Dubai

Holy crap, Dubai.

I only spent a few hours in Dubai, but it made a hell of an impression. It's rich, it's modern, it's clean. Big new buildings. Huge wide roads. (Crazy drivers, but that bugs me a lot less than it used to.) No visa hassles -- you show your passport, you go in.

First impressions: hot and sticky. Apparently Dubai has three seasons: dry and warm, dry and hot, and hot and intolerably humid. We're just at the beginning of the humid season, so: dog breath. And it will get worse before it gets better.

It's flat as a pancake. The combination of flatness, heat, and humidity reminds me faintly of central Florida... Orlando on the Persian Gulf, I guess.

But it's the Middle East. I saw my first woman in a, what do you call it, burqa? The one with just an eyeslit. That's not the norm --most women were just wearing headscarves -- but wow.

The woman at the visa desk had henna patterns all over her hands and wrists. I think of henna as something bored teenage girls do, not something people take seriously. But someone had obviously spent hours on this.

The airport was full of South Asians with a sprinkling of Central Asians and Filipinos. Dubai is one of those places where the locals have desk jobs and guest workers do everything manual. How well this works I can't say based on a few hours, but they've certainly managed to build a lot.

The air conditioning in my hotel room was turned to deep freeze.

Hotel: modern business culture has a tremendous homeogenizing effect. The hotel had a British pub, an Italian restaurant, and a Mexican place. There was also a bar with a little dance floor and a band. Which was of course Filipino, and which of course played the most awful hits of the last 40 years. ("Loooovving you... is easy 'cause you're beautiful...")

I had to try the Mexican place. It was decent basic Mexican, maybe half a cut north of Denny's. It had one of those annoying TV screens that announces the specials. They all were about 50%-100% more expensive than in the US. "Barbecue ribs! (may contain pork)" said one screen. "Thursday is Karaoke night!" warned another. I ate nachos and read my book until they turned the lights down for dancing. They weren't great nachos but they weren't bad either, and you'd be surprised how good even mediocre Mexican tastes after six or eight months without.

Walked around for a few minutes after, but the hotel was not in a good neighborhood for walking -- by which I mean it seemed to sit at the intersection of two large highways, with no neighbors but other hotels -- and anyway I was tired. And my flight was at 7:00 so I had to be early to bed.

Internet was $30 for a card good for 10 hours, so none of that. Read a few pages, crashed, got five hours of sleep.

And that was Dubai.

Comments

[Carlos]

Which was of course Filipino, and which of course played the most awful hits of the last 40 years. ("Loooovving you... is easy 'cause you're beautiful...")

I've said it before, but there is something remarkably unerring about Filipino taste.

It's unsettling.

[Doug M.]

Also on: "Karma Chameleon", "Footloose", and that toe-tapping Hijas del Tomate song from '02.

If I had never been to the Philippines, I'd be all "oh I am so sorry for those musicians, night after night having to play that stuff".

But I have been to the Philippines. It's like being sorry for Wisconsin for having a small-market football team.

Doug M.

[Luke]

From your description, what you've got is not the burqa, the glorious invention of Central Asia, but the Niqab, with separate eye slits; should include some adorable weird lace gloves. It's pretty much SOP for the Gulf, and increasingly more popular in the rest of the Arab world as against the old Egyptian/Azhari Raincoat Brigade style.

Henna, likewise, a Gulf-centered thing. Or, well, slosh back from Iran; it's much more popular at weddings than as a conventional social decoration. The stuff takes forever to dry, so, it's not like putting on makeup in the morning.

It's too bad you didn't have time to go out in Dubai. Reports back from friends who've spent a week there, a Muslim from Dhakka and a friend from Philly, well. Interesting. Though it might look like Orlando, the lived experience is a combination of Celebration, FL, and Vegas, with Arabs. Plus the tender mannerisms of an oil boomtown. They also really hate the browner Muslims.

Crazy driving is a feature of the Arab world. Don't bother asking your driver in Jordan to slow down, or worry about the blind merges and lack of headlights. Really.

[Noel Maurer]

Hi, Luke. You know much more about this than I do, but isn't the niqab just the veil? From what I've seen in Bahrain and Saudi, Doug probably spotted an abayya: the all-black shapeless garmet than includes a niqab that wraps around the nose and mouth. Am I confused?

