Superb article at altmuslim about the Burj Dubai and Emirati society. Sort of like a mini-Me of Johann Hari’s famous piece.
Latest Updates: dubai RSS
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aziz
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johnpi
The Sun reports that the cellmate of the girl believed the police were stricter with her because she was a Muslim of Pakistani descent:
“She’s a British girl but a Muslim, so I think they were tougher on her because of that.
“She was trying to report the rape but soon realized the policemen were more interested in how often she has sex with her boyfriend.
“They even asked if she did just normal sex or anything else in bed.”
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aziz
The Burj Dubai opens today –
(one of my own photos – not that great). I’ve been and still remain (extremely) critical of Dubai, but the building itself is just incredible.
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johnpi
Dubai to set up Human Rights Center in 2010.
This sounds really cool:
A centre to raise awareness about human rights among the public will be established by the Dubai government next year, a top police officer said at a gathering to mark the International Human Rights Day on Thursday.
The Dubai Human Rights Village will be a rights education centre and it will open in 2010.
Dr Sultan Al Jamal, Director of Human Trafficking Crimes Monitoring Centre of Dubai Police, said awareness among citizens and residents about what human rights are and what they mean is lacking. “The articles that constitute the Declaration of International Human Rights are unknown to many people.”
I like this concept of a ‘challenge’ room:
It will be divided into five domes that will introduce human rights to visitors. The public will be able to navigate and enquire about protection laws and government services.
The domes will focus on the rights — birth, health, food and water, education and cultural rights. Each area will have classrooms where workshops and lectures will be conducted. A challenge room will enable discussions on key human rights issues.
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johnpi
Dubai & Abu Dhabi markets plunge on debt woes.
Stock markets in the Gulf emirate of Dubai and its neighboring capital of Abu Dhabi fell sharply on Monday and then ground to a halt amid a lack of buyers after Dubai World’s shock proposal to suspend debt payments.
….Dubai World property unit Nakheel, builder of the iconic Palm Jumeirah man-made island, asked to suspend trading of its sukuks, or Islamic bonds, listed on the Dubai-based Nasdaq Dubai exchange.
One of the key loans affected by Dubai World’s planned debt moratorium is a Nakheel issue of $3.5 billion of Islamic bonds or sukuks, scheduled to mature on Dec. 14.
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aziz
Here’s a new article on, and in defense of, Dubai.
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johnpi
Oprah show deluged with complaints and accusations of misrepresenting Dubai.
American chat show queen, Oprah Winfrey, was forced to apologize on Monday to an outraged audience for an episode of her show featuring women from around the world in which a guest from Dubai gave false information about life in the dazzling UAE city.
The episode, which aired in October, hosted women from cities like Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Tokyo and Dubai, where Dr. Lamees Hamdan spoke to the show via Skype and explained about her life and what living in Dubai was like.
The segment began with a voice-over by Oprah who said: “Thanks to this country’s rich oil supplies, the government provides its citizens with free water, electricity and health care. The best part? No income tax!”
Hamdan went on to explain to the audience that people in Dubai do not pay utility bills, which is incorrect, and said there were no “poor people” in Dubai, overlooking the city’s tens of thousands of unskilled workers from South East Asia.
….The mother of five also caused a stir by saying that the traditional black dress and scarf, known as shela and abaya, was “cultural” and not religious.
Some viewers were also resentful because the interview was conducted via the online phone system Skype, which is blocked in the UAE, but was opened for Hamdan to appear on Oprah’s show.
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aziz
this whole confiscating passports of laborers thing in Dubai is basically indentured slavery.
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thabet
Murad Wilfried Hofmann was named Islamic Personality of the Year 2009 (I never knew such a thing existed) by the committee of the Dubai International Holy Quran Award, who also awarded an Indian man with ~£40k for coming first in the annual Qur’an recital competition.
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thabet
Ramadan belt-tightening:
Companies are scaling back the events, called iftar receptions, seen as important opportunities to network with business partners against the backdrop of some of the city’s most luxurious hotels.
Demand for Ramadan tents — the typical setting for iftars — is showing signs of decline, while hotels are recording lower corporate bookings as companies aim to conserve cash amid a property and economic slump in the emirate.
I can’t see much of a scaling back in Abu Dhabi though…
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thabet
Sums this place up…
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thabet
Labour protests in Dubai:
Workers from Al Habtoor Engineering stopped work on its sites in Deira as well as in the Jebel Ali port area. More than 2,000 protesting labourers in Deira stopped work at about 8am and walked on to the road, briefly halting traffic and creating chaos. Dubai police and labour officials immediately reached the work site and started controlling the crowd.
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thabet
Eighty-four billion dollars:
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thabet
Another ‘dark side of Dubai’ article, this time in The Washington Post. This one, however, has a small twist; it includes a former French spy turned businessman who escaped Dubai in a rubber dinghy dressed in an abaya.
