A Different Middle East

In the west, particularly USA, some stereotypical images of the Middle East colonize the mental landscape of the people. What are these stereotypical images? Here are the main ones:

• The home of radical Islam, where strict Sharia law governs the daily life of people
• A land of constant strife: Palestine and Israel, Iraq, and more
• A throwback to Middle Ages, where obscurantist ideas are bandied about by men in decrepit coffee shops or in Bedouin tents.
• A gusher of Oil: the land of unlimited Black Gold buried under the sands.
• A quaint, exotic Oriental fantasy of Camels, Souks, the Casbah, Belly Dancers and Masked Rifle-shooting Horsemen

As with all stereotypes, there are some grains of reality in all these images that float in western imaginations. But the whole reality is, always, complex and multigrained and not easy to characterize.

In this project, under my guidance, Kyle Dunlap - a senior at the University of Rhode Island - looks at what we have termed "The Other Middle East". These are the smaller nations around the Persian Gulf which are racing at a furious pace to modernize and diversify and (in their particular national ways) even "westernize" before the petroleum-driven revenues dry up. UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman -- and a few others -- are transforming at speeds that often make the East and Southeast Asian development pace look like a crawl.

Our hope is that this blog will create a deeper understanding of what is happening in these parts of the Middle East, and what these breathtaking changes mean not just for the Middle East region but for the world as a whole.

Nik Dholakia
Professor
College of Business Administration
University of Rhode Island