Arab Oil Sheikh

The Sheikh, he drove his Cadillac
He went a-cruisin' down the ville
The muezzin was a-standin'
On the radiator grille

— The Clash, Rock the Casbah

They're from Arabia and they're accumulators.

The Arab Oil sheikh is a rich Arab man with big investments in oil. He is typically seen in Arab dress, complete with keffiyeh, sometimes wearing dark aviator sunglasses when traveling abroad, or in a fine western suit and the keffiyeh and sunglasses. He will sometimes attempt to purchase the services of local prostitutes.

Often referred as the source of various pictures of excess luxury in Snopes.com's photography section, claiming they have, for example, cars made of solid silver, or coated in diamonds. (Back when Texans were the ones considered super rich, one example was the Texan who gave away his Cadillac and bought another one once the ashtrays were full. Yeah, and he smoked too, it was that far back.)

This character type is often brought in to teach a character An Aesop about putting his friends before monetary gain. This often involves the Sheikh innocently offering said character a large reward for a task that involves stepping on the character's friends in order to succeed.

A common outcome is that the character fulfills the requirement while managing to help his friends as well, but he then turns down the reward because he's learned that money isn't the only thing in the world.

In the present climate, they might be involved in financing terrorism. Sometimes The Con will involve someone using this trope and posing as a rich Arab to help explain a source of abundant but eccentric money for the mark, in which case the "Arab sheikh" plays a similar role to the "Nigerian prince" in a 419 Scam.

They also turn up a lot in romance novels, where they are dark, brooding, passionate and rule everything they survey in their desert kingdom with the same tenacity they show towards the heroine. Sheikh romance actually gave us the term "bodice ripper" due to the common kidnap-rape-love plots that featured where the Arab can get away with being beyond normal constraints in how he treats the heroine due to his exoticism. He'll still have the education of Lord Byron though and the manners of a prince which is kind of the point: these books want someone who lives in the closest thing to a modern lavish royal court and acts like The Black Death hasn't gone out of fashion. He will also turn up as a villain trying to buy or kidnap the female lead for his harem.

An indispensable addition to any (generally evil) Cosmopolitan Council. In more comedic works, he is almost inevitably a Funny Foreigner. If his home country isn't a real one, it's Qurac.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Mister Mohammad from Brain Powerd, presumably.
• One of Princess Flora's suitors in old school shoujo manga Honey Honey was an older version of this.
• One episode of The Idolmaster had a woman get into an Arranged Marriage with one. For extra kicks, "Oil Baron" is his actual name.
• Lupin III as a disguise.
• Invoked in Osomatsu-san. Totoko has such high standards for boys, she doesn't want to marry anyone less than an Arab oil sheikh. She manages to land one in "Totoko's Big Panic", but she gives it up when he can't stand her fishy scent.

Comic Books

• Belgian Comics and Franco-Belgian Comics: These are stock characters in a lot of comics series where the characters travel to the Middle East: Suske en Wiske, Jommeke, Nero, Natacha, Piet Pienter en Bert Bibber, Spirou & Fantasio,...
• The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers: Fat Freddy dresses up as one to get his friends out of jail. He doesn't look Middle Eastern at all, nor does he speak any Arabic, but he lets money do the talking.
• Fantastic Four: In a bizarre comic book example, a sheik apparently named Fasaud was transformed into an electromagnetic energy being and promptly began trying to take over the world. The Fantastic Four stopped him.
• Tintin: In Tintin: Land of Black Gold, Sheik Bab El Ehr is trying to depose Emir Ben Kalish Ezab so that Skoil Petroleum can take over Arabex's oil concessions.
• The Tomb of Dracula: In the tenth issue, a group of elites Dracula tries to intimidate/recruit includes a dark-skinned man wearing both Arabic headgear and a suit and tie. Unlike most examples of the trope, he practices Christianity rather than Islam, which also means that he has a crucifix to deploy against Dracula.

Comic Strips

• An Oil Sheik once tried to buy the entire island of Drambeg and have it shipped to the Arabian Gulf piece by piece in Angus Og. Despite his vast wealth he still had problems affording ferry ticket prices in the Outer Hebrides though.
• One of these, named Sultan Pepper, appeared in Gasoline Alley, buying an invention that would theoretically improve gas mileage.

