c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates _ Tolerance takes on new meaning in this trading center of the Arabian world.

Once a fishing village and then a desert sheikdom of 20,000 people, Dubai is now a lively city of over 1 million, 82 percent of them expatriates, especially Indians and Pakistanis. It feels like a combination of Chicago and Dallas, except that architecture ventures beyond cookie-cutter towers. One hotel is shaped like a sail and extends underwater. A hotel under construction will be entirely underwater. The world’s tallest building will be constructed here by 2006.

The difference was oil, of course. Dubai doesn’t have as much as neighboring Abu Dhabi, but a progressive sheikh leveraged Dubai’s 1966 oil discovery to build infrastructure: the world’s largest manmade port, a world-class airport, modern schools, and the power, transportation and communications required for factories, commerce and, more recently, tourism. Dubai is determined to be a commercial center rivaling Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Another difference is momentum. Money begets money, hard work is contagious, risk-taking is welcome, and vision has room to blossom. Those dreadful “seven last words” of the fearful _ “we’ve never done it that way before” _ don’t seem to occur here.

Another difference seems to be the desert. Thirty minutes outside Dubai, the desert begins. My colleagues and I join a “desert safari” of Toyota Land Cruisers skidding up and down dunes. We visit a camel ranch. We stop at a “camp,” for camel rides and a dinner of barbecued lamb and chicken while seated on cushions at low tables.

This is tourist fare, of course, and nothing like the life once known by Arabs pre-oil. But if you look out over rolling sand punctuated by straggly but hearty shrubs, you see “desert” at its full meaning: wild, pathless, never ceasing to blow sand and to erase yesterday’s trail. Desert demands respect. Desert requires endurance. Desert begs companions. Desert invites silence.

After supper, I climb a dune that encircles the camp. A full moon shines overhead. I see the distant glow of Dubai, as well as trucks crossing the desert on a newly completed six-lane highway. This isn’t exactly a picture-book Arabian night. But it is real. Beyond the camp’s faint lights lies a desert that I couldn’t survive on my own.

For all of its towers and talents, it’s clear that Dubai, like all cities and civilized places, is just a veneer set atop the desert. Stop the oil flow, and this goes away. Stop the commerce, and these buildings empty. Start a war, and underwater hotels look less inviting. Given a chance, the desert would blow its way across these glistening streets and merge again with the sea.

What will stop the desert’s return? Wealth, yes, commercial zeal, progressive rule. But the key difference here, I think, is tolerance.

Indians and Pakistanis flock here from their overpopulated and warring lands. Asians of every ethnic nuance find opportunity here. Europeans and Americans are welcome. A Catholic church sits near an Islamic mosque. Newspapers tell of religious wars in other lands, streets turned to war zones, and nuclear saber-rattling. Here people get along: more than 100 nationalities, several major religions, safe streets, traditional souks (markets) and modern malls where some women wear the abiyah covering all but their eyes and others wear scarves or Western dresses, while men wear everything from thobe and ghuttra to jeans.

Nothing can blossom in a desert unless people take the risk of collaboration and mutual respect. No civilization, however long its history, can survive once collaboration and mutual respect vanish. When anti-Western terrorism exploded two years ago, leading to war farther up the Arabian Sea in Iraq, commerce suddenly stalled in Dubai. Markets here note every twitch in Islam’s internal struggles between progressive and traditional, between tolerance and extremism.

The mounting religious and political intolerance in America is terrifying, not just because it makes for ugly preaching and hateful politics, but because it threatens the very civilization on which we depend. We can learn from Dubai. If extremists get their way and the intolerant succeed in undermining America’s daring experiment in openness, we all lose, and the desert will reclaim its own.

DEA END EHRICH