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This week, I’ve been in Abu Dhabi and Doha. It was  my first time in the real “Middle East”, and everything was fascinating and occasionally horrifying at the same time. A few days in a country is not enough time to really understand what is going on, but I saw enough to at least provoke a few thoughts.

Most things about the economic boom in the Gulf States has already been written, but to actually see the scale of the development of the UAE and Qatar is quite something else.  I haven’t been to Dubai, but if Doha and Abu Dhabi are merely the “little brothers” by comparison, Dubai must be simply amazing.

Both cities are vast building sites. There’s not just one or two buildings going up, EVERYTHING is going up. The new city centre of Doha has been largely built since the year 2000. Where, a decade ago, there was desert, there are now several dozen immense skyscrapers, and more are rising all the time.

The wealth on display is unmissable – Porche Cayennes cruise the Doha Corniche, Gucci and Prada have shops in all the big malls. And occasionally the money goes into religious architecture: situated in the middle of a vast carpark worthy of a supermarket, Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Al Zayed Mosque is the 8th largest in the world, and is a cacophony of marble, gold and chandeliers worthy of Liberace.

The inspiration for all this pious ostentation is the tomb of Sheikh Al Zayed, founder of the United Arab Emirates, where a mullah sings verses of the Koran over his grave all day. Completed in 2007, the air-conditioned complex is the only mosque in Abu Dhabi that is open to infidels such as myself.

The wealth, of course, has to come from somewhere, and in Qatar, you’re not allowed to forget this.  Posters all over the city proclaim that Qatar produced “77 million tonnes of natural gas” last year, and this volume of production is not likely to fall any time soon. Government geologists calculate that Qatar has 200 years of reserves.

In Abu Dhabi and Doha, I had the impression of being a lot closer to the centre of today’s world than one gets in Europe. Both cities are largely populated by foreigners who have arrived en masse to grab a share of the wealth: in Qatar, only 25% of the inhabitants are native-born citizens, and in the UAE, it’s only 8%.

Whether it’s Australian hospital managers, Filipina hotel cleaners or Pakistani contruction workers, everyone seems to be here because of the money.

One of my taxi drivers in Abu Dhabi was from Nepal: he told me he has three children back home, and travels back to visit them once a year, for a couple of weeks. His hard-earned, tax-free dirhams are putting his kids through school back in his village.

When you, a Western visitor, are staying in 4-star hotels and being driven everywhere in Mercedes, it’s hard to imagine the lives of the immigrants who hold the economy together. At sunset, we saw shadowy crowds of construction workers, crouching on the kerb below their half-complete skyscraper. They were waiting for the minibuses that would take them back to their hostels.

Building skyscrapers in the desert doesn’t seem like much of a life, but the workers seem to be earning a wage, and nobody seems to be complaining – much.

Of course, complaining is not something that is easy to do. The gulf states are dictatorships, and no matter how benevolently the Emirs might rule, the real wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a very few families at the top.

The native Emiratis and Qataris are cossetted by a web of generous welfare benefits that ensure that the status quo is not questioned. And the expatriate workers are there only for a short time, and paying no tax, they hold very little moral authority to ask for change.

Despite some moderate calls for reform (such as this editorial I read in Doha’s The Peninsula on Thursday), the set-up seems pretty firmly fixed in place. The whole situation is strangely compelling. I hope I get to go back again sometime soon.