Dubai: Travel reflections from a city between desert and sky.
ISLAMIC TIMES – Sometimes, Dubai does not seem built but dreamed — a vision of glass and dust, cradled between sea and desert. For decades it has lain there, surrounded by regions of unrest, and yet remains an oasis of progress, ambition and prosperity. Its skyline feels like a symphony of human ingenuity.
On ordinary days, the traveller follows a familiar itinerary here: riding up the Burj Khalifa to see the city as a mosaic of roads, water and towers; wandering through the air-conditioned universe of Dubai Mall, where aquarium, ice rink and luxury brands blend into one; heading out to Palm Jumeirah, where hotels rise like self-contained islands of imagination in the sea; visiting the Museum of the Future with its glowing ring architecture; and losing oneself in the alleys of the old souks by the Creek, where gold, spices and fabrics tell of another Dubai.
Between beach days along the Jumeirah coast, evening walks at the Marina and boat rides on Dubai Creek, a choreography of impressions emerges that draws many visitors back again and again.
We arrive, and everything feels familiar. The airport runs efficiently; a tangle of roads leads into the different districts of the metropolis. Everything moves to the usual rhythm — until the world changes.
The news of war hits us like a sudden drop in temperature: flames over the Gulf, and a hotel in Jumeirah on fire. And yet — strangely — the city remains calm. No panic, no angry voices. You sense an invisible hand holding order in place. The air defence systems protect what can be protected in human terms.
Life Continues Under a Shaken Sky
Inevitably, concern grows. The first flights are cancelled; the future suddenly seems uncertain. But life goes on, almost with stoic dignity. In cafés, cups clink; in malls, people keep shopping; children laugh on playgrounds while the news scrolls maps and frontlines across the screens. It is as if an invisible boundary lay between global drama and local everyday life — permeable to information, impermeable to panic.
We drive to Ras al Khaimah. Our route takes us past the construction sites of time, out to the quieter emirate at the edge of the mountains. In the distance the Al Hajar Mountains rise. The landscape feels archaic: water, rock, sand — nothing more is needed to create a world of its own.
We want to visit the museum dedicated to Ahmad ibn Mājid, the 15th-century navigator. People say his charts measured the sea, yet his greatest discovery may have been longing itself. The crisis reaches into everyday life: the museum is, unfortunately, closed.
Photo: Freepik.com
Ramadan Nights and a Different Face of Islam
It is Ramadan. The nights in Dubai are unlike any other. The mosques glow in geometric light displays and draw the eyes of visitors. They are open to curious travellers. We visit a mosque in Jumeirah, a house of peace during unrest.
Here, it becomes clear why so many guests see Islam anew: not as dogma, but as a living culture, a kind of social architecture that creates spaces of calm in a vibrating, accelerated world. Even when a smartphone alarm blares in the middle of the Tarawih prayer, the mood remains completely relaxed. The imam continues as if nothing had happened.
In Dubai, Muslims are associated with economic and social success — entrepreneurs, scientists, architects, people who move with ease in an open, global modernity. That matters, because in recent decades radical political Islam has created images of fear and separation. Dubai, by contrast, offers a counter-model: an Islam of education, progress and dignity. A place where religion and civility seem to flow into one another.
For the city, tourism is far more than a backdrop; it is a central pillar of its economic existence. A significant share of Dubai’s GDP is generated through hotels, gastronomy, entertainment, trade fairs, shopping and air travel, with tourism and its spillover effects contributing around a tenth or more of the wider UAE economy and supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The fact that the city has developed its infrastructure, security architecture, cultural programmes and festivals so consistently is not just image-building but a survival strategy: without visitors, conferences and this constant circulation of people and ideas, Dubai’s economic engine would slow noticeably. Perhaps this is one reason why, even in crisis, everything is geared towards maintaining an impression of reliability and hospitality.
