Thear or four times every night, the child would get out of bed with sharp pain. Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the future ruler of Dubai, appears to be the only one in the camp of the desert who is so frequently awakened by scorpion bites.
He soon learned that it was not accidental. A tribal elder scattered the arachnids in the bed of the eight-year-old boy. It was both a lesson in desert survival – check your sleeping quarters for insects every night – and a vaccination. To this day, Sheikh Mohammed claims to be immune to scorpion venom.
“Not everything that hurts you is evil,” he wrote of the episode. “Sometimes we learn and protect ourselves.”
It’s one of the original myths of a man who would transform the modest port city that rules his family into the glittering, ultra-modern metropolis of Dubai, a city whose amazing spectacle – an indoor ski resort, the world’s highest built – never been. has rather obscured his controversies. For the past three years, Sheikh Mohammed himself has become one of them.
Secret footage taken by his daughter, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, published this week by various newspapers, has once again raised concerns about the fate of the princess (35), who said she was being held as a prisoner in ‘ live in a protected villa. The messages suddenly stopped last year.
The disturbing videos contain the image that Sheikh Mohammed cultivated as a business visionary, poet, rider and progressive Arab leader. Although he is one of the richest royals in the world, with a fortune of $ 4 billion (£ 2.86 billion) and oversees a city at the heart of global capitalism, there is surprisingly little known of a figure who was described by a British judge last year as “an intensely private individual”.
Most public information about Sheikh Mohammed was formed by his own hand: three memoirs, extensive poetry collections and a guide for 2017 to cultivate happiness and positivity.
Then there are the darker glimpses of the man. They first came forward two decades ago in a desperate call to a British lawyer by a young woman, Shamsa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, claiming she was estranged from her father, the sheikh. A few weeks later she was abducted from a street in Cambridge and disappeared from the public eye. In early 2018, footage was published of a second daughter, Latifa, telling the camera that she was planning her own escape attempt. ‘If you watch this video, it’s not that good. “I am dead or in a very, very, very bad situation,” she said.
In the three years that followed, with the emergence of more haunting videos and damning court rulings, this shadow biography of Sheikh Mohammed became clearer.
Dubai has not always been a watchword for wealth. Sheikh Mohammed, 71, was born before the emirate set up its first hospital, public school or airport and had yet to free itself from Britain’s colonial chains. “There was no electricity at the time I was born … and no water,” he told the BBC in 2014.
He tells of a childhood he learned to survive in the harsh desert landscape, with deer, houbara bark, twists and camels, the hoof marks of which he learned can be as unique as a fingerprint. “A strategy is needed to have access to food in the desert,” he said as his father taught him.
The emirate Sheikh Mohammed would inherit had yet to discover oil, but Dubai’s own strategy to survive in the desert was already taking shape. When nearby port cities raised tariffs on trade, Dubai’s early 20th century rulers abolished theirs, attracting traders from Iran and India who made the city synonymous with pearls and gold.
When Sheikh Mohammed watched, he recorded an important lesson: “The leaders of today are the silent giants who own the money, not the politicians who make the noise.”
To leave the giants, they had to learn their manners, and in 1966 his father sent him to the University of Cambridge. He remembers the ‘strange but interesting smells’ of his first meal – lamb, peas and mashed potatoes – and novelties like the leftover meat being put in a fridge. It was heated and served for dinner again the next evening. “I ate … with reservations,” he said. “In Dubai, we always ate fresh food. There was enough mouth to feed every meal and finish what was there.”
When Dubai entered into a union with the surrounding sheikhdoms to form the United Arab Emirates, the young prince was entrusted with setting up the country’s first military and defense ministry. But he was irresistible to aviation, and could not shake an idea that had been running through his mind since he was a boy in a busy Heathrow terminal. “Our future lies in making Dubai a global destination,” he wrote.
Against the objections of consultants and operations of the airline industry, Sheikh Mohammed did so over the next four decades, resulting in Dubai’s transformation into the world’s busiest aviation hub and a tourism and professional services industry for a million dollars.
In addition to this unsavory story of success at best, the UAE vice president dedicates three chapters of his most recent book to another Latifa: his mother. She is idealized as his ‘first love’, ‘my heart and soul’, ‘the most wonderful, supportive, gentle, kind and extraordinary person in my life’. Her death in 1983 devastated him.
His wives receive relatively less coverage in the official narrative, and the story of only one, his sixth and youngest wife, Princess Haya, is extensively documented. After their marriage broke down, Haya, 46, said she was worried about the fate of Shamsa and Latifa. Soon, she said, she began to find guns in her house and a note pointing to it: “We will take your son – your daughter is ours – your life is over.”
A UK court found last year that these and other allegations of threats and harassment, along with the allegations that Sheikh Mohammed had arranged for the violent return of Latifa and Shamsa, were in fact highly probable. The judgment and publicity so far appear to have had little impact on the UAE’s defense and trade ties with London, nor on Sheikh Mohammed’s extensive personal relationships in the United Kingdom.
“He is closely integrated into the top rule of society through horse racing,” says Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow fellow who specializes in the Gulf at Chatham House. “He moves in the highest circles with members of the British royal family, and that may give him some respect.”
In Sheikh Mohammed’s latest memoirs, published in 2019, between tributes to his parents and ancestors, and a story of the history of Dubai, there is an unusual flash of a more difficult side. The sheikh may be immune to desert scorpions, he said, but it was not the only species.
“Human scorpions are said to live on earth in the form of gossip fighters and conspirators, who put souls in trouble, destroy relationships and undermine the spirit of communities and teams,” he wrote. “Sleeping with desert scorpions is sometimes easier than living with humans.”