Film — Animated

• In the Norwegian cult classic puppet-movie, Pinchcliffe Grand Prix, visiting Oil Sheikh Ben Redic Phyfasan (a name which in the original Norwegian would rougly translate akin to something like "Sheik Ben Radish Gawd Damn Eet") ends up sponsoring both the construction of the protagonist's Cool Car, Il Tempo Gigante, and the titular Grand Prix. What, exactly, an Arab Oil Sheikh was doing in a tiny Norwegian village on the far edge of nowhere, is never really explored.
  • He even speaks broken Norwegian, so maybe he takes a special interest in Norway.

Film — Live-Action

• 2012: An early scene shows a Saudi prince buying seats on The Ark for himself and his family even though they cost 100,000,000 euros apiece. Though even he balks at this price, because he has a very large family.
• The Sheik from The Cannonball Run offers to make random women part of his harem (including giving one of them a ring so she can 'get a physical'), and mentions that his mother is thinking of buying southern California in an attempt to dissuade CHiPs officers from giving him a ticket.
• Condorman disguised himself as one.
• Ben Kingsley plays a reclusive Arab sheik who abducts a New York woman in Harem.
• A very unusual example is featured in the Pakistani film International Guerillas where a pair of Arab businessmen are in league with the Big Bad who is conspiring to destroy Islam. The character in question was inspired on the writer Salman Rushdie who wrote an very controversial novel that outraged Muslims worldwide, including Arabs from the Gulf states which makes them side with Rushdie really odd. But then again, they are something of a punching bag even among Muslims themselves due to being perceived as "Western puppets".
• The Killer Elite a fairly impoverished sheik has vast amounts of oil discovered on his lands. His son has no desire to live the traditional lifestyle.
• The Kingdom: The FBI team negotiates with a wealthy Saudi prince about whether they can operate inside the country. He's a Politically Incorrect Hero in some respects, but more humble and reasonable than most examples of the trope.
• Noises Off: The Show Within a Show features a sheikh who is a prospective real estate buyer and is impersonated by another character.
• The exact same plot as Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (Arab oil sheik sponsoring race) shows up in the Swedish movie Göta Kanal. Except it's a boat race. And he ends up not paying because his brother launches a coup as he is gone. In the end the Norwegian navy saves the day.
• The US government attempts to trade Goldie Hawn to one in exchange for being allowed to construct a military base in his nation in Protocol.
• The end of Secondhand Lions.
  • Remember, that good-looking young rich fellow was the sheik's grandson. The sheik himself is shown in flashbacks of Hub and Garth's adventures and fits this trope to a T.
  • In the alternate ending, the sheik of the flashbacks makes an appearance himself (obviously VERY old) at Hub and Garth's joint funeral in the cornfield.
• The Sheik is a film from 1921 (based on the 1919 novel) with Rudolph Valentino in the title role.
• One of the subplots of Syriana focuses on the conflict between two sons who are the scions of a Gulf ruling family: a well-meaning Internal Reformist and his playboy younger brother.
• One of these fellows ultimately purchased Bryan Mills' daughter in Taken. He doesn't have much time for buyer's remorse to set in after Bryan comes looking to kick ass.