I found abayyas spooky in Bahrain, because they aren't universal. I kept startling at the black wraiths hanging about. In Saudi, on a different trip a few years later, I too-rapidly got used to them, because no females went outside without one.

I have to say, seeing abayya-clad streetwalkers in Jeddah, now, that was weird. My western female companion [abayya-clad, and not thrilled about it] commented, "I mean, like, don't you want to see what you're buying?"

The women's occupation was obvious from the way cars would pull up, talk for a moment, and then pull away, about half the time with one of the women on-board. Not a muttaween to be seen.

The burka, in its classical form, is a light blue thing that looks like a beekeepers' outfit. In parts of eastern Afghanistan, around Jalalabad, you'll see them in different colors (mostly white and beige), whereas in the far west I spotted a lot of chadors, which are AFAICT just abayyas by a Persian name.

[Luke]

Noel, I can see how this gets confusing, as the language is often slippery and imprecise in its usage across the Islamic world (in Indonesia, Hijab means a blouse). For the sake of clarity, I'm going to limit my definitions to the area from Gibraltar to, say, the Hindu Kush.

In the Arab-Muslim world:

Hijab: headscarf, various styles, leaves the face open. Part of the Egyptian "raincoat brigade" get up. It's style and placement varies throughout the Arab-Islamic world from being a hair wrap to extending down over the shoulders.

Abbayyah/Chadoor: shapeless full-body veil, leaving the oval of the face entirely in view, as are the hands. Tends to have under-sleeves that extend to the wrist with elastic, and billowy oversleeves, like a graduation gown, and an open bottom, though YMMV. (and yeah, Chadoor is just the Farsi for Abbayyah)

Niqab: Shapeless full-body veil, with two parts. The underlayer, a big track suit, elasticking to ankles and wrists, and a top-part, usually cut to a triangle shape just above the ankles, to ease some walking. The top part also inclues elastic at the wrists, accompanied by gloves that are either partially see through, like a lace doily, or solid fabric. The face is completely covered, save two seperate slits for the eyes, fabric over the nose. Precise measures of fabric can vary in tightness to the face, etc.

Burqa: Bee-keeper sack.

In response to your friend's question about checking out the horse's feet and teeth before you buy it, the covering intensified for precisely that reason, save, well, being a preemption against rape and slavering; it's a cheaper version of female circumcision. There's good scholarship to be done on that that just won't get done.

Hope that helps.

[Noel Maurer]

"I'm going to limit my definitions to the area from Gibraltar to, say, the Hindu Kush."

The dark side, it is strong in you. Considering as you know I've been to Muslim places between Gibraltar and the Hindu Kush, it comes across as a little snarky. I know that's not how you meant it, so I'm just sayin'.

Anyway, my confusion seems to have two causes.

(1) I've never seen an abayya that wasn't worn in public without a face covering, except occasionally by westerners, which gave the disconcerting feeling of being at a graduation. So I assumed that the term "abayya" included the face covering.

(2) "Niqab" has recently entered British English as a synonym for a veil. Britain isn't between Gibraltar and the Hindu Kush, so there you have it.

[Dennis Brennan]

I see women right here in Center City Philly, every day, wearing the black-full-body-cover-face-too-except-for-eyeslit Muslim garment. Based on my limited personal interaction (I worked with a very sweet young lady who wore one), hereabouts they tend to be worn by our homegrown African-American Muslim women rather than by immigrants. Since I assume that Philly isn't any more, well, Islamic than other larger U.S. cities, I found it a little striking that Doug hadn't seen the garment before. (You've been back several times in the past few years, right?)

I have never been to Dubai, but my brother has. (He's not Luke's friend from Philly, as far as I know, but they do have That One Thing in common.) He just had to try the indoor ski slope. (His main problem was getting them to find size 15 ski boots to rent to him.)

I found

[Noel Maurer]

Hi, Dennis! As (I think?) you know, I am rather familiar with Philadelphia, considering as I spend every weekend in Center City.

There are a lot of abayyas on the streets of Philadelphia --- mostly in West and South Philly, though, not Center City --- and the ones that I've seen have been almost universally worn by American-born converts.

