I spoke with two Emirati women who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the state. The first said she left Dubai at 18 for Europe, where she received asylum and is hoping to study as an engineer. “You can see a free woman without the hijab in the Dubai malls, but behind closed doors, you cannot know what’s happening,” she says, adding that after puberty, she was not allowed to leave her home without permission and a guardian. She explains the rationale for this thusly: “Honor is a big thing in the Arab world, and family honor is within the girl—her virginity is the family’s honor,” she says. “If that honor is gone, the reputation of the family is gone. So, the girl has to pay the price.”

The second woman is the daughter of a royal. She said she left the Emirates in her late 20s because “regardless of my age, I was treated like a child.” She adds, “Anyone who comes from the high-up royal level I come from is restricted from doing anything, culture-wise, that can annoy the public.” After beginning a covert romantic relationship with a British man, she ran to England. “I left an email in my sister’s inbox explaining everything: I hated the country, the injustice, the lack of freedom, and the Emirati men,” she told me. Her family, astonished, did not inform their community. “My family has decided to hide the fact that I left them due to our differences, and instead have been creating stories of me—studying in London, continuing my higher studies, living with a maid in an apartment (all paid for by my parents) when people ask about my disappearance,” she says. More recently, pondering her actions, this woman did ask her mother for forgiveness. Her mother responded that she felt her daughter had exposed the family to “unforgettable shame, disgrace, and dishonor.”

In the palaces of Dubai’s royal family, among Mohammed’s brood, some of the same cultural and religious ideology is prevalent. Even though princesses have high status in the country, their situation is not necessarily to be envied. “You have the fancy title of being a princess, and of course you have people waiting on you [hand and foot], but you’re essentially a prisoner,” says an Arab dissident. “You’re not supposed to socialize. You don’t have a normal life.” Though some women in Dubai’s royal family are educated abroad and have public profiles, others simply bear children, spend their monthly stipend, and remain quiet. “If you want to be in favor, you buy into what the king does. If you’re not, you’re pushed aside and nobody really cares about you—you’re not a high-profile monarchy anyway,” says a source with knowledge of Dubai’s royals.

By the time Haya became involved with Sheik Mohammed, if not before, one would think she would have known all of this, but perhaps she was too in love with Mohammed to realize the enormity of her choice in marriage. “I think Princess Haya falls into the category of the type of princess who learned that once you marry into the family, you have to play by their rules. And their rules include self-preservation at all costs,” says the source who has an understanding of the region.

But Haya must certainly have been aware that by the time they wed, something odd had already happened to one of the sheik’s daughters. In 2001, according to The Guardian, Sheik Mohammed’s daughter Sheikha Shamsa bint Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, a tall, dark-eyed college student and equestrian who once ranked behind Princess Anne in a long-distance horse race, abandoned her black Range Rover near the stables at the al-Maktoum Surrey estate. When the vehicle was discovered the following morning, Sheik Mohammed boarded a helicopter from another racing area to join the hunt. Shamsa was eventually found in Cambridge, after which she was reportedly snatched by bodyguards and returned to Dubai; her father followed up by moving 80 horses off the property and firing nearly all of the estate’s staff.