Literature

• Cat Among the Pigeons: At the beginning of the book, Prince Ali Yusuf is the hereditary sheikh of the small but rich (including in oil) Middle Eastern state of Ramat. He has a liberal, western education and has sunk his treasury into making the country a welfare state with schools and hospitals while rejecting the example of his grandfather, The Caligula (who has a bizarre Villain with Good Publicity legacy). This gets him overthrown in a coup.
• Dortmunder: One of the burglary victims in Nobody's Perfect is Nouveau Riche oil sheikh Rama el-Rama el-Rama El. He spends all of his page-time "cheerfully and suavely insulting everyone his glittering oily eye lit upon, making jokes about the West's incipient decline and the Arab World's upcoming dominance[.]" The best thing that can be said about him is that he doesn't laugh about an anti-Semitic joke, and even that may have just been because the joke was badly told.
• Charles Stross' The Merchant Princes Series continually compares the titular family of worldwalkers to Arab oil sheiks: they're members of a medieval society who've used a natural resource (in their case, the ability to travel between universes) to become wealthy in the modern world.
• Sheik Abu-Tahir in the first Modesty Blaise novel is the leader of a small Arabic tribe who recently hit oil and the big time in that order. Definitely a Funny Foreigner. He mixes elements of the wealthy lifestyle with elements of the traditional life of his tribe; for instance, when he comes to England to negotiate an oil deal with the British government, he and his retinue take a suite at the Ritz and then set up a traditional encampment inside it, complete with tents and goats.
• Proof (by Dick Francis) features an unnamed oil-rich Arabian prince interested in horse races. The narrator (a bartender) avoids interacting with him due to expecting that the Sheikh will express virulent disapproval of his work in the alcohol business. Other characters who do interact with the Sheikh describe him as a Fat Bastard and Straw Misogynist who looks down on everyone and is so paranoid about assassination that he makes his three armed bodyguards stand at his side in the dentist's office. He dies in a random car accident early in the book.
• The 1919 novel The Sheik is the Ur-Example for the Romance Novel version.
  • Even today, Mills and Boon (Harlequin in the United States) pump out at least one Sheik romance a month.
• Who Is Bugs Potter? by Gordon Korman features a notoriously unlucky emerald. One of its latest owners (and one of the few to survive owning it), Sheikh Muley Hassan, had one of his oil wells run dry shortly after he purchased the gem. At the advice of his astrologer, he gave the emerald away to a visiting movie star, who has since found herself plagued by constant (albeit nonfatal) bad luck.

