The Dubai royal family has always been one of the most fascinating in the Middle East. It aims for its public image to mirror how Dubai sees itself: as progressive and modern. But it has also been at the center of several controversies over the years.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has ruled Dubai since 2006, succeeding his father, a co-founder of the United Arab Emirates. He is beloved by many but also has his detractors. His greatest legacy will be the transformation of Dubai into an idealized modern Arab state. By leveraging an army of social media influencers, Dubai has turned into one of the most recognizable cities in the world, and in the backdrop of many of these social media posts, you will see the sheikh adorned on the walls of his carefully crafted kingdom.
Of course, there are limits to how much this image can be managed, and it’s both the aspirational elements and the controversies that hold social media users’ attention.
Princess Haya, one of the sheikh’s favorite wives and mother to Princess Al Jalila and Prince Zayed, attracted global media attention when she claimed spousal abuse and fled to the United Kingdom with her two children in 2019. Three years later, the British courts granted Haya full custody of their children. During the estranged couple’s legal battle, further details about their relationship emerged. Haya had been having an affair with her British bodyguard while married to the sheikh and, according to some accounts, it was his discovery of this that prompted her to flee across continents, fearing reprisals from her powerful husband.
No less intriguing, however, is the social media presence of some of the sheikh’s children, giving the public a glimpse into their extraordinary lives. Prince Hamdan, better known as Fazza, the heartthrob of Dubai, is seen either with his father attending to official duties, skydiving or climbing Dubai’s tallest skyscrapers. Princess Latifa — and Princess Shamsa before her — both gained attention as two daughters who tried to escape the palace, claiming abuse and imprisonment. Latifa became known as the “lost” princess of Dubai but has since been seen out and about in the city and traveling with friends across Europe. Another daughter, also named Princess Latifa, holds a black belt in taekwondo and is chair of the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority. These are only some of Sheikh Mohammed’s 26 children from his six wives, the stories of which have largely been known to us through social media.
Most recently, yet another of his daughters, 30-year-old Princess Mahra, has captured the spotlight. The only child of the sheikh and his Greek ex-wife Zoe Grigorakos, Mahra has been publicly living an Instagram-worthy fairytale. This time last year, social media was abuzz with her wedding photos and videos. Over the past 12 months, she and her husband have been sharing their travel adventures together, from ski slopes to water jets and from planes to helicopters. Not long after the wedding, the two posted a photo of themselves holding an ultrasound photo announcing that their first baby was on its way. It was captioned: “Just the three of us.” Later came the gender reveal, when we were told the two were expecting a girl. Then finally, in May, they welcomed her, sharing a photo from the delivery room, with Mom cradling her newborn while Dad looked over from the bedside.
But something seemed off last month, only weeks after the birth, when the princess posted a picture of her carrying her baby with the caption: “Just the two of us.” Then, last week, Mahra shared a post from her official account in which she divorced her husband:
“Dear Husband. As you are occupied with other companions, I hereby declare our divorce. I divorce you, I divorce you, and I Divorce You. Take care. Your ex-wife.”
Her popularity on Instagram almost doubled from under 500,000 to close to a million (and counting) in a matter of days.
As far as divorce stories in the Middle East go, the significance of this one is particularly striking. The Arab princess suggests that her husband, Prince Mana Al Maktoum, has been cheating on her, and not with just one person but multiple people. She then invokes the Islamic practice of declaring divorce three times in a row for an instant, final divorce. (Courts in the region often consider the verbal “triple divorce” as only one of three permissible instances of divorce, which can be retracted if the couple reconciles before the third instance. This practice is typically performed by men and almost never by women. In several countries, such as India and various European nations, the legality of this practice is disregarded.)
What caused the couple’s sudden shift from being lovebirds one moment to decisively splitting the next? As social media users are inclined to do, they looked to Mana’s Instagram for answers.
There, people have pointed to photos and videos of Mana embracing the highly controversial and polarizing figure Andrew Tate as evidence of Mana’s moral decay. Tate, who rose to fame on social media for his anti-women rhetoric, promotion of far-right ideologies and embrace of a toxic masculinity persona, converted to Islam in 2022, which led to his growth in popularity in the Arab world. It’s unclear what Tate’s association with Mana is, but the duo met around the time of Tate’s conversion. Mana first posted the two together on his Instagram timeline on Oct. 16, 2022, with the caption “#topg,” another nickname given to Tate, meaning “top gangster.” Two months after the photos of the two were taken together in Dubai, Tate was arrested in Romania and charged with rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women.
Despite the criminal charges against Tate, Mana keeps an album of stories on his verified Instagram page of their time together. This sits alongside another album dedicated to Tucker Carlson, called “Tuckers” (with a fox head emoji), which contains dozens of clips from his show on Fox News, where contempt for the Bidens feature prominently. In one clip, Carlson makes fun of President Joe Biden’s speech patterns. In another, he ridicules a glowing feature in Vogue about first lady Jill Biden. The album also includes a video in which Carlson labels Biden wearing a face mask during the pandemic at the beach as “textbook hysteria” and a “mental illness.” Another shows Carlson saying that Biden is the most unpopular president the United States has had in a very long time and that people dislike Vice President Kamala Harris even more. There is also Carlson explaining how neoliberal leaders are weak and fearful — like Biden and New Zealand’s “squeaky” former prime minister, Jacinda Ardern. Complementing these anti-Biden videos, Mana also has a clip suggesting that people saw no evidence of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gassing his people. Other albums include UAE leaders and Mana posing with an exotic pet lion cub. In one of his Instagram posts, he is seen feeding a white tiger with a milk bottle.
If Mana’s company is any indication of his private persona, it means Mahra not only stood up to a cheating husband but also to a new wave of toxic masculinity that has been growing online in recent years, pulling influence from the likes of Tate and other far-right personalities. That Mahra fought it through social media, the very platform that gave this cult its rise, was the cherry on the cake.
The story of Mahra’s divorce is not just a sensational headline; it represents a shift in the cultural landscape. Social media influencers in the Arab world are redrawing societal and cultural lines by pushing the boundaries of what a woman can do. The visibility that comes with social media platforms brings greater public scrutiny to their lives, but it also opens up for debate once-taboo subjects and enables more women to receive support from fellow women (few men have shown their support for the princess in the replies).
Thousands of women replied to the princess’s post with support and congratulatory messages. They were not congratulating her for a failed marriage or for the act of divorce per se, but praising her for raising her voice — contrary to many preconceived views of Arab Muslim women as lacking agency — and for standing up for herself against a husband who embraced toxic masculinity.
The episode revealed a different side of Dubai and its ruler, Mahra’s father. The Instagram divorce post remains on Mahra’s page, standing out like a sore thumb among a sea of other beautifully curated posts of the princess. Clearly, the post has the approval of the ruler, who used Instagram to reveal his ex-wife Haya’s infidelity by writing a poem to express his heartbreak and anger. (Poetry remains today, as in the past, a means to communicate personal matters within the culture of the Arabian Peninsula and the wider region.)
More than half a million new followers now await to see the princess’s next moves as she navigates her royal and new-mother role as a single, independent woman. For what she has done, to them she is no longer a princess but a “queen.”
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