Too hot to handle: Dina Al-Sabah's fat-torching cardio isn't the only thing causing a fitness firestorm

Muscle & Fitness, August, 2005 by Jeff O'Connell

"A lot of the Kuwait women have a lot of money from oil, and so they travel frequently to the West," says Hargreaves. "And when they come to London, for example, they behave in many ways like Westerners. But they don't talk openly about the fact that they exercise freely and they wear bikinis at the beach. They don't want to say things that wouldn't be accepted by the powers that be [back home] ... partly out of fear, but I think partly out of respect as well. As Muslim women who practice their religion and who believe that they're good Muslims, their attitude is, If I choose as an individual to interpret Islam in a particular way, I'm answerable to God. But I don't have to put down my religion."

LINES IN THE SAND

Setting down her tea, Dina considers this question: Given the potential backlash from that part of the world, are there certain lines you won't cross--say, for example, appearing in FLEX magazine's lingerie issue? "Apparently, you've never been to my site," she says, smiling.

To put it mildly, Dina has been indiscreet by Middle Eastern standards. In fact, fitdina.com, which she runs, hails her as "The Internet's Sauciest Female Fitness Model," a claim her subscription-only photo galleries back up. Nonetheless, she considers herself a Muslim. She doesn't necessarily pray numerous times a day, as orthodoxy would suggest, but when she does pray, they are Muslim prayers. "Certainly that's part of my heritage, and I'm proud of who I am," she says.

The royal connection makes the comparison between her and other Middle Eastern women murkier still. As Hale notes, Dina's status potentially offers both more liberties and more constraints than other women in that part of the world typically experience. In Kuwait, all Al-Sabahs are not equal: Those directly related to rulers are considered better "stock" than those who are very distant relatives. From the vantage point of Kuwaitis, Dina's lineage is among the best possible. Her grandfather was the son of Salim I, Kuwait's emir, or ruler, between 1917 and 1921. The current crown prince is her father's first cousin, and Dina's uncle by marriage.

Although Kuwait's colonial heritage is British, Dina's family tree is highly Americanized, owing at least in part to her grandfather's decision to send some of his children stateside for schooling. Dina's father became something of a jet-setting playboy, and after he met a half-Syrian, half-Turkish photo journalist chronicling civil war in Lebanon, and the couple had a daughter in Beirut in 1974, Sheikha Dina Ali Fahad Al-Salim Al-Sabah was already "apart" from her royal bloodline. The estrangement was more than geographical. The very coupling of a Kuwaiti royal with an "outsider" was considered inappropriate, and Dina's birth was kept secret for a year. Once her existence became known in Kuwait, the people there referred to her as the "one with the foreign mother."

When Dina was 4, her parents divorced, and she ended up in the care of one of her father's sisters. This surrogate mother owned an import-export business, and in what amounted to an Arab version of Auntie Mame, the two of them enjoyed a far-flung life of luxurious escapades from Italy to the United Arab Emirates. (Dina lived in Kuwait for only a year or so when she was 5, although she visited there periodically.)