a modern muslim country?

Really interesting article about the "other side" of Dubai. Yes, I know a lot of this has been said and/or written about before, but one part in particular stood out to me. The writer is interviewing a young Emirati and asks about Dubai's ongoing downward slide, and the Emirati says (emphasis mine):

"The Middle East will be far more dangerous if Dubai fails. Our export isn't oil, it's hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans or Iranians grow up saying – I want to go to Dubai. We're very important to the region. We are showing how to be a modern Muslim country. We don't have any fundamentalists here. Europeans shouldn't gloat at our demise. You should be very worried.... Do you know what will happen if this model fails? Dubai will go down the Iranian path, the Islamist path."

Just...interesting. I haven't been to the UAE (yet), though I often hear it described as being overwhelmingly fake. It would be weird, I think, to transition from Cairo, with its 4,000 year old pyramids, to Dubai, a city that sprang up from almost nothing in the last 30-odd years. I get that there are incentives, but it lacks the culture that makes the Middle East so appealing to me. Still, it's interesting to hear the country, now in a magnificent state of decline, described as the great hope for the Middle East. For everyone's sake, I hope that Egypt, and the rest of the region, can do better.

I'll end just by mentioning another quote from the article. While interviewing another Emirati, this one a political dissident who was blacklisted and had his passport revoked after speaking with Human Rights Watch, the man says something very telling in regards to both Islamism and freedom of the press in the Middle East:

"People who are told to shut up all the time can just explode."