In October, 2005, Thomas Krens, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, flew from New York to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. In the gilded lobby of the Emirates Palace hotel, Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, the crown prince, described his vision for Saadiyat Island, a twenty-seven-billion-dollar development not far from the city’s downtown. Saadiyat, which Emiratis refer to as “the island of happiness,” would include luxury hotels, Marbella-style villas, and a boutique shopping quarter. Most important was a vast cultural district, which Zayed hoped would position Abu Dhabi—both the city and the Emirate that bears its name—as the patron of a modern Arab Renaissance. A new Guggenheim was to be a centerpiece of this effort.

Sixty years ago, Abu Dhabi was a twenty-six-thousand-square-mile expanse of desert, without paved roads, electricity, or running water. The population consisted mostly of Bedouin tribes, who subsisted on pearl diving, pirating, and occasional smuggling. In 1971, thirteen years after the discovery of oil, Zayed’s father—the charismatic modernizer Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan—joined neighboring tribes to create the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi accounts for eighty-six per cent of the federation’s landmass and more than ninety per cent of its oil reserves.

For Krens, Saadiyat represented an irresistible opportunity. Six feet five, with an M.B.A. and the habit of referring to art as an asset class, he had led the museum for nearly two decades. In the art world, he was a polarizing figure, known for popular, middlebrow shows like “The Art of the Motorcycle,” in 1998, and, two years later, an exhibition of the couture of Giorgio Armani, sponsored by Giorgio Armani. Krens had also taken on dazzling capital projects, such as a Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry, which turned a sleepy Basque town into a global art-pilgrimage site. Still, the Guggenheim’s endowment was much smaller than that of similar institutions: some fifty million dollars, compared with the Museum of Modern Art’s five hundred million.

Krens and Zayed reached an agreement shortly after their meeting. The Emiratis would be responsible for building a Guggenheim on Saadiyat, as part of a deal that would eventually bring the museum about a hundred and fourteen million dollars in fees. (The museum won’t comment on the financial arrangement.) Guggenheim curators would staff the museum, and Krens would be the master planner of Saadiyat’s cultural district. He envisaged a group of landmark buildings by the world’s most prominent architects.

Gehry, commissioned to design the new Guggenheim, imagined a massive jumble of concrete forms, seven times the size of the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building, in New York. Soaring gallery spaces would be enclosed by giant cones, open at the top like the “wind catchers” that were once found in the region. The blueprint for the district also included a serpentine performing-arts center, by the Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid, who died this spring; a maritime museum arching delicately over the ocean, by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando; the Zayed National Museum, designed by Norman Foster to evoke the feathers of a falcon; and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, by Jean Nouvel, topped by a white latticed dome almost six hundred feet in diameter. The island would also be home to a New York University campus, designed by the Uruguayan Rafael Viñoly.

Krens often spoke of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi as a means of promoting dialogue between the West and the Middle East after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. With a reputed acquisitions budget of six hundred million dollars, the museum set out to collect the work of international figures, such as Anselm Kiefer and Ai Weiwei, in addition to notable regional artists like the Emirati conceptualist Hassan Sharif and the Iranian modernist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. (I worked for Krens briefly, in 2010, as a consultant on Middle Eastern art, and, five years later, as a researcher on his memoir.) Zaki Nusseibeh, a Palestinian-born Emirati who has advised the crown for decades, told me recently, “Here is an opportunity to demonstrate that creativity is not a gift from the West.”

Although the N.Y.U. campus was finished in 2014, the cultural projects on Saadiyat Island were significantly delayed by the collapse in oil prices and by regional destabilization after the Arab Spring. The opening of the Louvre, originally scheduled for 2013, has been postponed until next year. The Zayed National Museum is several years behind schedule, and the Hadid and Ando buildings appear to be stalled indefinitely. The Guggenheim, which was supposed to be completed in 2013, has not yet broken ground. Today, the site is nothing more than a scatter of concrete pilings.

Monumental architecture requires capital, vision, and whimsy. From Suleiman the Magnificent to Benito Mussolini, heads of state have often made ideal patrons. Some of the most ambitious building projects in the world are now underwritten by governments in the Gulf. In Doha, Qatar, the Museum of Islamic Art, a stylized ziggurat designed by I. M. Pei, opened in 2008; a national library by Rem Koolhaas is under construction nearby. Dubai, the flashiest of the Emirates, boasts the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa.

According to U.N. estimates, there are about twenty-five million migrant workers in the Gulf, the majority of them construction workers from the Indian subcontinent. (Migrants also work as doctors, nurses, accountants, cleaners, and beauticians.) Drawn by wages that are as much as three times higher than what they can earn at home, foreign laborers send back more than a hundred billion dollars a year to their families. It is not uncommon to hear rags-to-riches stories, such as that of B. R. Shetty, who tells of arriving in the Emirates, in 1973, as a young pharmacist with “a mere couple of dollars,” and is now the billionaire owner of one of the largest Emirati health-care firms.

Most low-wage foreign workers in the Gulf are bound to their employers by an informal system known as kafala, or “sponsorship.” In the mid-aughts, journalists and human-rights groups began documenting lax safety regulations and substandard living conditions across the region. Since December, 2010, when Qatar won its bid to host the 2020 World Cup, more than seven hundred Indian migrant workers have died in that country, according to a 2014 investigation by the Guardian.

Around the time of the Saadiyat discussions, Abu Dhabi began to pass some of the most progressive labor laws in the region. In 2005, the state banned outdoor work during the blistering middays of summer, and, a few years later, it introduced a law requiring employers to provide health insurance for all low-skilled workers. Yet, according to a 2009 report from Human Rights Watch, many problems associated with kafala persisted. Although recruitment fees are illegal in the Emirates, migrant laborers were said to have paid as much as forty-one hundred dollars to middlemen in exchange for airfare and visas. Often, workers arrived significantly indebted, and were paid less than they had been promised. Their passports were sometimes confiscated by employers, making it difficult for them to leave or to change jobs. Unionization is forbidden.

When Emirati oﬃcials are challenged about their labor policies, they often point to the Saadiyat Accommodation Village, where most of the island’s workers are required to live.

Human-rights activists saw the high-profile projects on Saadiyat as an opportunity to strengthen labor standards across the region. In 2008, as N.Y.U. prepared to break ground on its new campus, Andrew Ross, a professor in the university’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, began publicly criticizing N.Y.U.’s international expansion under John Sexton, who was then its president. Ross told New York that the university was “behaving exactly like a corporation that is entering its mergers-and-acquisitions phase.” Fifty-two years old, with muttonchops and two silver earrings, Ross had become known in the nineties as an activist in the anti-sweatshop movement and as a campus agitator, organizing faculty support for an effort to unionize the university’s graduate students, which proved successful. In March, 2009, he assembled a faculty-student alliance to advocate for laborers on its Abu Dhabi campus. Paul Boghossian, a philosopher at N.Y.U., told me that the critics of the Abu Dhabi project “tend not to mention a mitigating factor, which is that the Emirates is spending enormous amounts of money providing a free, first-class education to some very talented and, in many cases, very needy kids, who are recruited with great effort from all over the world.” In the end, Ross’s agitation seemed to work: in February, 2010, N.Y.U. announced unusually strong contractual safeguards for workers on the site.