Shiekh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan Welcomes Global Luminaries
(The following article appeared in The New York Sun on October 26, 2007, and is reprinted with the kind permission of the newspaper's editor.)
By Pranay Gupte
Special to The New York Sun
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates – Of the 22 countries that constitute the Arab League, only three have formal diplomatic ties with Israel. The United Arab Emirates is not among them.
But it would be fair to suggest that the U.A.E. – far more than Egypt, Jordan and Mauritania, which maintain legations in Tel Aviv – is far more of an open society, far less hostile to Jewry, and much more welcoming to Western and, specifically, American, economic, political and cultural interests. With a population of less than five million, of whom 80 percent are expatriates, the U.A.E. is certainly a far more cosmopolitan place than practically any other Arab country, and one where there are virtually no restrictions on the nature of national discourse.
That was conspicuously evident during the four-day Festival of Thinkers that ended here late last night. The idea was to expose young Emirati students to the world’s finest minds so that they could better integrate into an evolving global culture, notwithstanding the fact that in the U.A.E. – which pumps two million barrels of crude oil a day, has reserves of nearly 100 billion barrels of oil that will last at least 150 years, and will enjoy a surplus of more than $500 billion this year alone on account of oil prices that have touched $90 a barrel – no citizen is poor and no native really has to work for a living. At the heart of the festival was the simple, central notion that it wasn’t enough for Emiratis to be born wealthy; it was far more critical to accelerate the cross-fertilization of ideas with the outside world.
In support of this concept, the festival attracted 16 Nobel laureates, and more than 100 world thinkers, including American and New York luminaries such as the astronaut Buzz Aldrin; the president of the International Longevity Center Dr. Robert Butler; the president of Cooper Union, George Campbell; the founder of NewYorkSocialDiary.Com, David Patrick Columbia and his associate Jeffrey Hirsch; the chairwoman of the New York Institute of Technology – and senior vice president of Merrill Lynch – Linda Davila; the chief editorial director of American Media, Bonnie Fuller; the president and CEO of the Institute of International Education, Allan Goodman, who also administers the Fulbright Program; the editor of Discover magazine, Bob Guccione Jr.; and Dottie Herman, CEO of Prudential Douglas Elliman.
Also attending were the executive vice president of Edelman Financial Communications; Kathleen Lacey Hoge; the editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest, Jacqueline Leo, and her husband, the senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, John Leo; the senior editor of VOGUE, Shirley Lord; the president emeritus of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital, Dr. Paul A. Marks, and his wife, the Sarah Lawrence geneticist, Dr. Joan H. Marks; the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Judith Miller; the literary über-agent Lynn Nesbit; the president of Hunter College, Jennifer Raab, and her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, CNN commentator Michael Goodwin; the president of Business for Diplomatic Action, and chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, Keith Reinhard; the president of the New York Times Company Foundation – and a Pulitzer Prize winner – Jack Rosenthal, and his wife, the sculptress Holly Rosenthal; the president of the New York Academy of Sciences, Ellis Rubinstein; the CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Carl Schramm; President Kennedy’s closest adviser and speech writer, Theodore Sorensen; the president of Ursinus College, John Strassburger; and the head of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, Marion Wiesel.
They may well have been a tad surprised at the superlative graciousness – indeed, even warmth – with which His Highness Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, the biennial festival’s founder and the U.A.E.’s minister of higher education and scientific, received the guests, a large of whom were Jewish. (At last night’s farewell dinner deep in the U.A.E. desert, Marion Wiesel was seated next to Sheikh Nahayan.) The Oxford-educated sheikh, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royalty, put it this way: “We have had a record of trading with the world from ancient times, and we want to be even more open to the world in this age of globalization. Some might say that we are moving too fast. But change is the order of the day, and our country wants to play its role in promoting global peace, security and progress.”
The role has many dimensions. For example, the neighboring emirate of Dubai – one of the seven sheikhdoms that formed the U.A.E. in 1971 – has transformed itself into a glitzy metropolis, one where the world’s tallest residential building is about to be completed; where the world’s biggest indoor ski resort attracts tourists year-round; and whose financial institutions have taken large stakes in NASDAQ and other bourses abroad. Not wishing to compete with the flashiness of Dubai, the more conservative Abu Dhabi – which possesses more than 90 percent of the U.A.E.’s reserves of crude oil and natural – has decided to concentrate on developing institutions of culture, science, technology and education.
In pursuit of that objective, it has arranged to support the establishment of an outpost of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which will be designed by the Los Angeles-based architect Frank Gehry. Abu Dhabi has invited the Louvre to plant roots here. Sheikh Nahayan inaugurated the Nobel Museum a couple of days ago. New York University has agreed to start a campus in Abu Dhabi. And The New York Sun has learned that the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, is being asked to come over to begin discussions to create a branch of his institution in this city of sprawling parks, a plethora of palm trees, and sparkling beaches that sits at the edge of the Persian Gulf (the Emiratis, of course, prefer to call it the Arabian Gulf).
Clearly, Sheikh Nahayan seeks closer ties with New York’s cultural and intellectual establishment, and American participants at the festival came away with the impression that the U.A.E. – a traditional American ally which hosts the largest American naval base outside America itself – represents a role model among Arab states, even if its governance is by family rule and not in the style of Westminster or Washington democracy. (Of course, every aspiring institution builder wants U.A.E.’s money: at the festival, for instance, Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs seized the microphone at three major events on the opening day, repeated his signature mantra of protecting the global environment and alleviating global poverty.)
If the health of a society is to be measured by the quality of governance, then the U.A.E. can be said to enjoy social stability that is unusual in a volatile region.
It could be argued that by opening its doors to immigrants – particularly from poor countries of Asia and Africa – and facilitating the creation of wealth for them; by offering them opportunities to lead the good life (there is no prohibition here, unlike in much of the Islamic world); by exhibiting good governance in a rules-based society where there is zero-tolerance of crime and corruption; by encouraging international sports events such as tennis tournaments with huge prizes (Roger Federer lives in Dubai), and establishing the world’s richest horse race; by expediting the expansion of book stores where the latest in American and European literature is available; by allowing the newest of Hollywood and Bollywood movies to be freely exhibited in megaplexes – it could be argued that the society that leaders such as Sheikh Nahayan are building here in the United Arab Emirates is quite possibly a far more congenial and appealing place than many of the pretentious democracies that dot the developing world but that are, in reality, failed states.