Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has ruled Dubai since 2006 and has been Prime Minister and Vice President of the United Arab Emirates for the same period. Born in 1949, the third son of Sheikh Rashid, he was educated in Dubai and then in Britain, at a language school in Cambridge and the Mons Officer Cadet School at Aldershot. He was made head of Dubai police and public security at nineteen, and defence minister of the new federation in 1971 at twenty-two — the youngest in the world at the time. He ran Dubai's development in practice long before he inherited it, first under his father and then under his brother Maktoum. The strategy he executed was to build an economy that would outlast the oil, which in Dubai's case was never large and is now a small fraction of output. Its instruments were infrastructure and law: Jebel Ali port and its free zone, Emirates airline founded in 1985 with ten million dollars and a rule that it would receive no subsidy, the Dubai International Financial Centre operating under English common law with its own courts, and free zones permitting full foreign ownership. The building programme that followed — the Burj Khalifa, the Palm islands, a debt crisis in 2009 requiring a ten billion dollar loan from Abu Dhabi — made the city globally recognisable. He is a poet in the Nabati tradition and a serious owner and breeder of racehorses through Godolphin. Court proceedings in London in 2020 and 2021 made findings against him concerning two of his daughters and his former wife. He has ten children by six wives and is succeeded, as crown prince, by his son Hamdan. Dubai's population is roughly ninety per cent foreign, on renewable work visas rather than any route to citizenship.
- Lived: 1949 CE – ?
- Nationality: Emirati
- Roles: Prime Minister and Vice President of the United Arab Emirates (2006-present)
