Most Islah members were concentrated in the northern emirates, especially Ras al Khaimah, just over an hour’s drive north from Dubai. It is less dense than the wealthier cities to the south, with fewer skyscrapers and malls, and it is a little shabbier. In a sense, Islah was expressing its disapproval of the hypercapitalist culture being spawned in the U.A.E.’s biggest cities. Many of its public statements were protests against the bars and prostitution that served the U.A.E.’s growing foreign population. Its spokesmen eventually began promoting democracy and human rights, though those may have been at least partly a convenient way to draw Western sympathy to their cause.

Arabists and diplomats in the West have mostly taken the view that Islamists of this kind should be tolerated, and that their views are likely to be softened over time by their integration into electoral politics. The Tunisian Ennahda movement is often held up as an example of what may happen when Islamists are given a chance to evolve in a more progressive direction. Ennahda, which emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, has shared power with a secular party, and its leader has suggested that it is less an Islamist party than an Arab variant on European parties like the Christian Democrats.

M.B.Z. did engage in a dialogue of sorts with the U.A.E.’s Islamists, and he claims the experience proved they could not be trusted. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he began meeting with members of Islah and urging them to return to the fold. Initially, he offered them a deal: Stay away from politics and they could maintain their charitable work. They responded with lists of demands. The attempts at outreach came to an end after a tense meeting in 2003, and M.B.Z.’s attitude appears to have hardened. He told a visiting United States delegation in 2004 that “we are having a culture war with the Muslim Brotherhood in this country,” according to a cable made public by WikiLeaks. One of M.B.Z.’s own sons started to fall under the spell of Islamist thinking, he told a group of visiting diplomats in 2009. He responded by employing a tactic his own father had used: sending his son to Ethiopia with the Red Cross to appreciate the moral worthiness of non-Muslims.

Even as he cracked down on the Brotherhood, M.B.Z. was working on a far more ambitious project: building a state that would show up the entire Islamist movement by succeeding where it had failed. Instead of an illiberal democracy — like Turkey’s — he would build its opposite, a socially liberal autocracy, much as Lee Kuan Yew did in Singapore in the 1960s and ’70s. He began with Abu Dhabi’s Civil Service, which was afflicted with many of the same ills as those of other Arab countries: bloat and inefficiency, with connections and family reputation playing a bigger role in hiring than merit. These features were partly a legacy of the Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser, who built a dysfunctional prototype in the 1950s that was copied everywhere.

M.B.Z. deployed a group of young, talented people and authorized them to smash up the bureaucracy. Over the next few years, they fired tens of thousands of employees and reassigned many others, streamlining the state. Between 2005 and 2008, the Abu Dhabi government went from 64,000 people to just 7,000. At the same time, he began harnessing Abu Dhabi’s vast capital reserves to build up a non-oil economy. Using a new sovereign wealth fund called Mubadala, he attracted new industries, creating job opportunities that would help train the local population. He honed his progressive image by including women in his cabinet. Mubadala created an aerospace-and-aviation hub in Al Ain where 86 percent of the workers are women.

At times, he seems to want to change Emiratis themselves, to make his people more disciplined, more rational, more self-reliant. “Ever shake hands with an Emirati?” one former diplomat heard him say. “It’s a weak hand — they look away. I’m trying to teach people to look you in the eye and give you a firm hand.” He made jujitsu compulsory in schools. In 2014 he established the military draft, forcing young Emiratis — who are granted free housing, education and health care — to endure a year of boot camp and hard work. M.B.Z. made sure they took it seriously. Soon after the draft started, a few hundred eligible young men failed to register. M.B.Z. had them brought to him and “spent an hour excoriating them about what his father did, building the country and so on,” I was told by one former diplomat. “They all went to jail for 30 days.” (An Emirati spokesman disputed this account.)

When I first started visiting the U.A.E., in 2007, I heard a lot of fretting about the social consequences of the country’s sudden vault from poverty to vast wealth: listlessness, depression, isolation and dislocation. On my most recent visit, I heard at least a dozen stories about young couch potatoes who returned from boot camp sober and lean, suddenly willing to do their own laundry and dishes. The draft has also brought together people from different emirates and social classes in a way that rarely happened in the past. The Yemen war has wreaked horrors on that country, but it appears to have had an annealing effect on Emirati society. More than 100 Emiratis have been killed in the fighting, and while that is tiny compared with the appalling toll of Yemeni dead, it is in human terms by far the costliest war the U.A.E. has ever fought. It probably helps that M.B.Z. and most of the rulers of the other six emirates had sons or nephews on the front lines, some of whom were seriously injured. I briefly met Zayed bin Hamdan, M.B.Z.’s nephew and son-in-law, who uses a wheelchair after his spine was damaged in a helicopter crash in Yemen in 2017.