Said bin Taimur
Said bin Taimur ruled Muscat and Oman for thirty-eight years as a personal estate, paid off the debts he inherited by spending nothing, forbade his subjects sunglasses, radios, bicycles and travel, kept the oil revenue that began in 1967 in the treasury, shut himself in a palace at Salalah for the last twelve years, and was deposed there by his son in a palace coup that the British had arranged, in July 1970, after being shot in the foot by his own pistol; the country he left had three schools, one hospital and ten kilometres of paved road. He was born in 1910, educated at Mayo College in India and in Baghdad, and became sultan in 1932 when his father abdicated to live in Bombay, inheriting a treasury emptied by British loans and an interior the imam of the Ibadis governed without him. He was intelligent, spoke English and Urdu, and concluded that money was the danger. He paid the debts by the 1940s, kept the balance in gold, and refused development on the ground that it would bring the demands that had destroyed other rulers. When the imamate rose in 1954 and 1957 with Saudi money he took the interior with British aircraft and the Trucial Oman Scouts, and the last rebels held the Jebel Akhdar until the SAS climbed it in 1959, which was Britain's first use of the regiment since Malaya. Then he withdrew to Salalah in Dhofar, the southern province, and ruled by radio-telephone; the Dhofari revolt that began there in 1965 was Marxist by 1968 and held most of the province by 1970, with the Chinese and the South Yemenis behind it. The British, whose base at Masirah and whose oil company needed the country, decided the sultan was the problem. Qaboos, his only son, whom he had kept under house arrest in the palace since 1966, walked into his father's rooms on 23 July 1970 with British officers behind him. The old man wounded himself reaching for a gun, signed his abdication, and was flown to Bahrain and then to London, where he lived at the Dorchester on a pension until his death in October 1972. The son opened the schools within the year.
- Lived: 1910 CE – 1972 CE
- Nationality: Omani
- Roles: sultan, monarch
