The UAE has understood something we in the West (apparently) refuse to understand.
About a month ago I had a conversation that has stayed with me ever since. A friend had just returned home to Europe after five years in the United Arab Emirates. She had genuinely enjoyed living there. She had thrived, felt safe, lived a good life. But more important than anything else - she had come home with a view of Europe that had changed fundamentally.
Not because the UAE is paradise. It is not. But because certain contrasts, once you have lived with them, become impossible to ignore.
She explained it without drama and without ideological bias - the UAE is an Islamic society. The most moderate, pragmatic and Western-compatible of its kind, yes - but still an Islamic society. And precisely that was not negotiable. Not open to interpretation. And not subject to dialogue.
Islam constitutes the foundation for state, culture and social order. It is not one viewpoint among others, but the very premise everything else rests upon. The starting point, the destination and the boundary. And because this is recognised and accepted, the country has organised itself accordingly, consistently and without illusions that things could be otherwise.
What struck her was how refreshingly honest this recognition was. How little was negotiated about what carried the society. And how clear it was who was guest and who was host. When she came home, therefore, it was not the UAE she saw differently. It was Europe.
Because the UAE knows who they are. And they know what their society rests upon - religion, tradition, hierarchy and order. Precisely therefore they have also understood something crucial, which Western Europe after half a century still seems unable to understand - or perhaps no longer wishes to understand -
That Islamic civilisation and Western civilisation cannot coexist unregulated.
But the UAE wants coexistence.
And has therefore acted accordingly.
As a foreigner you are welcome in the UAE. You may live there, work there, earn money and live comfortably - even luxuriously. But from the first day the premise is clear - you are guest, not citizen. And you never will be. Your stay is conditional, and is not a right. You have no political voice and no claim to cultural influence, because you live in a society that is already defined.
Therefore it is also expected that you respect Islam as society's foundation, refrain from criticising the religion, the state and the social order, keep your private morality private and adjust your public behaviour, your language and your dress.
You must accept that certain freedoms, which in the West are regarded as self-evident, simply do not exist here. Public intimacy is not tolerated. Political activism is not tolerated. Culture war is not tolerated. Public expressions of LGBTQ and queer identity are not tolerated. Social media is not a free space, and freedom of speech does not exist in a form we would recognise.
And most important of all - the rules are not negotiable.
If they are transgressed, there do not follow long legal processes, moral discussions or television debates. There are consequences. Often deportation. Without further explanation. Not because the UAE is chaotic or evil, but because it is consistent.
What is interesting is that the model functions precisely as they want it to function. There is order, security, low crime and high predictability. Because no one is in doubt about the roles one enters into.
And that is what is interesting - because the UAE does not attempt to integrate the West. They do not attempt to transform their society, in the dream of uniting the unifiable. They invite labour - not worldviews, foreign culture or demands for transformation of their way of life, faith and organisation. Because they know who they are.
...
And then there is Europe....
Here we have chosen the opposite approach.
We have said - including to people from societies far more restrictively and orthodoxly Islamic organised than the UAE - that they can come as they are, preserve their norms, challenge our norms, demand changes and transform institutions, language, legislation and culture, if our organisation does not quite align so well with their expectations.
We have made guests into moral judges over our own civilisation, made the host countries negotiable and made our own culture relative.
Mr. "It'll Be Fine" has wreaked havoc with lack of understanding of one's own Western civilisation, lack of self-worth and a marshmallow in hand.
And when anyone has pointed out the incompatibilities, it is therefore dismissed as fear, hate, intolerance or phobia - because there is no need for arguments when one "stands on the right side of history".
But the asymmetry is striking, once one sees it clearly - Islamic societies actively protect their foundation. Western Europe has given up protecting its own.
The UAE says honestly: If you want to live here, you live according to our order.
Europe says: If you want to live here, we will figure out how to change ourselves.
One is civilisational responsibility.
The other is civilisational dissolution.
And therefore the question is not whether the UAE is too harsh. The question is why only the West is expected to be boundless?
Because in the end this is not about the UAE. And it is not about Islam either. It is about what a civilisation is willing to do to remain itself. All civilisations that have survived history have understood that a culture without boundaries ceases to be a culture, and that an order that cannot say no, in the end cannot say anything at all.
The UAE has - regardless of what one might think about their values - and there is certainly much to address through Western lenses - recognised that civilisation is not a neutral space. It is not an empty canvas where anyone can paint their own worldview.
Civilisation is an inheritance that is either protected or lost. Therefore they regulate coexistence. Therefore they distinguish between guest and host. Therefore they accept economic openness WITHOUT cultural dissolution.
The West, on the other hand, has fallen in love with the notion that morality can exist without boundaries, that societies can endure without centre, and that civilisations can survive without will to self-preservation. But history is merciless on one point - civilisations that no longer believe in themselves are not replaced by something better.
They are simply replaced.
So the question is not whether we should be like the UAE. The question is whether we even still understand that a society has the right - and duty - to protect what makes it precisely that society.
Because without boundaries there is no hospitality.
Without framework there is no freedom.
And without self-respect there is no civilisation.
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Clarification -
The text is not a romanticisation of the UAE. It is not a recommendation and not a wish for Europe to become a totalitarian or Islamic regime. The UAE is a society with serious limitations on freedom of speech, political participation and individual autonomy, where the state and religion stand above the individual, and where many Western freedoms do not exist.
But precisely therefore it is worth soberly considering what they have understood - and what we have forgotten.
This is not about which values are "best", but about civilisational self-understanding. The text is not a tribute or an ideal, but a mirroring - and a reminder that civilisations which no longer dare to define themselves sooner or later lose the right to do so.
