WAVE OF CHANGE IN THE PERSIAN GULF

  Artículo de David Ignatius en “The Washington Post” del 13.01.2004

 

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates -- Walk unannounced into the computer graphics lab at a branch of the Higher Colleges of Technology here and you find a surprise: The students are surfing the Internet unsupervised, designing their own Web sites, and generally reveling in the freedom and creativity of the digital age.

Saleh Marzouqi, a third-year student, shows me his site called mothhel.net, which means "amazing" in Arabic. He created it two years ago for graphics geeks like himself, and his chat room now has about 850 members. When he graduates this year, he plans to turn it into a business.

This is the way progress in the Arab world should happen, but too rarely does. And the United Arab Emirates may offer something of a model for the way change can come to a devoutly Muslim country without destroying its cultural traditions.

A leading advocate of change here is Sheik Nahayan bin Mubarak, the United Arab Emirates' minister of higher education and a member of its ruling family. He's one of the boldest of a new generation of Arabs who are slowly beginning to transform how this region deals with itself and the modern world.

I met Nahayan at his father's "majlis," a traditional Bedouin tribal gathering where the men greet each other by touching noses. It's part of a culture that's only a few decades past its desert nomad roots; when I asked Nahayan how old he is, he answered apologetically that he wasn't sure, 47 or 48 -- when he was born there was no running water, few clocks and little sense of time. A few hours later, at Nahayan's suggestion, I was roaming the computer lab at one of the universities he oversees.

"Education is the future of this region," Nahayan says, and he is determined to set it free from the religious conservatives and traditionalists who have used it to block progress. The Higher Colleges of Technology, for example, have grown over the past 15 years from fewer than 500 students to about 15,000. Roughly 60 percent of them are women, and at UAE University, which Nahayan also oversees, the percentage of women is even higher.

The goal isn't simply to educate people, Nahayan says, but to give them the tools to create businesses of their own so they won't depend on the government for handouts. Indeed, on the day I visited Nahayan he had just signed an agreement with MIT to establish an entrepreneurship center in the United Arab Emirates.

Nahayan has been attacked by religious conservatives because of his emphasis on women's education, his insistence on English as the official language at the technology schools and his refusal to limit access to the Internet. Radio Tehran even broadcast a false story claiming he closed a mosque at one of the colleges, he says.

"I will not be swayed," he says. "Those fighting change are doing so because they want to preserve their own power."

Nahayan says Arabs want the same things most people do: freedom, justice and equality. But their political regimes often deny these basic rights because they fear being held accountable.

The United Arab Emirates is changing because it is opening itself to the modern world. The most vivid example is the trading city of Dubai, about 100 miles down the road from Abu Dhabi. Its skyline features some of the wildest architecture this side of Shanghai -- fantasy buildings that seem to float in the air like the sails of an Arab dhow.

Dubai's prosperity is about free trade. Foreign companies are allowed to operate tax-free and without trade barriers or foreign-exchange controls. This wide-open market has produced a roaring boom, in which Dubai's non-oil sector now produces more than 90 percent of its gross domestic product. An "Internet City" has attracted such giants as Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and IBM; a "Media City" has drawn Reuters, Sony and CNN.

Part of what makes Dubai and Abu Dhabi feel different is that they are influenced almost as much by India, to the east, as by the Arab world. The technology boom in India has spread to the large Indian expatriate community here. "I doubt you could go anywhere else in this part of the world and find Indians and Pakistanis driving Rolls-Royces," says Nahayan.

The culture of change breaks the old political reflexes. Nahayan, for example, says he hopes the United States will succeed in Iraq. "We are lucky they came," he says. "Otherwise, we would have Saddam [Hussein] and his sons and his grandsons."

These days, it's hard to find much to be optimistic about in the Arab world, but little United Arab Emirates makes you remember that change is coming -- even to the land of the dromedary and the scorpion.