LONDON: During the night of April 8, 1961, 11-year-old Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, the future ruler of Dubai, was awoken by the sound of a ferocious storm battering the royal palace.
As a child, he had heard the elders of his grandfather’s generation recall phenomenal storms of such savagery that they likened them to the Day of Judgement.
But, as Sheikh Mohammed wrote in his autobiography “My Story” in 2019, “I didn’t pay much heed to their prophetic, doom-laden words.”
That is until that April night in 1961 when “I found my bed in the middle of a full-blown storm, with windows slamming in the gale-force winds that were blowing through our family home … It seemed like the world was ending all around me, what some other cultures call the end of days.”