Mohammed al-Maktoum, 34, had even attempted to escape
Dubai in 2018 on a boat registered in the U.S. and piloted by a
French American captain.
Soon, Mohammed would sue Haya in a high-profile Lon-
don court for the return of their two children, 8 and 12. Brit-
ish papers are calling the divorce one of the highest-profile
royal breakups since Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and,
with Sheik Mohammed’s fortune most recently estimated at
$4 billion, the most expensive separation in the history
oftheir country.
The picture starting to come together of Sheik Mohammed
was less progressive, where women are concerned, than one
had imagined.T
HE STORY OF Sheik Mohammed and Haya’s parting of
ways is a winding tale, full of unexpected twists and
turns and the font of so many rumors that I could bare-
ly keep them straight. The Persian Gulf states are involved in an
information warfare campaign at the moment—in particular,
the UAE and Saudi Arabia are pitted against Qatar—and con-
spiracy theories in many realms abound. It’s possible to even
hear impassioned explanations of how the real killers of Jamal
Khashoggi, the dissident and Washington Post columnist, were
actually Qatari spies who framed the Saudis to get back at them
for the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar. (And, by the way, part of
why the Saudis blockaded the country was said to be jealousy
over Qatar landing the 2022 World Cup.)
Theories about Haya’s departure too have come hot and
heavy. Dubai is the Gulf ’s shining beacon of merchant capi-
talism, if not democracy, with relatively open borders, a mas-
sive expat population, and fanciful real estate projects like the
world’s tallest building and the world’s largest choreographed
fountain system. But in the public square, some topics can be
off-limits—such as Mohammed’s wives and daughters. The
sheik himself has made his opinion on such loose talk known:
“It is said that human scorpions dwell on the earth in the form
of gossipers and conspirators, who trouble souls, destroy rela-
tionships, and subvert the spirit of communities and teams.”
(Neither Sheik Mohammed nor Haya responded to requests
from Vanity Fair for interviews.)
Yet in private among Arabian experts, royal-watchers, and
journalists in the West, each move in Haya’s departure from
Dubai has been scrutinized. If Haya’s escape has something
to do with Sheik Mohammed’s daughter Latifa fleeing on the
yacht, is it possible that the downside of the sheik’s monarchi-
cal prerogative may be felt through the heirs, as it is so often?
The sheik needs to run his state and keep his offspring from
embarrassing him, and he may do that in a strict and poten-
tially brutal way.
Many are also questioning why Sheik Mohammed, who is
known to keep close tabs on his citizens, would have allowed
Haya to leave when Dubai has more surveillance than any-
where on earth, with 35,000 cameras trained on street cor-
ners. (Washington, D.C., has about 4,000.) If he had an
inkling things were awry in his marriage with Haya, wouldn’t
he have asked one of his ministers to monitor his wife’s
digital footprint and even revoke her privileges on their (mul-
tiple) private planes?
And, in yet another theory, British papers have made much of
PAGES 124–25: PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRIAN DENIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. PAGE 126: FROM GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY IMAGES. PAGE 127: BY TIM GRAHAM PHOTO LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGESHaya’s alleged relationship with a bodyguard. In a poem about