Live-Action TV

• On 30 Rock, Floyd is up for a big promotion at General Electric. He and Liz Lemon are looking at what must be a multi-million dollar apartment with a river view. Before Floyd works up the courage to commit to it, an Arab Oil Sheikh enters and agrees to buy it on the spot so that his son can store motorcycles in it.
• An Arab billionaire tried to buy British Airways in one episode of Absolute Power (BBC), although he was dressed in more of the way of a traditional businessman. He needed a PR team because he was related to Osama bin Laden.
• One appeared on Alice, offering to marry the sassiest waitress—she was impressed by the over-sized real diamond ring, but was unwilling to be his fourth wife.
• In an episode of America's Next Top Model, a contestant admitted that before the show she had once gone to what she thought was a modelling casting, but turned out to be a dinner with rich middle eastern men trying to solicit young girls to take home as wives.
• In one episode of Are You Being Served?, an Arab Oil Sheikh visits the store and attempts to buy a pair of trousers in exchange for a goat...When the goat is refused by the sales assistants, the sheik then tries to trade a beautiful woman.
• One The Beverly Hillbillies episode features a gaudily dressed Arab sheikh who calls Jed "brother" because of how both of them make so much of their money from oil that it's practically in their blood. He also tries to buy Jed's daughter to be one of his wives.
• Parodied in one episode of Get Smart. In one scene two wealthy terrorist-connected men in Arabian garb discuss all the cities they are going to attack with a super-weapon and it is implied one is Jewish:
  Sheik #1:New York, London, Jerusalem.
  Sheik #2: Not Jerusalem.
  Sheik #1: Why not Jerusalem.
  Sheik #2 whispers into Sheik #1 ear.
  Sheik #1: Really? You don't look it.
• Les Guignols de l'Info has Prince al-Thani of Qatar, who shows up whenever football clubs are mentioned. He's always accompanied by the club's manager, who acts as his Completely Unnecessary Translator (the Strictly Formula segments go like this: the prince whispers something, the manager translates in semi-correct French, the anchor asks if the prince speaks French, the manager responds that yes, but not to him). One episode showed him walking around Paris and treating it like a game of Monopoly, the difference being that he could afford to buy every street.
• Several iterations of the opening credits of Have I Got News for You had a Sheikh floating on an oil gusher in Water-Geyser Volley style. In his last appearance, he was shown accompanied by U.S. soldiers; the moment the oil ran out, the soldiers abandoned him in favour of a humble goatherd who had just struck oil.
• In Highway to Heaven, Mark Gordon (played by Victor French), temporarily pretends to be one of these to fool corrupt businessmen to help Johnathan Smith and Mark Gordon's equally corrupt but good-natured friends.
• On Homeland, Carrie's contact Lynne Reed is a High-Class Call Girl for an Arab prince who is suspected to be funding terrorist activity. In addition to sleeping with the prince, she also recruits women for his Paid Harem.
• Hotel Babylon, where a group are seen as enjoying the services of one of the prostitutes that the hotel will get for clients who ask.
• In the season 6 opener of Hustle, the grifters con an oil sheikh out of £250,000 by having Emma pretend to be Kylie Minogue.
• An Arab oil sheik showed up in an episode of Las Vegas. He sort-of defied the stereotype in terms of looks since he was younger and more handsome than the usual standard and just wore a regular custom suit instead of a keffiyeh, but he was openly polygynous and already had three wives. He proposes to Delinda, but is 'mysteriously' poisoned and then set on fire before he can give her the ring. It turns out that his previous wives all despised him.
• Leverage had Hardison do something closely akin to this in "The First David Job".
• A subversion or aversion- in one episode of Minder, the character to be guarded is a wealthy Arab politician who is a rather noble good guy who doesn't show any of the stereotypical love of excess associated with the character. Amusingly, one character in the episode is hired as a temporary butler and believes the stereotype and thus thinks that hiring a white prostitute for his boss is the first thing he should do.
• A stock character in several episodes of Mission: Impossible.
• The Muppet Show. One episode has a subplot of Arabs drilling for oil in the guest star dressing room.
• In an episode of The Nanny, Fran visits a Sheikh at his palace in his home country. He, of course, falls in love with her, and tries to persuade her to stay as his wife. The decision Fran has to make isn't exactly made easier by the fact that the Sheikh looks a lot like Mr. Sheffield. Subverted, in that he wasn't actually interested in marriage, but hiring Fran as a nanny for his son and future children. He did seem taken with her, leading her to the wrong conclusion.
• In the Omid Djalili show a recurring sketch has a parody of this trope, with a sheikh who keeps striking oil everywhere. Including in a golf course sand bunker and somehow in the middle of a park bench
• The Real Hustle used this to get US$80,000 of jewellery from a Las Vegas jeweller. The grifters gave it back.
  • They used it to steal two cars as well.
• In the second episode of Round the Twist, Mr Gribble tries to sell Nell's land (which is a day or two away from foreclosure) to a group of Arab sheiks, with the promise of the Twists' lighthouse to follow. When Mr Gribble bad-mouths the sculptures Tony makes, saying, "You wouldn't give it to your mother-in-law," one of the sheiks corrects him: "mothers-in-law". Later, the sheik sees the sculptures and buys a statue on impulse, seemingly producing AU$500 from nowhere (when Mr Gribble expresses disbelief, the sheik smiles and says, "Give me a hand, Mr Grobble," patting him on the back).
• Scarecrow and Mrs. King: "Always Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth" features an Arab prince who grew up in an Lonely at the Top household, is wooed for drilling rights to his country's oil by a False Friend, is married to an American woman who befriends Amanda, and is said to be one of the last stabilizing factors in the Middle East.
• One comes to John Beresford Tipton's rescue in SCTV's parody of The Millionaire.
• Seigi No Symbol Condorman has Oil Snake, an oil-themed snakeman and Monster Clan executive who dresses like an Arab sheikh.
• One attempts to buy Doreau in an episode of Sledge Hammer!.
• The Small Wonder episode "Vicki Goodwrench" features one, played by an Israeli actor.
• Whodunnit? (UK): The Victim of the Week in "Instant Coffee" is the ruler of a tiny, oil-rich Arab kingdom on the Persian Gulf who is in London to negotiate an oil contract with a British firm. He, his son, and his brother are all dressed in Arabian robes and keffiyeh.

Music

• "The Sheik of Araby" is a hit song from 1921 (inspired by the movie mentioned above in Film).
  • Covered by The Beatles for their Decca Records audition. Included on The Beatles Anthology 1.
• The Clash's "Rock The Casbah" mentions a sheik cruising in his Cadillac in the opening lines. The music video also shows one, who's hitchhiking until he meets a Jewish limo driver and the two of them hang out around Austin, Texas together before going to a Clash concert.
• The 2009 Busta Rhymes song "Arab Money" describes living an opulent lifestyle similar to that of an Arab oil tycoon.
• Ray Stevens' eponymous Ahab the Arab is described as having "emeralds and rubies just a-drippin' offa him, and a ring on every finger of his hand".
  • His song "The Sheik of R&B" is about one of these who decides to get into the music business.
• The front cover of Frank Zappa's 1979 album Sheik Yerbouti.

