Maumoon Abdul Gayoom
Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was president of the Maldives from November 1978 to November 2008, thirty years, the longest rule in Asia in his time. He was the al-Azhar-trained Islamic scholar whom the parliament chose when Nasir left for Singapore and whom six referendums, in each of which he was the only name on the paper, confirmed with majorities above ninety per cent. He lost the first contested election the country held, in October 2008, to a man he had jailed. He was born in Malé, the son of a court official. He studied at al-Azhar and the American University in Cairo and taught at Nigeria's Abdullahi Bayero college. He came home in 1971 to be jailed by Nasir for criticising the government, was let out to be a minister. He was the transport minister and the country's man at the United Nations when Nasir went. The thirty years made the country what it is. There was the tourism, from a few thousand visitors on two islands in 1978 to seven hundred thousand on ninety resorts by the end, which paid for the schools, the hospitals, the airport and the highest income in South Asia, the islands' own on one side of the lagoon and the resort's on the other, so that the visitors never met the country. There were the fisheries, and the speech at the United Nations in 1987 that made the Maldives the first state to say that the sea would drown it, which it has said since. There was the Islam that was the state's, one religion by law, the mosques his ministry's, the sharia's punishments kept mild and the preachers who wanted them otherwise kept out, which held until it did not. The state was also the prisons. There was the coup attempt of November 1988 by Malé businessmen with Tamil Tiger mercenaries, put down by Indian paratroops flown in overnight at his request. There was the National Security Service that his brother-in-law ran. There was the jail on Maafushi where the beating to death of a prisoner in September 2003 produced the riots that began the end. There was the reform process he announced in 2004 and expected to control, with the parties legalised in 2005 and the constitution of August 2008. There was the election that October, in which Nasheed, whom he had jailed a dozen times, beat him in the run-off with fifty-four per cent. He conceded the same night. The region noticed. He has since been the leader of an opposition party, the ally of his half-brother Yameen's presidency from 2013 and then his prisoner in 2018, at eighty, for nineteen months, and the elder whom the presidents since have consulted. He made the country they govern.
- Lived: 1937 CE – ?
- Nationality: Maldivian
- Roles: president, scholar, politician