Jaubert then set out to sea in the dinghy to the boat his friend had positioned just outside the UAE’s territorial waters, and they sailed toward India. After eight days at sea, the pair arrived in Mumbai — an account corroborated by his traveling companion. With a new passport issued by the French consulate, Jaubert flew to join his wife in Florida, where he is writing a book he has titled “Escape From Dubai.”
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thabet
This has nothing to do with the economic downturn and empty properties:
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thabet
Rod Liddle rips off Johann Hari’s article on Dubai. As ever with these articles the real fun is in reading the comments section.
I haven’t been able to take anything Liddle says seriously since he turned up on a Channel 4 series on immigration to moan about the darkies taking his seat on the buses and trains. Although the abuses he highlights are true, how seriously can anyone take Liddle’s complaint about human rights abuses given only earlier this year he was linking human rights with appeasement for terrorists?
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thabet
Trouble on the Black Gold coast:
In other news, a survey has found one in ten people have lost their job in the UAE.
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thabet
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johnpi
One of the values of all of the stories coming out of the Gulf Arab states right now about sex therapy and sex issues are just the examples of the range of struggle that people live with that may make others feel less isolated in their misery and seek help/improvement:
In Saudi Arabia and other countries where the genders are rigorously separated, many men have their first sexual experiences with other men, which affects their attitudes toward sex in marriage, Ms. Lootah said.
“Many men who had anal sex with men before marriage want the same thing with their wives, because they don’t know anything else,” Ms. Lootah said. “This is one reason we need sex education in our schools.”….
She reels off stories from her practice in rapid fire: the Emirati military officer whose wife had an affair because he was away from home too much; the woman who thought fellatio was against Islam (not true at all, Ms. Lootah notes); the wife who discovered her husband dressing up as a woman and going out to gay bars. She seems bent on showing that there is a whole world of sexual confusion that would benefit from open discussion.
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thabet
This Gulf News report on Palestinian pleas with the Saudis not to award the Haramain railway project to Alstom because of its work in Jerusalem and Israel (pdf) forgot to mention that Alstom was also awarded a contract with Dubai.
Surprised?
(Via Fake Plastic Souks.)
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aziz
major property scam scandal in Dubai – and the government threw its weight around to cover it up, as only an autocratic regime can. Theres also a pending law that will seek to enforce even more restrictions on media there:
A report by the US-based Human Rights Watch group into the UAE’s pending media law, Just the Good News, Please, was published last month. “(The pending law) includes troubling content-based restrictions on speech, draconian fines, and harsh registration requirements,” the report said.
It highlighted a number of the new law’s provisions, branding them: “Not only unlawful intrusions by the government into the right of journalists in the UAE to freely express their thoughts and opinions on any subject of their choosing, but also an unjustified attempt to control the independence of the media.”
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thabet
A reader’s complaint about the latest Emirates Airlines ad campaign which uses an Indian consturction worker:
In related news, Arabian Business also has a summary of an ‘independent’ survey of foreign construction workers in Dubai.
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thabet
The UAE’s telecoms regulator has ordered du to unblock the Johann Hari article critical of Dubai.
(That’s what you call ’silencing’.)
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thabet
A court in Dubai has found a woman who lost her unborn child in a traffic accident guilty of manslaughter in what is said to be an unprecedented ruling.
The judge is reported to have based his ruling on ‘Islamic law’.
‘Unprecedented’ is an understatement.
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thabet
Sultan Al Qassemi, who was interviewed by Johann Hari for his widely read essay on Dubai, responds to Hari’s criticises in Time Out Dubai, and has an exchange with Johann Hari in the pages of the Independent.
The problem for Al Qassemi’s argument is that Hari has never defended or shied away from talking about those bad, dark, things about Britain, though I can understand why he feels the British media are out to get Dubai.
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thabet
The UAE* tries to counter the negative coverage of Dubai in the British media (much to annoyance of the British government**), which culminated in the form of Johann Hari’s lengthy essay in The Independent and Panorama’s Slumdogs and Millionaires.
As part of the counter propaganda, Emirates Airline are also running adverts on BBC World (and presumably other channels) showing the ‘nice’ images of Dubai with Black’s Wonderful Life playing in the background.
*The National is a Abu Dhabi newspaper.
**Why is our government passing comment on the workings of a free press, however flawed it may be?
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aziz
Hari’s essay on Dubai that thabet linked earlier really got me going as usual.
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Kawthar
Dubai’s Chief of Police confirmed that they plan to block 500 search terms
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Fatemeh
Salam, everybuddy! Sorry I’ve been absent these last few weeks; no good reason, just laziness.
This week, we take a look at how a South African Muslim magazine has been revitalized by its new female editor, how a Canadian immigrant uses women’s bodies to prove the “I’m not like them!” spiel, how the Financial Times gets sidetracked in its story about Dubai horse-racing, how a Canadian documentary looks at Indian Muslims, and at the misplaced concern generated by the video of the girl being whipped in Pakistan. Plus: LINKS!
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thabet
Johann Hari visits and writes about Dubai.
