Qaboos bin Said
Qaboos bin Said deposed his own father in 1970 and inherited a country with three schools, ten kilometres of paved road and a law against wearing sunglasses. Said bin Taimur had ruled since 1932 and governed by keeping Oman out of the twentieth century deliberately: no radios, no spectacles without permission, gates of the capital locked at dusk, and almost no medical care in a country with endemic trachoma. His son, educated at Sandhurst and kept effectively under house arrest on returning, took power in a palace coup with British support and sent him to London. The war he inherited in Dhofar had been running for seven years and was backed by South Yemen and, through it, by China and the Soviet Union. He won it by 1976 with a combination British officers still study - an amnesty that turned insurgents into government irregulars, wells and clinics in the areas taken, and Iranian and Jordanian troops. Oil paid for the rest. Schools, hospitals, roads and ports were built from almost nothing, and life expectancy rose by about thirty years within his reign. He had no children and named no heir publicly. The arrangement he left was a sealed letter in two copies, to be opened if the family council could not agree within three days of his death - which is a constitutional mechanism resting entirely on an envelope. It was opened in January 2020 and worked. He ruled absolutely throughout, holding the offices of prime minister, foreign minister, defence minister and central bank chairman at once, and permitting a consultative council with no legislative power. What he did with that unaccountability was mediate: Oman kept relations with Iran through every crisis, hosted the secret American-Iranian talks that produced the nuclear agreement of 2015, and stayed out of the Yemen war its neighbours fought.
- Lived: 1940 CE – 2020 CE
- Nationality: Omani
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
