Princess Latifa, for example, is the daughter of one of the most open Arab rulers of the Persian Gulf, often seen with his wife Princess Haya bint al-Hussein and daughters without head veils. Many privileged Arab families prefer to present themselves to the outside world as liberal and worldly. For many of these women, wealth is hardly a consolation for the inability to make the choices they desire.Ĭompounding the problem is rampant hypocrisy. Outside the palace, interactions with foreigners are frequent at private schools and while traveling to their family estates abroad.īut these are just reminders of a life that they aren’t permitted to have. In an expat majority society, many of those working in the palace are foreign. “They have the means to live differently and a high-level exposure to women from other cultures.” Privileged women aren’t deprived of media that depicts the lives of women in the West, and often have direct contact with them. “For them, it is unbearable,” said Hala al-Dosari, a prominent Saudi activist and scholar. The Arab world’s women of privilege-whether they are members of royalty or part of politically connected families-in many ways have it worst of all.
In Saudi Arabia, a detention facility called Dar Al Reaya-infamous for torture, solitary confinement, and prolonged sentencing-houses cases of “immoral behavior.” At the age of 9, the Saudi women’s rights activist Amani al-Ahmadi was warned at her local school in Yanbu that girls who misbehaved would end up in the facility. If a woman is found to be involved with a man, it would prompt the gravest punishment, including lashing, imprisonment, or honor killing. The punishment for those caught depends on which rule is broken. To get around these restrictions, many Arab women practice deception they use fake names online, wear face veils to cover their identities in public, hide burner cell phones from their families, and develop elaborate plans to sneak out of their homes. Marital rape is not a crime, and women who work without their husbands’ consent are “disobedient.” In the UAE in particular, she said, there is no law against domestic violence against woman.
It’s just not as extreme as Saudi Arabia,” said Hiba Zayadin, a Human Rights Watch investigator. “They use different wording, but is there. The university is still segregated, and female students can leave the campus with someone else only if their guardians agree, who are then notified through a message once they leave. Its campus for women is enclosed by a wall lined with barbed wire, and its gates are guarded. Until recently, for example, the government-sponsored United Arab Emirates University prohibited female students from carrying a cellphone with a camera. This treatment extends to public institutions outside the family home.
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Under Saudi Arabia’s guardianship system, a male relative-a husband, father, or son in some cases-has full authority to make critical decisions for a woman from her birth until death.
Traditional families generally place severe restrictions on women depending on which tribe they are from, women may face restrictions on whom they can marry, how much freedom they have outside the house, if they can use social media, if they can travel and where, if they can work, what they can study, when they marry, and who can see their faces. Most women in the Arab world are disadvantaged socially. Together with the details of her thwarted escape attempt, the video offers a rare glimpse into the secret lives of the Arab world’s princesses and its other privileged women and focuses light on the yawning gap between their storybook image and their dire reality. But her final act of freedom deserves attention. Princess Latifa’s dire predictions seem to have come true, now that her family has confined her to a medicated house arrest. “Either I’m dead or in a very, very, very bad situation.” “If you are watching this video, it’s not such a good thing,” she cautions viewers in a plea to save her life. The entire saga would have remained secret if not for a 39-minute video the now 33-year-old princess recorded before she fled and which was leaked after she was apprehended. Within a matter of days, she had been forcibly returned home. When Sheikha Latifa, princess of Dubai, fled her home country in February 2018 and eventually boarded a yacht owned by a wealthy French socialite, her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, quickly assembled a team to track her down.
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