East meets West in a culture clash as Sheikh Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, and friend of the Royals and successive Brit governments, is exposed in a family court ruling in London. The judge found he orchestrated the abductions of two of his children and subjected his youngest wife to a campaign of “intimidation” – behaviour which, on the balance of probabilities, amounted to potentially breaking English and international law.
In 2000 one of the daughters who tried to escape the gilded cage, Shamsa, was kidnapped from the streets of Cambridge and hasn’t been seen since. According to reports, the UK Foreign Office stopped the police investigation. Another daughter, Latifa, fled in 2018 only to be picked up by Indian coastguards and forcibly returned home where she alleges she was beaten and tortured. All of which has come back into the spotlight with the sheikh’s sixth and youngest wife, Princess Haya, daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan and half-sister of King Abdullah, fleeing to London last April with their two young children, one of whom she alleged her husband was trying to marry off to Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
Sheikh Maktoum, 15 July 1949, is known for developing Dubai into a global city and for his racing interests in the UK though his horses have been dogged by doping concerns. He was also criticised heavily over the enslavement of young boys acting as camel jockeys; and also for the conditions of immigrant workers in construction in Dubai.
He is a Sun Cancer in an expansive opposition to Jupiter; with a possessive Venus Pluto in Leo. It’s not a particularly hard chart but the lifestyle there despite pretensions to being a Western tourist hotspot is about two hundred years behind the times. He’s in for a shock in 2021 with Solar Arc Mars conjunct his Saturn which could be financial or health issues. With serious setbacks in 2023/24. That latter is a time when the Dubai chart is under major strain as well.
Princess Haya, 3 May 1974, is a stalwart Sun Taurus with a hard-edged Mars Saturn in Cancer square Pluto, so despite her opulent lifestyle she’s known some hard times. Her Uranus squares the Sheikh’s Sun so it was always going to be an arms’ length affair with her freedom-loving instincts finally breaking through.
Shamsa, 15 August 1981, is a Sun Mercury in Leo trine Neptune; with her Sun in a needs-independence square to Uranus; and her Mars in Cancer in a trapped and scared square to Pluto.
Latifa, 5 December 1985, is a rebellious Sun Uranus in Sagittarius sextile an enthusiastic Jupiter. Although Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, recently sat beside her for a staged photo op saying all was well, Latifa looked drugged. Latifa’s chart looks beyond horrific for the next several years with a chained-down tr Pluto square her Mars for two years; then several blocked, angry, explosive Solar Arcs running to mid-decade.
There’ll come a day of reckoning (maybe) for the Royals who home in on the obscenely wealthy like wasps to a jam jar, and the real-politickers in successive UK governments who have cosied up to these Gulf allies, with their Sandhurst-trained rulers and turned a blind eye to anything that didn’t and still doesn’t sit comfortably with Western sensibilities – while selling them weapons by the yard.
And why anyone chooses to holiday there, let alone buy a second home, given their archaic laws and dodgy legal system is beyond me.
See Previous post August 18 2018.