Margaritas, Jeans, Golf, Safeway--Can This Be an Arab Sheikdom?

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A Pakistani in a wide sombrero greets the customers at Pancho Villa’s, Dubai’s homage to Mexican cuisine. Filipino waitresses in slit skirts serve schooners of frozen margaritas while a Scottish duet croons country songs under the protective colors of a Confederate flag.

In Jabal Ali, about 20 miles from town, workmen are putting the finishing touches on a championship 18-hole golf course. Japanese businessmen are expected to be the first to pay the $2,500 annual dues.

At the Safeway grocery store, European and American women in tight jeans and short pants push their carts past cases of frozen food, while Filipino check-out girls bag the groceries.

Dubai is primarily a nation of strangers. By conservative estimate, more than 85% of its 500,000 population is made up of foreigners.

Even more striking, the rulers of Dubai, one of the small Persian Gulf sheikdoms that constitute the United Arab Emirates, have consciously made the country into an oasis of tolerance in an area better known for its religiously inspired austerity.

“It’s like living in a vacation resort,” said a British expatriate named Richard, cooling off with a large beer after two sets of tennis.

Just across the Persian Gulf lies the fundamentalist Islamic theocracy of Iran, headed by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, while the conservatism of the orthodox Muslim regimes in neighboring Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have become legend.

Drinking alcoholic beverages in Saudi Arabia is a whipping offense, but British-style pubs here feature draft beer from Australia. While the sexes under the conservative regimes are prohibited from mingling in public, bikinis are commonplace on Dubai’s beaches, and the atmosphere is as relaxed as European resort.

‘Not Afraid of Foreigners’

“We are not afraid of foreigners,” said Abdulla A. Abulhoul, director of foreign relations for the Dubai Chamber of Commerce. “We live with them in confidence. We realize also that when we accept expatriates, we have to take care of their needs.”

Those needs include everything from ice skating rinks and bowling alleys to separate schools for students from Britain, the United States, India and Pakistan.

Another rarity in the Persian Gulf is the religious freedom represented by the proliferation of churches in Dubai, ranging from Roman Catholic to Baptist. There is even a Buddhist temple.

One Western diplomat noted that the rulers of Dubai are aware that their petroleum reserves will eventually be exhausted and that they will have to survive on the kind of general import-export trade that only expatriate expertise can keep running smoothly.

“They know how to keep conservative opinion satisfied, while maintaining a liberal way of life for the expatriate community,” the diplomat said. “They realize that Dubai gets ‘expats’ cheaper than Saudi Arabia because Dubai treats them a whole lot better.”

The diplomat added that in domestic matters, such as maintaining strictly sheltered conditions for women, Dubai is as strict as other countries of the Arabian Peninsula.

The credit for the tolerant air of Dubai is generally given to Sheik Rashid ibn Said al Maktum, the country’s ruler, who has largely transferred power to his four sons. The latter have carried on his liberal tradition.

In a famous anecdote, Rashid was said to have told a visiting Kuwaiti emir, who complained about the presence of alcohol, that “we have the bar and we have the mosque and in between we have the police station. Nobody interferes in either.”

While Dubai has had its share of the petroleum bonanza, it also has a 1,000-year history of international trading that has lent the country a highly cosmopolitan air. Along the Dubai Creek, Iranian traders still load wooden, junk-like vessels called dhows with American washing machines in testament to the freewheeling--and entrepreneurial--nature of Dubai society.

Expecting Culture Shock

“I was expecting real culture shock when I arrived in this exotic sounding emirate, and wondering how I was going to cope with the language,” one young diplomat said. “Then you turn on the radio and there is American top-40 and ‘Moonlighting’ is on the TV. It’s easy to feel like you’re back in America.”

For the last two weeks, live satellite transmissions of the Iran- contra hearings in Washington have been the talk of the town. An English woman reads the evening news and most of the disk jockeys on Dubai radio have broad London accents.

In fact, the estimated 3,000 Americans and 8,000 British expatriates are but a small minority of the foreigners here. By far the largest contingent comes from India, followed by the Pakistanis and Filipinos, who are brought here mainly to do manual labor but often end up running shops as well.

“You hear more Urdu (the language of Pakistan) in the markets than you do Arabic,” said a British journalist who is a longtime resident here.

Indian and Pakistani laborers are everywhere, tending the grass median strips in 130-degree heat, zipping in midtown traffic on motorbikes and swarming over war-damaged ships in the Dubai dry docks, a major income earner for the emirate.

The manager of the airport’s famed duty-free shop, one of the largest in the world, acknowledged in a recent interview that none of the 280 employees is from Dubai or even speaks Arabic.

At some of the city’s better hotels, a guest could easily awake and imagine that he had landed by mistake in Manila, since most hotel staff members are Filipinos.

As much as the expatriate workers seem omnipresent, it is the foreigners at play who seem the most striking to visitors from elsewhere in the Arab world.

“Everybody back home said, ‘You’ll hate it, you’ll be second class,’ ” said Suzanne Sutton, a single British woman who came here six months go to work as sales executive for a major hotel.

“But I really think the life in Dubai is better than back in the U.K. The standard of living is higher, people are nicer. They come here to have a good time. I couldn’t imagine going back now. You work hard, but you play hard, too.”