Abu Dhabi: East Leans West

While radical Islamists fight to restore the Dark Ages, a modernizing sheikhdom invests in Western culture.

Each month, 25,000 people from around the globe arrive in the United Arab Emirates, seeking jobs, contracts, and political stability. Walk past the gleaming new skyscrapers, government buildings, fountains, and shopping malls that line the immaculate tree-lined corniche in Abu Dhabi—or those in neighboring Dubai, only a 90-minute drive away—and you’ll hear dozens of languages. Most people wear Western clothes; you see relatively few dishdashas, the flowing white robes usually worn by Arab men in the Persian Gulf. There are no bearded mullahs on the streets or on the far more crowded highways. There are lots of women drivers, though, some with headscarves, some without.

Only two decades ago, few foreigners would have viewed this loose federation of seven independent sheikhdoms, strung out along the southeastern corner of the Persian Gulf, as a land of opportunity. But thanks to the world’s fifth-largest reserves of crude oil and natural gas, an estimated $1 trillion of investment abroad, and plans to spend at least $200 billion over the next decade on infrastructure and other grandiose projects in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the two most dynamic emirates, the UAE has burst into the world’s—and belatedly, America’s—consciousness.

Most Americans had heard of Dubai, the most frantic of the seven emirates—and especially of its over-the-top city of the same name: Disneyland on steroids, or “Donald Trump on acid,” as one writer called it. But far fewer knew much about either the emirate of Abu Dhabi or its eponymous capital city (also the capital of the federation as a whole).

“Talk with Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan and members of his brain trust of young advisors, and you’ll hear a lot about cultural transformation.

“We’re in a war with those who have hijacked our religion,” the 46-year-old crown prince tells me. “To succeed, we must also eradicate concepts like wasta and baksheesh—family influence and bribes,” both widespread Middle Eastern traditions. “And we are succeeding.”

To make itself the region’s true cultural hub, the emirate has forged surprising partnerships, and is negotiating others, with some of the world’s leading cultural and academic institutions, several based in New York.

In 2006, for instance, Abu Dhabi commissioned the Guggenheim Museum to construct a vast, 450,000-square-foot branch in the emirate.

(Abu Dhabi shares Dubai’s obsession with gigantism: having the world’s “tallest” skyscrapers, the “best” hotels, the “largest” shopping malls, and so on.)

This past November came the announcement for New York University–Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), which will be the first comprehensive liberal arts campus that any major American research university establishes abroad.

The emirate has also recruited the Sorbonne to create a French-language university and inked a whopping $1.3 billion deal with the Louvre to use its name, build a classical art museum, and share and jointly acquire art.

Further, Abu Dhabi is talking with the New York Public Library and several other great libraries about opening branches, and it has approached New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center about a partnership, though executives say that no deal is imminent.

The home for these projects will be a spectacular 640-acre cultural complex on Saadiyat (“happiness” in Arabic) Island, just off the coast of the capital. Abu Dhabi is investing $27 billion in the development, with some of the world’s most influential architects, including Frank Gehry, designing its landmark museums and other new buildings.”

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