Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan

Mohamed was educated in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain and graduated from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1979. He joined the UAE armed forces, held various posts, became a pilot in the UAE Air Force, and was promoted to general in 2005. As a child, his father had unknowingly assigned a respected Muslim Brotherhood member, Ezzedine Ibrahim, as his tutor; the English article recounts that the attempted indoctrination backfired and shaped his lifelong distrust of the Brotherhood, in his own words to American diplomats in 2007: "I am an Arab, I am a Muslim and I pray. And in the 1970s and early 1980s I was one of them." ^{1 2}

When his father died in 2004 and Khalifa became president, Mohamed became crown prince of Abu Dhabi. After Khalifa's stroke in January 2014, Mohamed became the de facto leader of the UAE, carrying out the public affairs of the state and the day-to-day decision-making of the emirate for the rest of Khalifa's life. ¹

On Khalifa's death on 13 May 2022, Mohamed became ruler of Abu Dhabi and was elected president by the Federal Supreme Council the following day. In March 2023 he appointed his son Khaled bin Mohamed as crown prince of Abu Dhabi. The New York Times named him the most powerful Arab ruler in 2019, and Time included him among its 100 most influential people that year. ¹

The sources describe an interventionist foreign policy pursued first as de facto leader and then as president, driven by opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Iran and its proxies. Under him the UAE took part in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and in the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen — until a disagreement with Saudi Arabia over its support for the Yemeni party Al-Islah, while Mohamed backed the Southern Transitional Council — and led the 2017 Qatar crisis, in which the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and others severed relations with Qatar over its alleged support for the Brotherhood. In Sudan's civil war, the article describes him as the main backer of the Rapid Support Forces. He fell out with the Obama administration over the Iran nuclear deal and supported American withdrawal from it, maintained a close relationship with President Donald Trump, and in 2020 the UAE signed the Abraham Accords normalising relations with Israel. These positions are recounted here as the sources report them, not as the museum's assessment. ¹

Islam is the official religion of the UAE; the article describes how the state tightly controls and monitors Muslim practice, requires permits for Qur'an lectures and religious content, and pays all imams, in an effort to counter decentralised preaching by Islamist groups. Mohamed visited Pope Francis in 2016, and in February 2019 welcomed him to the UAE in the first papal visit to the Arabian Peninsula, coinciding with the Global Conference of Human Fraternity; Francis celebrated the first papal Mass on the peninsula, at Zayed Sports City, before some 180,000 worshippers from 100 countries, including 4,000 Muslims. ^{1 2}

Mohamed married Sheikha Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan in 1980; they have nine children, four sons and five daughters. A lifelong fan of falconry, he established a falconry and desert physiognomy school bearing his name. ¹

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