Okay the blog this week was supposed to be a rant at customer service- but then someone from the UK tweeted me (@Audiomonkee) saying they’re coming to visit to Dubai-and wanted to know what is and isn’t allowed in the UAE. I replied saying ‘normal things’ are allowed, having only 160 characters.
However, I do think it’s brought up an important point. The UAE, while it does have random idiosyncrasies, is also one of the most liberal places in the region. Yes, there are rules and regulations, but as far as I know, all societies are made up of certain rules. In the UK you can take pictures of government buildings, in the Ukraine you can’t. In Malia, you can have sex on the beach, in Dubai (and mostly everywhere else in the world) you can’t.
The UAE has got some bad rep recently, thanks to some frisky Brits and equally frisky tabloid papers, which is why I hope I can help you make an informed decision about the country. Firstly the couple infamous for their sexual exploits on the beach would have been breaking public decency rules in pretty much most of the world and an insider has told me that the couple who were charged for kissing in a restaurant were warned numerous times before they were dobbed in.
The UAE bases a lot of its rules on a culture based on a mixture of Islam, Gulf culture and the nomadic and pearl diving heritage it has. Because of the set up, women and men tended to have different tasks and did tend to be separated from each other in a lot of situations. This is something that has stuck, but does not mean the female population here are downtrodden. In fact, Emirati girls are higher achievers than the boys at school and university. This week, I met two who were convinced that there’ll soon be more Emirati women in the UAE cabinet than men, they say like everything, it needs time to help perceptions change, and they are right.
Consider the fact that the UAE is forty years old on December 2nd, England is hundreds of years old-yet in England only around 22 percent of women make up the parliament today, while a very similar number of women are in government in the Emirates. In the UK, the first woman elected into parliament was in 1919 after the war, in the UAE, women were in parliament since parliament existed. This is an excellent article by two women I have interviewed many times
Around 40 years ago, there were less than 50 cars on the UAE’s dirty, sandy roads…and today it’s got over 400 skyscrapers and a few million cars and an annoying but quite advanced toll system.
The point I’m getting at, is the UAE is a relatively young country and it will make mistakes but its positives outweigh the negatives by far or so many of us expats will not live here.
Of course there are a lot of rules I, and many others, don’t agree with; for example this week a girl was fined 300 dirhams for falling asleep on the metro. When I called the RTA to ask why, the simple answer was it’s a rule. Another metro story, earlier in the year, a colleague of mine was fined for running in the metro station, when I contested it with the police officer, he said the train comes every 8 minutes, just wait and be patient.
Those rules really infuriate me, just like all the bureaucracy it takes to do something simple like cancel a visa or move jobs, but at the same time living here is easy, its safe and there is a strong cultural awareness. Children here are very respectful of older people, to the point I can always tell if an expat has been born and raised in the UAE or their home country.
So, yes, getting back to my point...walking around showing overt public displays of affection are frowned upon, but I don’t really know any society where this is actually okay. I’ve been on buses in England where people do their best to look everywhere but at the couple who are trying to swallow each other’s tonsils at the front. It really isn’t pleasant, whether or not you’re a prude and I say hallelujah to a government that fights for my rights to look all around a bus and have a tonsil-free view.
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