Gents, before some of you go stereotyping people of any race – (this thread's victim of choice appears to be those ‘uncivilized’ Gulf AY-rabs) – take a closer look at “forum newbie’s” two posts and I think I’d have to agree with “Andu” that this guy’s a windup merchant, and not a very good one at that.
A couple of points about his posts just don’t gel. For instance, he says he’s an Australian, but he met his wife at “college”. College? College’s are posh high schools in Australia, and this “bloke” doesn’t seem to have gone to one of those.
And “hello blokes”? Give me a break. Why not go all the way and get out the corks on a string hat and say “hello cobbers”…
I have never heard the term “East Indian” (when referring to people from the Subcontinent), used in Australia, only in North America, particularly Canada.
Australians tend to kick people in the aRse, not the ‘ass’, “bloke”.
You say that your wife is a “local national”. Most people even remotely familiar with the UAE would assume from that description that the lady is an Emarati, and if she <<“has family higher up in the government”>>, that she would almost certainly (most would say definitely) be Muslim. If that’s the case, we can only assume that you converted to Islam to marry the lady. (If you did, after reading your rather intemperate remarks about your wife’s people, you don’t seem to have taken the lessons prior to your conversion very much to heart.)
If you haven’t converted, your wife’s family must be almost unique. There might be a few non religious Muslim families in Dubai that might accept a daughter marrying a non Muslim if she lived in the West, but I’d be very surprised if even the most secular Arab families could accept their daughter returning to the UAE “married” to a non Muslim. I use the quotation marks because the marriage simply wouldn’t be recognised by the local authorities. The young lady would be living in sin – an adulteress – and the courts have rather painful and permanently scarring physical punishments for young Muslim women you do such things in this part of the world, apart from brothers and cousins who tend to take it upon themselves to defend the family honour, (which they value very highly), sometimes in ways that can prove terminal for the person deemed to be doing so.
If your tale is in fact true, with the attitudes you express, I can only assume that your in-laws, like you, find themselves in a “<<weird situation>>” with you in their house. As for whether <<”(will) being a national make it easier for me to get hired by Gulf or Emirates?”>>, I couldn’t comment either way. But please, if you really are in the “weird situation” you say you’re in and you really do have Australian citizenship, do yourself and your native country an enormous favour and keep your eyes open and your mouth shut for a few months until you get to understand the culture you’ve married in to. You never know, you might even learn something.