Sheikha Jalilain Dubai, 2018.an unnamed woman Sheik Mohammed put online around
the same time that Haya disappeared, he wrote, “O you who
betrayed the most precious of trust / My sorrow revealed your
game.” He continued, “You loosened the reins of your horse.”
H
AYA AND SHEIK Mohammed had their first roman-
tic spark at an equestrian event in Spain and mar-
ried in 2004. “I was surprised Haya was marrying
someone who was so Arab, because I always thought she’d
end up with an English landowner,” says the friend of Haya.
“But she was crazy about Sheik Mo—madly in love with
him.” Mo loves pomp and circumstance, and Haya was a bit
quirkier and more down-to-earth; she didn’t mind cracking
jokes at her own expense, such as when her father gifted her
a horse, named Scandal. She explained that she’d told him,
“Daddy, every princess has a scandal and if you want mine
to come with four legs rather than two, you’d better buy it for
me.” Haya and Mohammed’s nuptials were not arranged, but
before they became a couple, oil-poor Jordan was in finan-
cial distress, and these days, the UAE is reportedly one of the
country’s largest investors.
Though Haya was raised in Jordan as the adored daughter of
a king, the sheik’s family in Dubai ran a very different kind of
monarchy. Jordan’s royal family is closer to the British model:
Princes and princesses have patronage, run organizations,
and are highly visible (the American-born Queen Noor, who
became Haya’s stepmother after her mother, Queen Alia, died
in a helicopter crash when she was a toddler, comes to mind).
But Dubai’s monarchy is mostly closed and private. Sheik
Mohammed married his first wife, Sheikha Hind bint Mak-
toum bin Juma al-Maktoum, in a five-day ceremony including
100 camel races in the 1970s; since then, she has rarely, if ever,
been in a photograph seen by the public in 40 years of marriage.
They have 12 children together.
Though women in Dubai are increasingly becoming busi-
ness and government leaders, the Emirates also enforce the
law of male guardianship, which means that husbands and
fathers control the destiny of their wives and daughters.
Women can only work with permission of their husbands;
must have a lawful excuse for refusing to submit to sex with
spouses; and any unmarried woman, Emirati or expat, who
appears at a hospital pregnant in Dubai can be arrested,
including a woman having a miscarriage. Perhaps most
importantly for Haya, any woman who divorces her Emirati
husband and seeks to remarry must grant full custody of her
children to the first spouse.
I spoke with two Emirati women who requested anonym-
ity for fear of retaliation from the state. The first said she left
Dubai at 18 for Europe, where she received asylum and is
hoping to study as an engineer. “You can see a free woman
without the hijab in the Dubai malls, but behind closed doors,
you cannot know what’s happening,” she says, adding that
after puberty, she was not allowed to leave her home without
permission and a guardian. She explains the rationale for this
thusly: “Honor is a big thing in the Arab world, and family
honor is within the girl—her virginity is the family’s honor,”
she says. “If that honor is gone, the reputation of the family is
gone. So, the girl has to pay the price.”
The second woman is the daughter of a royal. She said she left
the Emirates in her late 20s because “regardless of my age, I was