Thursday, October 30, 2008

How Arabic is Dubai?

2nd order: From a cultural perspective I expected Dubai to be much more Arabic. I thought there would have been a much stronger influence in terms of daily cultural practice. In fact Dubai seems to be more an Indian and Pakistani place if you take the people and their habits into account. However as they form the majority of the population this is not as astonishing as one might think. Recent figures showed almost 50% of Dubai's population are Indians.
The same accounts for Muslim traditions. My observation is that you rather rarely see veil or ‘Abbaja’ – a long black robe, which traditional Muslim women wear when they go on the streets. This might be again a consequence out of the fact that just around 17 percent (see Wikipedia) of the citizens are Emirati. However one should not be mislead by this façade, the law is still based on the Shari’a. Just recently a couple of two British executives went for three months to prison for having sexual intercourse at the beach.

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