COMPANIES Six hundred years ago, Ibn Khaldoun, the pre-eminent Arab social scientist, argued that tough desert tribes would always supplant urban elites in an inexorable cycle of renewal.
A contemporary example of this evolutionary theory occurred at the World Economic Forum last weekend as Omar bin Sulaiman, the long-standing chief of the Dubai International Financial Centre, was abruptly dismissed. The news was imparted in a terse press release, while Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, the emirate’s crown prince, addressed the forum. Fairly or not, much of Dubai’s elite is being made to atone for the wastage that accompanied a period of giddy growth that has turned into bust.