Music Videos

• The music video for The Clash's "Rock the Casbah" (which got a lot of play on MTV in the early 1980s) has some fun with this trope as a man who appears to be an Arab Oil Sheikh ends up hanging around with a man who looks like an Orthodox Jew, and the video ends with the two attending a concert The Clash were putting on.

Tabletop Games

• As shown above, they are among the groups you can add to your conspiracy's power-structure in Illuminati: New World Order.

Theatre

• Ali Ben Ali in The Desert Song, who has a harem.
  • Also from The Desert Song: Pierre Birabeau, a Frenchman, disguises himself as a Sheikh to lead the local people in rebellion against colonialism.

Video Games

• Ali Shaheed from Alpha Protocol, who finances and leads a terrorist cell. When you confront him, you are given the option of killing him, apprehending him or making a deal to spare him so that he can help you gather information on the real villains.
• Beyond: Two Souls: One of Jodie's early missions with the CIA involves spying on several classified documents belonging to an Arab sheikh. It's even possible for Aiden to mind control the sheikh himself.
• Tangentially: The Arab civilization in Civilization V gets two bonuses: extra gold from Trade Routes, and double oil production.
• The Hashishin from Gothic III fit this trope well, although they don't deal with oil, but rather artifacts from excavating ancient ruins.
• Yusuf Amir in Grand Theft Auto IV is the son of one, a nice guy from the start, and shows an infatuation with American popular culture.
• In Hitman: Blood Money, one of Agent 47's targets, Mohammad Bin Faisal al-Khalifa, could be described as an Arab Oil Sheikh. He actually runs a pharmaceutical company, but he's still filthy rich, influential, and dresses in the appropriate manner for such a trope. For good measure, he owns the Arabian-themed casino where the mission takes place. One of the customers confuses him for one of the wait staff.
• Sheikh Salman Al-Ghazali, in Hitman (2016), is a "real" Arab Oil Sheikh: corrupt as hell, fortune from oil, hails from Saudi Arabia.
• Maken X and its remake Maken Shao had one. He was one of the villains, and was short and fat, with his stomach stuffed with grotesque mutant tentacles. Did we mention these games were by the same people as Shin Megami Tensei?
• Flame Man in Mega Man 6 is designed to look like one.
• Fassad aka Yokuba aka Locria in Mother 3. (Well, he looks like one, in any case.)
  • Doesn't help the fact that the first time you see him, he's in the desert. It also doesn't help with the fact that his shell is in the Empire Pork Building, with a desert theme.
• A sheik shows up if you initiate a certain line of rumors in Persona 2 and gives you a side-quest dealing with filling out dungeon maps.
• Richman series has Salonbus who is an Arab oil tycoon. He also uses oil tanks to represent his properties in most games.
• Sheikh Salim represents the Middle East in Tropico 4. Salim has many wives and many camels; he will often promise his second-best camel as a gift for meeting certain requests. Should that camel die, he will instead give El Presidente the change his wives fished out of the couch (US$30,000).

Western Animation

• Clue Club: In ''The Solar Energy Caper," a sheikh asks Pepper to be his sixth wife and haughtily offers to buy a solar energy device for a million dollars. The gang speculates he wants to destroy the device so that it won't be used to disrupt his oil interests.
• Darkwing Duck: In "Water Way to Go," the Princess of Oilrabia is a combination of an oil sheikh and the High Queen. She wears Arabian clothing, runs a country with an oil-based economy, and allies with the heroes to keep the villains from robbing her people's source of income.
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: In "Cobra Soundwaves," Sheikh Ali rules a desert country whose oil fields are being attacked by Cobra. The Joes arrive to help bolster his country's defense, and Ali is a Nice Guy who gets along with them fairly well and cares for the safety of his people (although he also has a reckless Fearless Fool moment in the climax).
• The episode "Harem Cat" of Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats had Orville, a pet cat of one of these, try to kidnap Cleo for his next wife.
• One episode of Mister Go has the title character digging in an oil field that belongs to one of these. After he drills through a pipeline and causes the oil to flood all over, the owner forces him to clean up the mess and threatens him with a sword.

Real Life

• The Los Angeles suburb of Beverly Hills is usually stereotyped as having these, due to the amount of Gulf Arabs living there.
• Mazher Mahmood was an undercover reporter who posed as a "Fake Sheikh" to get stories.
• The fake sheikh scam has even been used by US government agents!

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