DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Nayla Khaja, 26, a filmmaker now studying in Canada, is riding a sudden crest of fame.
Khaja had grown tired of hearing misconceptions about Dubai, where she grew up. Women are as likely as men to be driving the late-model Jaguars that zip along the avenues here, and blue jeans are as common in the marble shopping malls as the black, cloak-like abayas worn throughout the Persian Gulf region.
Cranes dot Dubai's marina area. The city-state has been filling in the sea to make way for new construction.
(Photos Scott Wilson -- The Washington Post)
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So she decided to make a documentary, "Unveiling Dubai," a promotional look at her home town as seen through the eyes of a visiting foreigner. She shelled out $30,000 to become Dubai's first female movie producer.
"We are not Saudi Arabia," Khaja said in summarizing the documentary, which made its debut at the Dubai International Film Festival this month before an audience of local leading lights and a few Hollywood stars. "That really is the lesson."
As flat as Florida and with few of the natural resources that bless its neighbors, this city-state on the shores of the Persian Gulf has had to invent its own economy over the years -- and it has succeeded spectacularly.
Prosperity has made this ancient trading hub -- one of the seven states that make up the United Arab Emirates -- something like a politics-free zone in a region rippling with discontent. There is little clamor for greater democratic rights, and the subdued news media know that political change and the place of Islam in society are subjects more safely left to tribal leaders, who have run this patch of desert for centuries.
Most of the city-state's 1.1 million residents are immigrants, and many of the 20 percent actually born in Dubai appear happy to be living under a benign autocracy that guarantees them free health care, education and scholarships to study abroad regardless of need.
Dubai has been filling in the sea to expand its shoreline, building skyscrapers and ski slopes and generally making the desert bloom. In the process, the emirate's unelected tribal leaders have presented a small-scale alternative to the Bush administration's vision of democratic government as the key to a stable Middle East.
This month, Dubai's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Rashid Maktum warned his fellow Arab leaders to "change, or you will be changed" at a forum attended by intellectuals, Middle Eastern politicians, business leaders and former president Bill Clinton. People who know the prince said his speech was not a push for democratic reform, but meant only to encourage his far wealthier neighbors to follow Dubai's model: using economic opportunities to appease volatile youth suffering poverty, unemployment and despair.
"We believe our neighbors can do more," said Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, chairman of the government-owned Nakheel development company and a longtime friend and partner of the prince. "We tell them: 'We have nothing, and look what we have done. Imagine with your resources what you could do.' "
Outside Sulayem's 47th-floor office window in the Emirates Towers, his new project is taking shape in the pale blue waters of the Persian Gulf. Dubbed The World, it is a $3 billion plan to create a series of islands resembling the map of the world. Nearby, two archipelagos in the shape of palm trees are emerging from the sea. Scheduled to be constructed in phases over the next seven years at a cost of more than $20 billion, the developments will feature luxury homes, apartments, clubs and shopping centers.
As important to the government's plans to promote tourism, the artificial islands will add more than 600 miles of coastline to Dubai, which naturally has only 70 miles of white-sand beaches. Sulayem described the projects as signs of the crown prince's ambitions to put his little emirate on the map.
"It doesn't matter what you call it, democracy or anything else," said Sulayem, who began working with the prince after graduating from Temple University in Philadelphia in 1981. "What people want above all else is economic development, a way to make a living, transparency and justice. If this is achieved, they don't care what you call the system."
The ruling tribe of Dubai, once a stop on the Silk Road renowned for its pearl trade, arrived from Abu Dhabi roughly a century ago. From the start, trade was central to its governing ethic and remained so even after oil was discovered here in 1966. Dubai's reserves pale in comparison with those of Abu Dhabi, which in 1971 became the capital of a federation of six emirates and largely finances the budget for each. A seventh joined a year later and each has developed a distinct character, from the traditional and pious Sharjah to cosmopolitan Dubai.
