I recently returned to New York City after nearly a year in Dubai. When people ask how Dubai was, or how it feels to be back, I feel an emotional vertigo.
The question feels loaded.
As Americans, we have the luxury of looking away. Our skies are missile-free, even as our tax dollars finance the violence unfolding elsewhere. I left a region being actively harmed to return to the empire perpetrating that harm (though Dubai is entangled in that empire too because the UAE hosts both Israeli tech companies and American military bases).
Are you aware there is a war? I need to gauge.
With an American passport, I am fortunate to have global mobility, and I do not take that lightly. But privilege does not insulate me from grief. I am mourning children killed when the US struck a girls’ school in Iran, which prompted Iran to attack American military bases and companies in the UAE and other Gulf countries. I am sad that my friends in Dubai are traumatized from the sounds of explosions at 3 AM. I am heartbroken watching the ummah, the global Muslim community, fractured by a conflict engineered by forces far beyond its borders.
From living and working there, I came to understand that there are many Dubais. My experience was filled with emotionally breaking down on FaceTime when I felt alone (via VPN, because FaceTime is banned in the UAE) and spontaneous drives to the desert in abayas with my people, many of whom are quietly queer in a country where queerness is illegal. Dubai is full of happenings if you choose to look. But most people are too busy to pay attention. Workaholism, light drone shows, random dust storms (which I find genuinely magical), decadent meals and even more luxurious fitness classes run the city’s flow. The overlap of mean girls, drunk girls, girls with Botox, Muslim girls and beautiful girls all existed here, sometimes in the same room. I loved picking up Arabic phrases (like 5las and 7bb), saying inshallah like it was second nature, spotting hot men at Kite Beach and even hotter men in thobes everywhere I turned.
The Muslim visibility in Dubai did something good for my heart.
When I first landed in Dubai 8 months ago for a job in media, I was eager, alone and wide open to whatever came next. In the airport, the sound of the Azaan drifted through the terminal, and I smiled to myself. Never in Amerikkka, I thought. On the wall nearby, a plaque listed the Eight Principles of Dubai, declared by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. I stopped to read it. The UAE government, it said, is committed to developing the country into an international business hub while maintaining political neutrality and avoiding involvement in military conflicts.
The UAE’s allegiance to US/Israel proves this principle to be a fallacy. Additionally, migrant workers, many from Bangladesh and Pakistan, are responsible for building Dubai’s skyline and delivering food and really anything you can think of straight to your doorstep, routinely face poverty wages and demoralizing living conditions. Behind the artificial ski slopes in a mall and man-made islands lies one of the world’s highest ecological footprints, a debt-fuelled skyline, and a vast, largely invisible gulf between the wealthy elite and the migrant workforce that serves them. Dissenting voices are heavily censored, with strict laws restricting any public discussion of the country’s social realities. And while Dubai perfects its image for global consumption (Dubai chocolate, anyone?), the UAE has remained implicated in the genocide unfolding in Sudan.
Dubai is known to be a crime-free city with no income tax, making it an expat’s Disney World. But that promise of safety is now shattering as debris from intercepted missiles is falling from the sky. While many people trust that they are indeed safe with the high-tech defense system (courtesy of the US), others are unraveling. Some people chose to leave (like Lindsey Lohan), others – immigrant workers, friends with passport restrictions, or people without the means or the freedom to simply book a flight and go – are all forced to stay. Some of them are also expected to work and perform normalcy. Burj Khalifa performs light shows, while some businesses demand their workers return to the office despite the risk.
When I decided to leave Dubai for personal reasons, before the war had even begun, I was mapping out my next journey. I learned my Filipina friend could not visit her own motherland as a Dubai resident due to document restrictions, but as an American tourist, I could fly there with ease. The asymmetry is a product of power derived from American militarism. The US maintains the world’s largest defence budget, and has spent decades engineering political outcomes across the Global South through sanctions, coups, and outright war. The result is a global hierarchy of mobility, where the citizens of powerful nations move freely precisely because those nations have spent generations destabilizing, extracting from, and controlling the countries now deemed too risky, too poor, or too politically inconvenient to grant easy entry to their own people. My Filipina friend cannot visit her motherland freely in part because of the economic conditions shaped by decades of US intervention in the world.
