Imanmajed, may I ask you a question?
I´d like to know if you think that the fact that Princess Haya committed adultery will cause those people in the UAE who were willing to take a second look at the role and lifestyle of women and either allow or initiate some changes in their own family or, if not that, be more tolerant and open towards others who make such changes, to now re-think their stance and draw back on it?
I am asking because I suppose that Princess Haya served as some sort of a new role model who combined the „best of two worlds“, so to speak, being an attractice woman who played a public role but who was at the same time a faithful and loving wife and mother (as it seemed), an intelligent person with a university degree who gracefully accepted her role as the „junior wife“... - I think you get the picture.
But now, after it has become known that she committed adultery I suppose that is completely over because by that (however dire her situation may have been, it is not my intent to judge her) she must have confirmed the fear of the more traditionalist people that a woman who leads a public life and is her own person will sooner or later give in to the temptations that come with that free life and cannot be trusted morally.
So, instead of giving people hope that freedom and traditional moral values can go together, Princess Haya explicitly crushed that hope. And I´d like to know if you think that this will influence people in the UAE in the way I have outlined. Or does not make it that much of a difference because Princess Haya was never that important in this respect anyway, being an outsider for whom the rules were different from the beginning and would always have been?
Please, also accept my heartfelt sympathy on the occasion – all this is not a pretty story and must be highly depressing to witness.