Dubai: Confronting the mythology that has sprung up as quick and opulently as the city itself, analyst Afshin Molavi and Annabel Kantaria, author of Telegraph’s expat blog, met at the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature on Friday, hoping to thresh the fiction from the facts in a session entitled: Eye on Dubai.
Molavi, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, was the man responsible for the National Geographic cover story on Dubai, Sudden City. He said that the story was deemed as a cover only when editors from the magazine’s international family expressed their avid curiosity.
“About 20 or 21 of the 29 Nat Geo editions around the world carried it as a cover, which was incredible. It generated an incredible amount of interest from the magazine’s editors in countries like Japan and Czech Republic,” he said, adding that it was Dubai’s unique reputation that attracted attention to the article.
On the topic of news articles written about the city, Annabel Kantaria said that the media landscape in Dubai has changed dramatically in the last two decades, adding that with the advent and popularity of social media each individual holds a responsibility to report the facts.
“People have to be careful not to lend themselves to rumour-mongering,” she said. “With social media, the nature of news circulation has changed and people need to be careful not to spread inaccurate information.”
“In Africa, Dubai’s name has become a shorthand for success,” said Molavi.
He also said that Dubai is becoming a cultural hub, as many artists from Iran, Africa and the Levant come to Dubai to exhibit and sell their works.
“Dubai’s place as a cultural hub happened organically,” he said, when asked about the city’s cultural future. “A number of renowned galleries have opened branches here, including Christie’s. A lot of regional artists and even artists from Iran and Africa come to Dubai to exhibit and sell their works.”