Reflections: Islam, Images, and Travel
For the traveller’s gaze, this is both disconcerting and healing. Many guests arrive with invisible luggage — not just suitcases, but images. These are images from news studios, headlines and films, where the Muslim often appears as a marginal figure: threatening, backward, trapped in a rigid system of rules and prohibitions. Such images are so familiar that we barely recognise them as constructions anymore, but rather as background noise, as the self-evident backdrop to the word “Islam”.
Yet in recent years, that backdrop has begun to crumble in Dubai. Not because someone persuades, preaches or converts, but because everyday life offers a different narrative. In hotel lobbies and co-working spaces, in convention centres and shopping malls, sit men and women whose quiet self-assurance disarms the stereotypes: prayer app on the smartphone, business plans on the laptop, designer suit, hijab, sneakers, Rolex.
The old categories — traditional vs. modern, religious vs. secular — begin to shift like dunes in the wind. The Gulf states promote tourism, but also cultural and interfaith encounters at a high level.
Travel writing has always grappled with the “Other”, often from a safe distance. The traveller looked, described, interpreted — and turned the distant into a mirror for what was familiar. Here, however, that gaze reaches its limits. In Dubai, Islam can no longer be conveniently placed in the box of the exotic; it is not folklore, but part of how a hypermodern city functions.
The Muslim is not a projection surface but an actor: CEO, engineer, start-up founder, university professor, hotel manager or pilot. The familiar overlay of “Muslim” with “backward” falls apart like a poorly glued collage.
This becomes especially visible during Ramadan. When the city awakens for iftar after sunset, the smell of cardamom, rice and grilled meat mingles with the hum of conversation. Muslims share a moment of togetherness when the first glass of water is raised, the first date tasted.
The traveller who is willing to observe realises: worlds are not falling apart here; they are being reassembled. The negative iconography of radical political Islam — bombs, militant slogans, grainy black-and-white videos — is not combated polemically in Dubai, but gently corrected.
Not through counterpropaganda, but through a different image. Islam appears not as a block, but as a texture — woven together with economy, education and urban life.
For the traveller, this raises an old question anew: What do we see when we travel? And what do we bring along? Perhaps, in this sense, Dubai is less a place than a test. It tests how stable our inner images really are.
Do we see in the Muslim business partner, the praying doctor, the devout hotel manager only the role that the news has assigned them? Or are we able to interrupt the familiar dramaturgy of the “Other” and relieve our gaze of its burden?
Travel, Bruce Chatwin once suggested, is also an exercise in doubt — doubt about one’s own certainties, about the seemingly fixed maps in one’s head. In Dubai, this doubt becomes productive: the cliché of “backwardness” cannot withstand reality.
What remains is a productive disorientation, an empty space that slowly fills with new impressions. And perhaps this empty space is the most valuable thing one can take away from the city: the experience that Islam is not only an object of debate but a lived, diverse modernity — with all its contradictions, tensions and hopes.
Photo: Adobe Stock
Red Dunes and the Silence of the Desert
Later, we drive out to the red dunes, just an hour by car from Dubai. Their light is soft, almost melancholic. The sun sinks, and a silence spreads like an answer without a question. Edmond Jabès was right: You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it. And yet — or perhaps for that very reason — in this loss we find a quiet kind of home. Between the ridges of sand, nothing echoes but what is already within us.
When our return flight is cancelled, time takes on shape again. Two days of uncertainty. And still the city remains cheerful, responsible, obliging. Emirates rearranges bookings, hotels keep their prices steady and car rental agents smile like old friends.
In a world that so often defines itself only through crises, Dubai cultivates the art of reliability — an act of hope, modest and of great value. It is as if the city were saying: if we cannot resolve the big conflicts, we can at least make sure, in small ways, that no one is left stranded.
Eventually, we do take off. Below us, the sea sparkles and the city slip away — like a vision one once wanted to hold on to, only to realise that it lives precisely in its fleetingness. Perhaps this is Dubai’s true strength: it does not merely endure; it transforms itself. Again, and again.
In the glow of the future, in the belief in the next morning. And somewhere between clouds and sea, the traveller carries a new, quieter map within — one in which Islam is no longer just a catchword, but an encounter.
