Constantin Schreiber and Azhari TV: The trail leads to the Emirates

What follows is a good 18 minutes of him doing exactly that. “Why Germany needs the Emirates” is the name of the video that Schreiber published on his YouTube channel on September 9, 2026. The occasion is the state visit of Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed to Germany, during which the Emirates pledged investments of 40 billion euros.

Sheikh Mohammed, says Schreiber, “showed leadership that extends far beyond the immediate region.” The Emirates were among the forces in the region “that we as Germany and as Europe should strengthen”.

Six weeks later it becomes known where Schreiber's path leads to Axel Springer, where he will be leaving at the end of the year. From mid-January 2027, he will host the “Islam Talk” program twice a month on the Egyptian religious channel Azhari TV, in Arabic, with scholars, imams, rabbis and Christian representatives

The station wants to “promote a lively and critical debate about Islam and especially the relationship to the West,” says Schreiber of the SZ. He shares the concern with those responsible that in Europe “conservative to extremist Muslim organizations are gaining sovereignty in interpreting Muslim communities.”

Schreiber does not say who those responsible are. However, the story of Azhari TV and its main owners leads to Abu Dhabi and the environment of the ruling family - the country for which Schreiber always finds positive words and which appears in his reporting on the Middle East as a supposed partner against extremism and for stability.

Azhari TV was founded in 2009 by the Libyan oil entrepreneur Hassan Tatanaki. According to research by journalist network OCCRP, Tatanaki ran his business from an office in Dubai in 2014 and holds an Emirati passport. He has maintained contact with the Emirati ruling family since his student days. Tatanaki appears in the “Paradise Papers” as early as 2003 as co-director of a Bermuda company, alongside a later advisor to Mohammed bin Zayed.

There is no publicly available information about the current ownership structure. Egyptian newspapers provide information, reporting on the outcome of a long-standing legal dispute between Tatanaki and the other shareholders. A court decided this legal dispute in 2016. Tatanaki lost the 60 percent shares that he had in the founding agreement.

The station then fell into the hands of a second man who is also close to the Abu Dhabi ruling family: the Emirati businessman Hashem al-Qaisiya. According to Egyptian media reports, he took over the financing of the station in 2016 and became the largest shareholder and CEO with 40 percent.

Hashem Ahmed Al Qaisiya has been known as a media entrepreneur in Abu Dhabi for more than twenty years. He is also a confidant of the UAE monarchs. In 2007, he told the Emirati newspaper Al Bayan that his favorite official trips were with Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, now the Emirati national security adviser. The current Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi came to his son's wedding in 2023. His closeness to the ruling family could hardly be deeper.

Schreiber's fascination with the Gulf Monarchy is not new. He came to Dubai for the first time in 1999, when he was in his early twenties, he remembers in another video on his YouTube channel entitled “The Miracle of Dubai”: Where there are high-rise buildings today, “there was desert here”.

From 2006 to 2009, Schreiber worked in Dubai as a correspondent for Deutsche Welle. In 2022, during his time at “Tagesschau”, he published the travel guide “Nice to meet you, Dubai!”. When he started at Axel Springer in 2025, he repeatedly raved in his world columns about the UAE and Dubai as a place where “dreams are not just dreamed, but put into action.”

In the “Global Reporter” from Axel Springer Publishing, the fascination with the glamorous life of Dubai blurs with an uncritical assessment of Emirati foreign policy. In the “Why Germany needs the Emirates” video from September, he presents the UAE as a counter-model in a troubled region.

The Emirati interest in stability is “not a romantic peace project” but “a solid reason of state”. Germany needs partners “who have an interest in stability” and states “that do not benefit from religious extremists becoming stronger, trade routes collapsing or conflicts continuing to escalate.”

Schreiber praises the Emirates' fight against the Muslim Brotherhood, its tolerance minister, the Abraham Accords (which are intended to normalize Arab states' relations with Israel), and Jewish life in the country. In the end, he draws a line between good and bad partners. It makes a difference whether a state invests in openness and cooperation “or whether it promotes ideological confrontation and instability.”

Criticism can be found in half a sentence: That doesn't mean "that I think everything is uncritically good." However, the Emirati involvement in two of the biggest humanitarian crises of our time is left out: the civil wars in Sudan and Yemen, which call into question Schreiber's thesis that the UAE is an anchor of stability.

A civil war has been raging in Sudan since April 2023. Despite denials from the Emirates, there is ample evidence that the Emirates are supplying the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) with weapons and mercenaries in their war against the army. They enable the RSF to conduct extraordinarily brutal warfare, which is also directly directed against civilians.

In October 2025, the RSF massacred more than 6,000 people in three days in El Fasher in the Darfur region, according to the UN Human Rights Office. The RSF is also fighting with weapons that apparently come from the Emirates. In May 2025, Amnesty International documented how Chinese guided bombs and howitzers “almost certainly” ended up in the hands of the RSF via Abu Dhabi because the Emirates were the only country that bought them. Abu Dhabi denies the allegations.

Schreiber is held responsible for these entanglements of the UAE. In April 2026 he met the Emirati ambassador to Germany, Ahmad Attar. Afterwards, he wrote on LinkedIn that the Emirates “stand for a new path in the Middle East that relies on exchange, tolerance and cosmopolitanism.” Under the post, other users referred to research by Amnesty International, for example.

Yemen also shows how little the image of the “Emirati anchor of stability” actually applies. For years, the Emirates were part of the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis until a break with Riyadh occurred. The reason: At the same time, the UAE supported the separatists of the Southern Transitional Council (STC), whose goal is to secede from Yemen.

At the end of December 2025, the Saudi Air Force attacked cargo delivered to the STC from the Emirates in the port of Mukalla. Riyadh called the Emirati support a “threat to national security.” Abu Dhabi rejected the Saudi allegations and withdrew troops from Yemen. Within a few days, Yemeni government soldiers with Saudi support took Aden, the capital of the separatist STC, which was forced to announce its dissolution.

What is noteworthy is the fact that Schreiber wrote about this break between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in mid-February 2026, but from a different direction. He ignored support for a separatist militia that does not fit into a stability narrative.

His text “The New Arab Rivalry Destabilizing the Middle East” appeared in the world. In this, the Emirates are the victim: a Saudi media campaign, anti-Semitic rhetoric, a rival who “morally questions” them. The text does not mention Yemen. Sudan appears, but only in a list of signatories to the Abraham Accords.

Schreiber's show on Azhari TV is also notable with regard to press freedom in Egypt. Almost simultaneously with his announcement, a court shut down the independent news site Mada Masr and took its editor-in-chief Lina Attalah into custody. In Reporters Without Borders' press freedom ranking, the country ranks 169th out of 180. Schreiber did not answer a query from the taz about the persecution of critical journalists in Egypt, nor about the owners and financing of Azhari TV.

However, Schreiber wrote to the taz about his new show that it was “first of all good to start conversations with representatives of one of the highest institutions of Islam.” His independence has “always been particularly important” to him and he “doesn’t consciously ignore any perspective”.

He referred to his 2020 book about the war in Yemen and that “Islam Talk” was one project among many. Azhari TV left a query from taz about the owners unanswered by the time of going to press.

It is patterns like this in Schreiber's reporting on the Middle East that make one suspicious: How does a journalist come to uncritically positive judgments about a country that, like all other countries in the Middle East, has shady connections? What is he hiding and why? With his new job at Azhari TV, the question “Are you getting paid for this?” possibly a new relevance.