My comment is not an attempt at being racist or judgmental, but even the "highest class" Americans probably shake their heads at what is going on there.
It's hard to tell because the comment you're replying to is so absurd, but perhaps the commenter meant to say that Dubai is a sort of cartoon version of a European state, as imagined by some "Islamic" people who deplore the structure of such states — and thus was doomed to fail. It's hard to read it as other than a gross stereotype, though.
Me, it depresses and scares me a bit how little I understand about the human world: not only the "Islamic world", to whatever extent it makes sense to lump together Indonesia, Turkey, and Egypt under a single rubric, but also Africa, India, and China.
http://youtu.be/5wLEvYcmj_Q (goto 12:00)
-- the ultimate issue is that there are Muslim supervisors who decide whether money should be lent or not on a case by case basis. It's subjective and it's biased. If the recipient promotes Shariah it's cool, if it's against Shariah, it's not. Shariah compliant finance is stealth jihad.
About home mortgages — it seems like it would be hard to apply the preferred-share-like structure I described to home mortgage financing. Your house doesn't produce profits that you could share with someone, does it?
Maybe you could sign over a fraction of your total family income in exchange for help buying the house: say, one third of your income for twenty years. But that would still be pretty risky for the investor, even more risky than investing in a hotel, where they have a plausible reason to believe that their investment will produce results. (And I have no idea whether it would be legal, either under the shariah or under civil or common law systems.)