My ability to go anywhere is built, at least in part, on the restriction of others.
Yet, multiple truths exist at once. I am a Muslim Native New Yorker, who lived through 9/11; I view my travels as a pilgrimage and a blessing bestowed upon me by God. While the stamps on my passport pages are markers of imperialism, I am grateful for the global community I have built. Traveling to Dubai reminded me that we are all connected and that true safety for all is an illusion as long as oppressive forces like militarism, xenophobia, and Zionism exist. Solidarity is the only way forward.
These days, I am chronically online, and my brain is on overdrive. In one doom scroll, I see a post by Middle East Eye about how the UAE is arresting people for taking pictures of the debris particles, a UAE nationalism post, a clip of Tehran on fire, and a short video explaining that Iran’s strikes on the UAE have disrupted the RSF, the militia responsible for genocide in Sudan, as supply lines are cut.
The news is too dystopic.
I decide to call my best friend in Dubai.
“Habibti, I’m so happy you’re safe,” he answers immediately. He confirms he is okay, just depressed. “I live in the Capital,” he jokes.
“Babes, I live in the real Capital,” I snicker. I validate his emotions and remind him that depression is a normal response to war. Bonded over our love of God, I remind him that good will triumph over evil; it’s already written in the Quran. I tell him that New York City is its own bubble. There are no intercepted missiles (yet) or fallen debris. There are ICE agents, NYPD, now run by the people’s mayor Zohran, and city rats. We talk about Iran and Lebanon and how precious our lives are when brown bodies are so often disposable in the eyes of the state.
I make it a point to tell my friends in New York City about the war, at the very least. I commit to divest more intentionally from Big Tech, deleting Spotify as a start. I mute and unfollow people posting UAE nationalism content. If the state relies on us to de-intellectualise, I refuse to let the AI era flatten my thinking, and I am returning to reading and writing as acts of resistance.
Organizing is illegal in the UAE. In New York City though, there is a no-war march and my friends and I know the drill. We share emergency contacts, chat on Signal for privacy, and mask up. The state still does its best to surveil and suppress direct actions with cops employing the classic tactic of dividing groups or undercover cops sprinkled within the crowd, but we show up anyway because we know our rights and we look out for one another.
Watching people grow more conscious gives me hope.
A conscious collective means politicising, critically engaging with the systems that govern us, questioning what we are fed, and recognising that we are many and that we are capable of uniting. During my time in Dubai, I received messages, mostly from New Yorkers, urging me to publicly call out the UAE for its complicity in the monstrous violence against Sudan. Working in media, I did what I could by platforming stories on Sudanese girlhood, art, and beauty rituals - an attempt to raise awareness subtly and strategically, in the ways available to me.
What struck me, though, was how quickly people on the internet moved to criticise Dubai and its media outlets without any understanding of the surveillance and censorship that shapes life there. That impulse to cancel is itself a form of American ethnocentrism, a refusal to reckon with context and choose ego. The media in Dubai is a state institution, one node in a vast global apparatus. When one part of the world is silenced, it becomes the duty of the rest of the world to tell those stories, to resist, and to stand for justice rather than simply point fingers.
People in Dubai are systematically silenced and depoliticised, but that does not mean they are indifferent. Many do not want war. Many stand with humanity. It is simply not as straightforward as leaving a place they call home or risking their safety to speak out against the state. I dream of a world where the world conspires together, honestly and tactfully, to say no to war, to politicise together, and to stand on the side of humanity.
The future is uncertain. My grief is messy.
I have people I love on every side of this war, and leaving the region does not mean leaving it behind. It means carrying it with me. This essay is where I start because, contrary to what is written on that DXB airport plaque, Dubai is political. When a country declares neutrality while hosting the infrastructure of an empire, that is political. When people are censored for speaking against a regime, that is political. When missiles share a skyline with the tallest building in the world, that is political. Everything is political.