TThree or four times a night, the child would get out of bed in severe pain. Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the future ruler of Dubai, seemed to be the only one in the desert camp who was so frequently awakened by scorpion bites.
He soon learned that it was no coincidence. A tribal elder was spreading arachnids on the eight-year-old boy’s bed. It was both a lesson in survival in the desert – check your dorms for insects every night – and an inoculation. To this day, Sheikh Mohammed claims to be immune to scorpion venom.
“Not everything that hurts you is evil,” he wrote about the episode. “Sometimes pain teaches us and protects us.”
It is one of the myths of the origin of a man who would later transform the modest port city that his family ruled into the sparkling and ultramodern metropolis of Dubai, a city whose great spectacles – a covered ski resort, the tallest building in the world – never obscured their controversies. In the past three years, Sheikh Mohammed himself has become one of them.
Secret images recorded by her daughter, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, and published this week by various media outlets, have rekindled concern about the fate of the princess, 35, who said she was living as a prisoner in a protected villa. The messages stopped abruptly last year.
The distressing videos match the image that Sheikh Mohammed cultivated as a business visionary, poet, knight and progressive Arab leader. Although he is one of the richest royalty in the world, with an estimated fortune of $ 4 billion (£ 2.86 billion), and manages a city at the heart of global capitalism, surprisingly little is known of a figure described by one British judge last year as “An intensely private individual”.
Most of the public information about Sheikh Mohammed was elaborated by his own hands: three memoirs, extensive collections of poetry and a 2017 guide to cultivating happiness and positivity.
Then there are the darkest glimpses of man. They first appeared two decades ago in a desperate call to a British lawyer by a young woman, Shamsa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, claiming to be estranged from her father, the sheikh. A few weeks later, she was kidnapped on a street in Cambridge and disappeared from public view. In early 2018, a footage of a second daughter, Latifa, was published telling the camera that she was planning her own escape attempt. “If you are watching this video, it is not such a good thing. I’m either dead or in a really, really, really bad situation, ”she said.
Over the next three years, with the emergence of more frightening videos and damning judicial trials, this shadow biography of Sheik Mohammed became clearer.
Dubai was not always a watchword for wealth. Sheikh Mohammed, 71, was born before the emirate established its first hospital, public school or airport, and had not yet freed itself from British colonial chains. “No electricity at that time, when I was born … and no water,” he told the BBC in a 2014 interview.
He recounts a childhood learning to survive in the harsh desert landscape, tracking deer, houbara bustards, sandpipers and camels, whose hoof marks he learned can be as unique as a fingerprint. “A strategy is needed to have access to food in the desert,” he said that his father taught him.
The emirate that Sheikh Mohammed would inherit had not yet discovered oil, but Dubai’s own strategy to survive in the desert was already taking shape. When nearby port cities raised tariffs on trade, early 20th century Dubai rulers abolished their own, attracting merchants from Iran and India who made the city synonymous with pearls and gold.
Watching, Sheikh Mohammed said he absorbed an important lesson: “Today’s leaders are the silent giants who have the money, not the politicians who make noise.”
In order to court these giants, it was necessary to learn their customs and, in 1966, his father sent him to university in Cambridge. He recalled the “strange but interesting smells” of his first dinner – lamb, peas and mashed potatoes – and news like leftover meat being put in the refrigerator. It was heated and served again for dinner the following night. “I ate … with fear,” he said. “In Dubai we always ate fresh food, there were enough mouths to feed each meal and finish what was there.”
When Dubai entered into a union with neighboring sheikdoms to form the United Arab Emirates, the young prince was tasked with establishing the country’s first military and defense ministry. But he was irresistibly drawn to aviation, unable to shake off an idea that had been infiltrating his mind since he was a boy, in a busy Heathrow terminal. “Our future is to make Dubai a global destination,” he wrote.
Against the objections of consultants and machinations of the airline industry, for the next four decades, Sheikh Mohammed did so, leading the transformation of Dubai into the busiest aviation center in the world and establishing a multi-billion dollar tourism and professional services industry.
Alongside this sanitized success story against all odds, the UAE vice president dedicates three chapters of his most recent book to another Latifa: his mother. She is idealized as her “first love”, “my heart and soul”, “the most wonderful, supportive, gentle, gentle and extraordinary person in my life”. His death in 1983 devastated him.
Their wives receive comparatively less coverage in the official narrative, and the story of only one, his sixth and youngest wife, Princess Haya, has been amply documented. After her marriage faltered, Haya, 46, said she was concerned about Shamsa and Latifa’s fate. Soon, she said, she started finding weapons left at her home and a note that said, “Let’s take your son – your daughter is ours – your life is over.”
A UK court concluded last year that these and other claims of threats and harassment, along with the claims that Sheikh Mohammed had organized for Latifa and Shamsa’s forced returns, were in the balance of probabilities, factual. The trial and publicity appear to have had little impact so far on the UAE’s defense and commercial ties with London, nor on Sheik Mohammed’s extensive personal relationships in the UK.
“He is intimately integrated with the upper echelons of society through horse racing,” said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Gulf associate at Chatham House. “He moves in the highest circles with members of the UK royal family and, to some extent, that can give him respectability.”
In Sheikh Mohammed’s latest memoir, published in 2019, between tributes to his parents and ancestors and a retelling of Dubai’s history, there is an unusual glimpse of a more difficult side. The sheik may be immune to desert scorpions, he said, but they were not the only type.
“Human scorpions are said to inhabit the Earth in the form of gossips and conspirators, who disturb souls, destroy relationships and subvert the spirit of communities and teams,” he wrote. “Sleeping with desert scorpions is sometimes easier than living with humans.”