But it isn't surprising that Doug hasn't seen them. I can't emphasize how abnormal Philly is in this respect.

Let me start with personal experience. In three years living in Boston, I've seen exactly one woman in an abayya, riding the Red Line from Cambridge. She was African-American. But that's it. (The very nice lady who bakes my bagels in the morning wears a hijab, but she is from the Middle East. You also might see a lot of black women in what look like hijabs in parts of Roxbury. They are mostly Ethiopian Orthodox, from the West Indies.)

In New York, over God knows how many years there, I can't remember any abayyas, although I'm not sure. (You see a lot of things in Manhattan. It blurs sometimes. Perhaps I should say that I'm pretty sure that I've never noticed an abayya in the outer boroughs, not even along Atlantic Avenue.) In San Francisco, none, and this time I'm sure about it. In Miami, ditto. In D.C., same thing. Los Angeles? Cero.

In other cities I've only got occasional observations, but I only remember seeing anything other than the (very occasional) hijab in the Houston Galleria, which shouldn't be that surprising. And there they weren't worn by African-Americans, but rich Arabian expats.

Philly, though ... Philly jumped out as weird on practically my first trip. Which would be 1986, I think, for the Penn Relays.

Turning from the personal to the statistical, the Islamic Cultural Preservation and Information Center of Philadelphia claims that about one out of every eight Philadelphians is Muslim, 85 percent of them African-American.

The ICPIC number is not hard to believe, but ARDA at Penn State reports a number only half as large. Nonetheless, even the ARDA estimate gives Philadelphia a Muslim population greater than 5 percent, compared to a little over 2 percent in New York and Boston, and 3 percent in San Francisco ... and there is little doubt that the Muslim populations of those other cities consist mostly of immigrants and their descendants ... much unlike Philly.

In other words, Philadelphia is much more Islamic than most other American metropoli, and the fact that most of its Muslims are African-American makes it even more unusual.

Coincidentally, this year I spoke to a well-known conservative Muslim scholar outside Riyadh. (I can't remember his name at the moment.) He had studied in the U.S., and I asked him about Philadelphia. He'd been there, of course, and he said that he thought that the Muslims in Philadelphia were going "overboard," taking things that were culturally-specific to the Arabian Peninsula and forcing them on Americans.

I got the impression that he thought it impeded the spread of the faith, but I don't really know.

If anyone knows the origins of the Muslim community in West Philly, I'd be very curious to hear it. All I've found is an old Philadelphia Inquirer article from May 17, 2006, claiming that, "Many of them, Muhammad said, converted to Islam from Christianity in the 1960s and 1970s. Today their children perform a balancing act, striving to adhere to strict dress codes while socializing with their more hip-hop-oriented peers." (Abdul Rahim Muhammad is the head of the aforementioned ICPIC.)

[Dennis Brennan]

Noel--

Very interesting info. I guess this is what I get for assuming that the sample size that consists of my personal experience is typical.

http://www.phillyblog.com/philly/showthread.php?t=4071 provides a bit more information.

Again, from my personal experience, the rise of Islam in West Philly is unquestionably a force for good. Muslim-oriented businesses are making a good effort at reviving some of the badly blighted commercial areas. And one of these days when I'm in the neighborhood I'd love to try a halal cheesesteak.

Noel- I did not know that you were visiting hereabouts regularly. If you ever find yourself in Center City on a weekday I'll take you out to lunch-- weekends, though, I'm a family man of the Main Line.

[Noel Maurer]

Amma and I keep a tiny tiny apartment on Chestnut Street, since she still has a lot of rotations to finish down there. When she's in Philly, my Friday evenings and Monday mornings involve the Red and Silver Lines, the R-1 train, and either Airtran or U.S. Airways. Trains, planes, and buses, the public transit trifecta. And the bus in question is one of those newfangled dedicated busways type, and runs both on a diesel engine and on overhead lines. Best of all, I've barely got to walk a half-mile from the station on either end.

Public transit heaven, right?

Except just talking about the above makes me miss those five-hour drives involving the New Jersey Turnpike and Interstate 84.

I want my Focus back.

Then again, it can be nice to be able to read and drink beer while travelling.

Anyway, I'd be glad to take you up on that lunch the next time I'm in town on a weekday!