on the sheikdom’s $80 billion debt. The leader of the Dubai, the charismatic and driven Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum (dubbed “Sheik Mo” by the media), was in London England at the time in a museum… and his response was Twittered online as “Inspired by Islamic artifacts”.

Sheik Mo’s vision of Dubai has elevated the oil-poor nation to a place of global importance… and his beliefs that the Islamic world has nobody to blame but theirselves for falling behind the Western world has made him something of a figurehead for progress in the Middle East.

I admit freely that I hate just about everything Dubai stands for… but I find myself liking Sheik Mo (who I knew nothing about before this article). When asked what linked all his endeavours, Sheik Mo responded plainly “I love success. I despise failure.” He has also gone on record chastising Arab leaders who preferred “to sit around waiting, praising our glorious past and blaming others for our failures and our problems.” Instead, he said, “We have to arm ourselves with courage and work quickly and seriously, to tackle the reasons that put our region behind the rest of the world.”

What’s not to like?
Well, there is that whole turning-Dubai-into-a-shrine-of-all-things-capitalist thing… but other than that, he seems like an okay guy. We’ll have to see how and when Dubai pulls out of its economic funk… Sheik Mo will probably tweet something like “Boring day at palace today. Solved economy” when it happens.