Banned! The UAE Bans Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success

In what might be a first for us, one of the books we publish has been banned for sale in the United Arab Emirates. Late last week the Times Higher Education Supplement ran an article about the banning of Christopher Davidson’s Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success.

Dr. Davidson, a fellow of the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Durham University, said of the ban: “It makes it difficult for foreign academics to come to a country and try to do research when there is freedom on anything except the domestic matters of the country and the government. It’s a mentality that is self-defeating for these countries, which are trying to become knowledge economies.”

The book is part of the Columbia/Hurst imprint and is sold in the Middle East through Hurst & Co publishers.

Ironically, the day after the ban on Dubai was announced, the Gulf News ran a story on the decline in the number of books being banned by the UAE government.

The ban on the book comes one week before the Banned Books Week in the United States.