This is not vaguely as nutty as it sounds.

Every Dubai mall must stay open 24 hours a day for three consecutive weekends, by order of the emirate’s ruler.

Why is it not nutty?

For several reasons.

–Dubai is all about malls. It is a sort of consumer’s paradise, and limiting shoppers to, say, 16 hours a day seems, to some, perverse. (This entry suggests the city has 68 malls, with nine under construction. For a city of 2 million people.) A kid from Dubai did a tribute song a year ago in which he names about half of the city’s malls. The song has been viewed more than 160,000 times on YouTube.

–Malls serve as social centers in the UAE. Whole families go, for hours at a time, and the notion of a clean, well-lit place appeals to parents who don’t want the kids to get in trouble. Why not have the malls available around the clock? Wouldn’t it be better to have teens wandering the malls than out on the streets?

–The UAE is very much a country of the night. The whole Arabian Peninsula is, as far as I can tell. It is a function mostly of the weather: When a country is shockingly hot half of the year, it makes sense to sleep in air conditioning during the day and venture outside at night.

Also, Islam calls for a month of fasting (Ramadan), from dawn to dusk. Muslims here wait until 7:30 p.m. or so to eat their “break fast” meal. Many eat again just before dawn, and then sleep for much of the day. All this reinforces nocturnal lifestyle patterns here, making more sensible the idea of the 24-hour mall.

–Again, Dubai is about buying and selling.  And why not take a look at how much can be bought/sold during those wee hours when lots and lots of people/consumers are still awake?

The National story linked at the top of this entry suggests that shops are getting a fair amount of business.

This could be a sign of things to come. These three weekends of all-night Dubai malls could turn into 52 weeks a year. Perhaps it does not make sense for every mall. Perhaps limit it to the 20 biggest.

But it wouldn’t hurt Dubai’s reputation as a shopper’s haven if the city was promoted as “the home of the all-night mall.”