Making the Desert Boom

On Sand and Water, Conjuring An Air-Conditioned Mirage

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The idea behind The World is that it will look as much like the world as possible. When finished, this collection of hundreds of man-made islands, dredged up out of the Persian Gulf off the coast of Dubai, will be shaped like the seven continents of planet Earth. It will be sold to extraordinarily wealthy people (tabloids spread the apparently baseless rumor that Rod Stewart will buy "England") who want their own little (or not so little) piece of this emirate's latest exercise in superlatives. The World, which will be big enough to be seen from space, will join The Palm (yes, islands shaped like two gigantic palms, also big enough to be seen from space), and the Burj Dubai, a skyscraper that, if finished, may be the tallest on Earth (the actual height is being kept secret).

But neither The Palm, nor the Burj Dubai, nor even a proposed amusement park that would be eight times bigger than Disneyland, really captures the essence of Dubai quite like The World. This is a fiefdom of plenty that compensates for a lack of here here by creating vast imitations of other places. Las Vegas may seem like the obvious analogy, but Vegas's vulgarity is bush-league stuff, mere caprice compared to what is planned for Dubai.

The emir of Dubai, Sheik Maktoum bin Rashid Maktoum, invariably described here as "farseeing" and "wise," is planning against the day when this patch of torrid sand floating on a sea of oil will be just a patch of torrid sand. He has thrown the place open to business and investment, with all the don't-ask, don't-tell financial promiscuity of the Swiss. And money has flooded in. Towers rise, vast shopping malls spread out beneath them, and everywhere there are cranes on the horizon.

The World keeps putting you in mind of a book you almost understood in college, Jean Baudrillard's "Simulations," which began with an analysis of a Jorge Luis Borges tale in which a map is made of an empire, and the map is so detailed that it grows to be as big as the empire. The World won't be that big, but you can't help but think that somebody was reading Baudrillard, or at least Borges, when they planned this. For a moment, contemplating a map of the world, owned entirely by rich people, you think you have a sense of what Baudrillard meant when he talked about the "simulacrum" that would replace "reality," and bemoaned that in America, "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real."

The real, here, is in no danger of being entirely confused with the manufactured. The real and the artificial are locked in an uneasy detente. It is, for instance, really hot, in the summer, outside, and really cold inside, where the air conditioning is set so high that the point seems not so much to keep the 115-degree heat at bay, but outdo it with arctic extravagance. You don't say to yourself, thank God for air conditioning; rather, you think, by God, if they unplug this country, I'm dead in 20 minutes.

Among Dubai's most influential exports is another simulacrum of sorts. Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language news satellite channel, is based here, in a sprawling office park. Al-Arabiya, like its better-known competitor al-Jazeera (based in Qatar), is in the business of creating an image of the Arab world for the Arab world, an image that counterbalances the one produced by Western news networks.

Al-Arabiya is in "Media City," a long drive down a hot but beautifully paved highway from the center of town -- past "Interchange No. 4" and just before "Interchange No. 5," near "Internet City" and down a stretch from the turnoff to "Health Care City." Driving to Media City, past these nameless exits and compartmentalized techno-villages, makes you think of all those places in America that are vaguely embarrassed about being sandwiched between here and there, about people from New Jersey who identify not by town, but turnpike exit. Here, there's no embarrassment, just candor. The writer, William Gibson, once described Singapore as like Disneyland, with the death penalty. Dubai is like Disneyland, without all the guilt tripping that American intellectuals like to do when enjoying the hydroponic fruits of American materialism.

Al-Arabiya's newsroom is on the fourth floor of the Middle East Broadcasting building. Everything in this building is cool and slick, including the newsroom itself, a fantasy of glass and steel with a round, spaceship cockpit news desk in the middle. From here, various impeccable anchors pursue the 24-hour news channel's mission: "Al Arabiya is an independent, self-empowered, informative and free-spirited satellite channel. It is an Arabic station, from the Arabs to the Arabs, delivering content that is relevant to the Arabs." Or so reads their Web site.

Al-Arabiya is a relative newcomer to the news business. It began beaming its broadcasts just before the most recent war against Iraq began. Shortly before its debut, in spring 2003, Advertising Age quoted sources at the channel's parent, Middle East Broadcasting, saying that the goal of al-Arabiya, was to be seen as more balanced and objective than al-Jazeera. The hope was to soak up all the ad dollars that al-Jazeera's supposedly anti-American tone scares away.

It's been a bumpy road. In November 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had no more love for one or the other, calling both channels "violently anti-coalition." But by this past May, President Bush considered al-Arabiya enough less violent to use it to tell the Arab world that, contrary to what those pictures and reports from Abu Ghraib seem to say, most Americans don't think it's okay to ride an old woman like a donkey, and lead men around on leashes, even if they are in prison.

On-screen, al-Arabiya feels just a little more glossy than al-Jazeera. The motto might properly be, from Arabs to Arabs, in the style of Fox News. One news program has the classic Fox feel, short, urgent news bites, with an ominous musical riff keeping the whole thing humming along. The news feels edgy and dangerous.

"We wanted to achieve news with entertainment, says Salah Nagm, head of news at al-Arabiya. "There are several elements: how to make news short, but deep."

Nagm presides over a large, diverse newsroom that, in many ways, reflects life in Dubai by having nothing to do with Dubai. The journalists here are largely from someplace else.

Maya Bitar, for instance, came to al-Arabiya after a French-language station she worked for in Lebanon was shut down by the government (for criticizing the Syrian occupation of parts of Lebanon).