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Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, the Ruler of Abu Dhabi who died on Tuesday aged 86, was President of the United Arab Emirates and a moderate but visionary leader of his desert people.
The sheikh was the principal architect of the UAE, the federation of seven emirates formed when the British withdrew from the Gulf in 1971. It became the longest and most successful example of regional integration in modern Arab history.
Sheikh Zayed's foresight ensured that the UAE's citizens pursued the road from poverty to riches in less than a generation, moving within years of his accession into urban settlements built by oil wealth, but without losing too much of their cultural or religious heritage. The freedom of worship offered to Christians, and allowances made for expatriates to follow Western ways, helped fuel development but sometimes sat uncomfortably with his credentials as a Muslim head of state.
Pious and disciplinarian, Sheikh Zayed's secret was that he never forgot his desert origins, his Islamic faith or his youthful passion for traditional sports and conservation.
The late Sir Wilfred Thesiger recalled his first meeting with Sheikh Zayed in 1948 in a famous passage from his masterpiece Arabian Sands: "He was a powerfully built man of about 30 with a brown beard. He had a strong intelligent face, with steady observant eyes, and his manner was quiet and masterful."
Although Zayed amassed an estimated $20 billion, he always lived modestly. He enjoyed hunting parties with falcons and desert journeys to visit his kinsmen. A keen shot, he gave up hunting with rifles at the age of 25, as a contribution to conserving wildlife.
In a politically turbulent region, the UAE under Sheikh Zayed was a model of stability and progress, with women enjoying freedoms not permitted in more austere Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. His foreign policy paid attention to the plight of the Palestinians and also supported developing nations - especially Pakistan, where Sheikh Zayed often felt at home, enjoying falconry parties in the mountains.
A noted philanthropist, he believed oil wealth was a gift from God that should be shared with countries and people in need. Abu Dhabi sits astride a tenth of the world's known oil reserves and a major proportion of its natural gas. The Abu Dhabi Fund for Arab Economic Development was set up a few months before independence from Britain to handle aid flows, and Sheikh Zayed subsequently channelled economic assistance to at least 40 countries on three continents. He also endowed many charitable appeals.
His skills as a mediator were celebrated throughout the region. They had been honed during a long apprenticeship as Ruler's Representative in the Eastern Region of Abu Dhabi, lasting from 1946 until he took over as Ruler in a bloodless coup 20 years later. His sense of honour became a trademark. He never betrayed the solemn fraternal oath he and his brothers swore before their mother Sheikha Salaama not to murder each other.
Sheikh Zayed's statesmanship was tested by the tortuous and quarrelsome negotiations leading to the creation of the UAE. It was remarkable, given the history of enmity between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, that the federation survived with few stresses and strains after 1972, when Ras al Khaimah joined. In 1981 Sheikh Zayed persuaded the five other sovereign Arab Gulf kingdoms - Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait - to unite in the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC), an economic community with ambitions to move towards a federated structure. The inaugural meeting took place in Abu Dhabi and marked the apogee of his regional influence.
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