An old Arab saying goes, “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads.” These three capitals, along with Damascus, were long the hubs of culture and education in the Arab world. Arabs from across the region flocked to these cities to study and work. Sculptures such as the 1958 Monument of Freedom in Baghdad by the great Iraqi artist Jawad Salim and "Egypt's Renaissance," unveiled in 1928 in Giza by the pioneering artist Mahmoud Mokhtar, embodied the ambitions of these Arab cities.

However, over the past few years, as these traditional Arab capitals became more embroiled in civil strife, a new set of cities started to emerge in the Gulf, establishing themselves as the new centers of the Arab world. Abu Dhabi, its sister emirates of Dubai and Sharjah and the Qatari capital, Doha, have developed as the nerve center of the contemporary Arab world’s culture, commerce, design, architecture, art and academia, attracting hundreds of thousands of Arab immigrants, including academics, businessmen, journalists, athletes, artists, entrepreneurs and medical professionals. While these Gulf cities may be unable to compete with their Arab peers in terms of political dynamism, in almost every other sense they have far outstripped their sister cities in North Africa and the Levant.

Abu Dhabi City, with its massive GDP of $248 billion that outweighs any other Arab country save Saudi Arabia, has embarked on a cultural renaissance program that includes opening campuses of world-class universities such as New York University, Paris’ prestigious Sorbonne and INSEAD, the top-10 global business school based in Fontainebleau. Abu Dhabi is busy constructing a Norman Foster-designed Zayed National Museum, a Louvre by Jean Nouvel, a Guggenheim by Frank Gehry, a maritime museum by Tadao Ando and a concert hall by Zaha Hadid. The city’s airport is home to the multiple-award-winning Etihad Airways and is undergoing a major expansion to be completed by 2017 that will add a total floor area exceeding that of the Pentagon and the capacity to service 40 million passengers. And it’s not just about oil. Abu Dhabi’s non-oil sector is estimated to have reached $107 billion in 2012, making up 43.5% of the economy of the emirate.

While much of the region was embroiled in wars, Dubai transformed itself from a fishing village to a global capital of business and trade in a matter of a few decades. Dubai, home to the world’s tallest tower, man-made islands and cutting-edge infrastructure, is today the embodiment of a global city with more than 200 nationalities and a constant stream of arriving immigrants. The city is a near-certain winner of the soon-to-be-announced World Expo 2020, which will catalyze development even further. Referred to as the “Center of the World,” Dubai, home of Emirates Airlines and a top-five global airport, attracted Arabs from across the world with its array of free zones that cater to media, IT, finance and various other industries, earning the praise of the UN Arab Human Development Report as early as 2002.