The best way to meet Tajiks in Dubai is by walking around Al-Nasser Square, a public place nearby the Baniyas underground station in Dubai Deira. As a meeting place for both tourists and foreigners (Elsheshtawy 2008), Al Nasr Square forms the spatial centre of the Tajik Dubai business.
Like other migrant workers from CIS countries, Tajiks jokingly refer to Al Nasr Square as mini Cherkiz bazaar.10
Deira, a vibrant urban district located in the heart of Dubai, offers plenty of shopping malls, market halls, hotels, and restaurants.
Surrounding the Dubai Creek River with its city port, Deira is the main shopping district in Dubai’s historic quarter. Russian and other tourists have access to a wide variety of popular fashion shops, brands, and restaurants, as well as the offices of numerous trading, cargo and shipping companies. Additionally, there is an extensive selection of electronic, cosmetic, jewelry, and toy stores, and the majority of Dubai’s fur coat shops are located around Al Nasr Square.11
Historically, the Deira district, located between the Creek side and Al Nasr Square, was the commercial centre of Dubai. However, when revenues from the oil industry and tourist sectors soared over the last two decades, Dubai expanded from a mere two square kilometers in 1950 to 1,000 square kilometers in 2015, moving the centre of the city to Sheikh Zayed Road and the Business Bay districts with their high-rise commercial buildings. Nevertheless, Deira remains one of the main business centres, a popular destination for tourists, as well as a dwelling area for foreign migrant workers and residents from Asia and Africa who work in construction, hotels, the care sector or in one of the city’s many malls and street markets. Deira is therefore also known as Dubai’s
‘migrant quarter’.
Due to the high density of hotels booked by tourists and businesspeople from Russia and other post-Soviet states in Eurasia, many Tajik workers,
10 Cherkiz bazaar was one of the biggest international bazaars in Moscow, were many Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and Azerbaijani migrants worked, until it was closed by the city administration in 2008.
11 Also known as Jamal Abd el-Nasr Square, close to the Dubai underground station Baniyas square.
businesspeople, and entrepreneurs locate their offices, work, and living places around Al Nasr Square. Above all, the area is the workplace of about 300 to 500 kamak,12 street brokers who invite tourists from Russia and other CIS countries to visit the fur-coat shops they work for and later share the commission they get from the purchase. Tajik kamak, like those from other post-Soviet countries, have their own gathering points around Al Nasr Square, thereby following the spatial segregation of the local fur-coat business along ethnic and national lines. They wait in small groups in front of hotels, tourist shops, and restaurants, trying to find clients and offering them their shopping services. Like many other Tajiks in Dubai who work as vendors in souvenir, smartphone, or fur coat shops, as tourist guides or small-scale entrepreneurs and traders, they pursue their business interests in the grey zone between formality and informality. While only a minority of Tajiks, i.e., those working in shops or companies, have employment contracts that allow for long-term residence and family settlement in the United Arab Emirates, the majority are seasonal workers staying during the peak tourist season, from October until April. When the tourists leave, the workers return home to Tajikistan or Russia, where they wait until the new tourist season starts. Long-term residence is tied to an employment contract with a Dubai-based company, which requires connections (wasta) to informal networks around business elites and the Arab kafala system of sponsorship, which is the system by which foreign migration is managed and governed in the United Arab Emirates (see Gardner 2012, Vora 2009).
Tajik kamak, while trying hard to become ‘connected’ to the business or social network around a kafeel (an Arab sponsor) through knowing the
‘right’ people and having the ‘right’ knowledge, work on the basis of tourist visas. The latter, however, allow for short-term residence but do not include a work permission. Tajiks are therefore often involved in illicit economic practices and street work activities.
12 Due to the undocumented status of kamak, work statistical data or official numbers do not exist. The number above reproduces our main Tajik interlocutors’ estimation of Tajik kamak working around Al Nasr Square in Dubai Deira between 1010 and 2014. Kamak is a Greek word referring commissioners, i.e. people who introduce potential customers to a specific business and in return receive a commission of 10–15% of the total sale from the owner. However, since the fur coat business in Dubai depends on Greeks, the term kamak only refers to commissioners working in the fur coat trade.
Tajiks are newcomers in Dubai’s economy. Nevertheless, many Tajiks successfully integrate into the emirate’s global tourist and trading business simply because they are able to capitalize on their close cultural ties with Iranian and Afghan traders, entrepreneurs, and businessmen. Cultivating relations to the established Afghan or Iranian diaspora in the emirate, Afghan traders and Iranian businessmen have an influential position in the transregional trading business in the UAE and simultaneously invest in the real estate sector and Dubai’s booming middle- and upper-class tourist sector (see Elshashtawy 2008, Parsa and Keivani 2002). For Tajiks, they are therefore potential doorkeepers to relations (wasta) around potential Arab sponsors (kafeel), and, as such, an important prerequisite to upgrade one’s one status as ‘foreign migrant worker’ through moving from the informal to the formal economy; i.e., to gain formal employment with a Dubai-based company.
‘We trade with whom we trust’ is a core principle ruling not only the Tajik Dubai business. It first of all points to the importance of ethnicity- and kin-based business networks and the leading role family members play as ideal business partners because they ‘would never cheat you’.
However, the cultural proximity of Iranians from Baluchistan and Dari-speaking Afghans turn them into ‘trusted familiars’ instead of ‘strangers’
(Osella and Osella 2012:128). Belonging to the Sunni-Hanafi branch of Islam and sharing their rootedness in Persian culture, literature, and history, Tajiks perceive Afghans, Baluch, and other Sunni Iranians as ‘brothers’ (barodar) and claim to belong to ‘one people’ (yak millat) and share one historic-cultural identity. It is therefore no surprise that Tajiks consider Sunni Iranians and Dari-speaking Afghans as ‘culturally closer’ (nazdik) than Turkish speaking Central Asians or Uzbeks from Tajikistan. Another important factor, however, is the Sunni-Shia divide. Although a common claim among Tajiks we met in Dubai was that they do business ‘with everyone as long as he is a Muslim’, our interlocutors simultaneously emphasized that they ‘would never share their accommodation with a Shiite!’ Strikingly, religious and cultural belonging has a great impact on how Tajiks adapt to the city, integrate into Dubai business sectors and articulate unity, sameness, and difference (see also Landa, 2013:3).
We thus argue that Tajiks pursue their Dubai business projects in a flexible space of ‘cultural nestedness’. This allows for leaving the centre
of one’s one ethnicity- and kin-based network, crossing over its natural boundaries. It also means involving oneself in the production of what Finke, in his study on the Kazakh minority in Mongolia, has called
‘institutional cosiness’; i.e., the institutional production of ideas about appropriatedness that include the longing for ‘a geographical and social environment with which one is familiar, knows the rules of the game, and feels at home’ (Finke 2003:178).
Figs. 2.2 and 2.3 Dubai Deira around Al Nasr Square: Commercial Center and
‘Meeting Place’. Photos © Manja Stephan-Emmrich (2013), CC BY 4.0