The first wife of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, the ruler of Dubai, to the Sunday Times: I was prevented from seeing my daughter for more than forty years Arab Unreported Follow Dec 22, 2019 · 6 min read

The start will be from the Sunday Times, which published an exclusive interview for the first wife of Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, under the exciting title of “Our child is now in the forties and the prince is still preventing me from approaching her.”

As for the subtitle of the meeting conducted by Louise Calagan, the newspaper’s correspondent in the Middle East, it says, “The first wife of the Emir of Dubai says that she was expelled from the country when her marriage ended in the seventies of the last century, and she did not see her daughter from then.”

In this meeting, Lebanese Randa Al-Banna tells her story and the circumstances of her marriage to the ruler of Dubai, then divorced her, and prevented her from seeing her daughter for decades.

According to the newspaper, Randa lived an “exceptional life by all standards. She started marrying a prince of the richest ruling families in the Middle East, and she celebrated this life with private planes, champagne and parties at the Trump Nightclub in London, then divorce and return bankrupt to Beirut, and she was forcibly separated from her little girl, Then the kidnapping came, and forcing her to marry a leader of the armed militia fighting in the Lebanese civil war.

Honey of beginnings and the cost of freedom

“Sheikh Mohammed is not an easy man. He is not. He is very stubborn,” journalist Louise Calagan quotes Randa Al Banna as saying. “I have made my decision, and I cannot see Manal now … I do not know her shape. I am not allowed to see her, because I am who I chose to leave, so this is my punishment. Not to see her. “ “It is not fair. All this is because I made the decision to leave, and to be free. You are wondering why I wanted my freedom. See what it cost me.”

She added that “she was the victim of an attack that almost claimed her life a few days before her intention to travel in secret to Dubai to attend Manal’s wedding, and she still has clear traces to this day.”

Randa says that when she met the prince in 1972, she had no idea who he was. She was sixteen years of age, and was harmoniously dancing at a friend’s engagement party, when a man came to her to tell her that the son of the ruler of Dubai wanted to talk to her. Randa was not affected by the offer. The daughter of the Lebanese politician had not heard of Dubai, and she felt that the Prince’s name was too long to be remembered, and her answer was, “If he wants to talk to me, he can come to me.” The prince really came, and a brief conversation took place between them, and after two days he was in her parents’ house with a large entourage and asked her hand for marriage.

The detection of Randa comes after the escape of Princess Haya Al Hussein, the sixth wife of Sheikh Mohammed, and the spread of news of their dispute over the custody of their children, and the arrival of the matter to the British judiciary.

As she says, Randa has kept the secrets of the Al-Maktoum family, hoping that her silence will enable her to see her daughter, but today her health is declining, and she is extremely concerned that she or one of her children from her second marriage would be subjected to revenge for revealing what happened. She spent about ten years collecting her memories, which she hopes to publish.

However, what she most wanted was for her daughter to know that she loved her, and that she did not want to leave her for those years.

The young couple lived in London for some time before moving to Dubai, where the Beirut girl did not like the lack of amenities nor the Bedouin culture that her husband was so attached to. She says he wrote her poems, but she did not understand any of them.

Randa reveals that her husband’s family “insisted on changing her name, which they considered very European, to Haifa.” “My audacity disturbed him, I couldn’t conceal anything inside me. I didn’t think that when you were talking to a member of the royal family you should be watching yourself.”

The price of love

Despite that, they were lovers, and she was 18 years old and was happily pleased when she gave birth to her daughter. But soon everything fell during a short visit to her family in Beirut shortly after Manal’s birth, when she learned of an order that the sheikh did during her pregnancy, and he denied that this was true, but Randa asked for a divorce.

She ended up returning to Beirut and preventing her from accompanying her five-month-old daughter. “Then I lost my family, I didn’t want to talk to any of them. I lost it, I lost my home, I lost my daughter, I lost my dignity and my pride, I lost everything. I paid the price of love.”

And that was not the only blow in her life. At a checkpoint in Beirut that was buried under the yoke of the civil war, Randa was kidnapped, and her kidnapper, a militia leader, forced her to marry him, and her life was with him “a storm, with a lot of violence, and she gave birth to two children.” Always threatening her with death, he once shot her leg because she “put her feet on the table.” And once she cut her long hair because another man expressed his admiration for him.

Whenever she asked for a divorce, he would tell her that “the only way to leave it is inside the coffin.”

When the civil war ended, she took revenge for herself, and branded her husband to the authorities, so they arrested him. In return, she and her two children were allowed to travel to Italy, where she lives to this day. A few years later, the husband was assassinated.

Randa says that Sheikh Muhammad helped her pay the lawyer’s fees for her divorce from the militia man, and when she became free she repeated her attempts to see Manal, and she begged the Sheikh to allow her, but he was always promising, and not fulfilling promises. “Promises. A life passed, an entire life.”

She said that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid gave her a picture of Manal, a child she liked, and she is the only one she has. Years later, I realized that it was not Manal’s picture at all, but that of one of his other children. “I loved a picture that wasn’t my child,” she says. “I knew her. She embraced her.”

Maternity instinct test

In 2000 she traveled to Dubai, called the sheikh and asked to see her daughter, and the sheikh gave her an address and asked her to come in the most beautiful clothes, and the place was a celebration of an Emirati air show attended by thousands of people, “I asked him where she is? He replied that she is inside, try to get to know her, I want To see the mother’s instinct. “

Randa searched in the hall among hundreds of women for her daughter, but she understood that she was not present, and on the second day she left Dubai. Then, she says, she was prevented from entering the Emirates. “Do you know the reason for the ban? Because I am dangerous for security. Me or his daughter. Imagine.”

Then she tried to enter the UAE secretly in 2005 as part of a retinue of a Saudi princess who was her friend to attend Manal’s wedding, but days before she was traveling she was attacked by a man with a baseball bat.

The attack resulted in a long wound that required 27 stitches, and broke four of its ribs. When I woke up, Sheikh Muhammad was at her side to express his sympathy, present his willingness to pay her medical expenses, and she was very afraid and “I asked him what she did. He replied, Are you crazy? You are from my family. I can never harm you.”

Doctors had to insert a metal cage with eight screws into her torso, and she had to use the wheelchair for four years.

But Randa Al-Banna concluded her speech by saying, “If I were allowed to see my daughter, he would have compensated me for everything. All I want is to hold her in my arms again.”

Source — https://www.bbc.com/arabic/inthepress-50881991