Gulf social changes are in the global spotlight | Financial Times #UAE

Gulf social changes are in the global spotlight | Financial Times

In the UAE the brash commercialism of Dubai has sometimes obscured Abu Dhabi’s harsh response to

 political Islam at home and abroad © Christopher Pike/Reuters

Overshadowed by world events such as the US presidential election or the first breakthrough in developing a Covid-19 vaccine, the United Arab Emirates last week announced radical changes in its legal system. These are designed primarily to enhance the Gulf country’s attraction to expatriate workers, but they could resonate and ripple, over time, throughout the Muslim world. 

It is always hard to decide whether change in the Gulf, effusively hyped and expensively marketed, is about rebranding or reform. But the UAE reforms can also be seen as part of a race between Gulf countries, hit by the pandemic and the slump in world demand for oil, to reinvent themselves. 

The UAE, a federation of seven emirates whose senior partner is Abu Dhabi, has moved in a secular direction by decriminalising alcohol consumption and the cohabitation of unmarried couples, as well as fully criminalising so-called “honour crimes” against women. The reforms also enable resident foreigners, who outnumber Emiratis nine to one, to settle family law issues such as divorce and inheritance under their home-country legal system rather than the Muslim sharia code. 

The UAE, unlike Saudi Arabia, allows adherents of all mainstream religions to worship freely, and welcomed Pope Francis last year, the first Roman Catholic pontiff to visit the Arabian peninsula where Islam was born. It has also focused on education and innovation, while expanding the rights and public role of women. 

But Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, is at one with his ally and counterpart Mohammed bin Salman, the young heir to the Saudi throne. The Saudi crown prince has reined in the Wahhabi clerical establishment to pursue his brand of economic modernisation and let a young society repressed by medieval puritanism breathe. But both these dynastic autocrats have stamped out political dissent and criticism. 

In the UAE the brash commercialism of Dubai has sometimes obscured Abu Dhabi’s harsh response to political Islam at home and abroad since the Arab upheavals of the past decade unleashed a regional whirlwind. Yet it is competing fiercely with its neighbours for the global spotlight. 

The pandemic has postponed until next October the Expo 2020 extravaganza but the fair still expects up to 25m visitors to showcase an open UAE economy marked by innovation. Saudi Arabia, which plans to host sporting events such as Formula One races and boxing, has just announced the overhaul of the kafala system in which foreigners working in the kingdom need a local sponsor, a lucrative practice critics liken to indentured labour. From next March about 10m expats will be able to move jobs and exit the country without their sponsors’ permission. 

The gas-rich emirate of Qatar, blockaded since 2017 by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt for its promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood, dalliance with Iran and alliance with Turkey, is in more confrontational competition with its neighbours. Yet as part of its controversial plans to host the 2022 football World Cup it has changed its kafala system and introduced a minimum wage. It has announced elections next year to further burnish its image. 

Over the centuries, the Middle East has tended to flourish most when there have been places, from Abbasid Baghdad to the Ottoman Levant, that act as cultural clearing houses where civilisations and faiths, traders and travellers, meet and rub shoulders. Change in the Gulf has a long way to go before it reaches that level of amenity. But that should be its direction of travel.