PROFILE: Qatar's Porsche investor emir is Gulf's most modern monarch

By Anne-Beatrice Clasmann Aug 14, 2009, 15:39 GMT

Doha - The emir of Qatar, whose sheikhdom Friday became a major investor in the iconic German sports car company Porsche, is by far the most colourful ruler in the Arab Gulf states.

Aged 57, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani is also the youngest in the club of rich Gulf monarchs.

Sheikh Hamad came to power at age 43 in June 1995, when he deposed his father, Sheikh Khalifa, who was on holiday in Switzerland. The father was enraged, but the son, who had already served as defence minister of his tiny oil-rich state, prevailed.

The bloodless coup initially made Sheikh Hamad suspicious to the region's other rulers, all of whom belong to his father's generation.

They also took offense at his creation of the satellite TV network al-Jazeera, which since 1996 has broadcast more or less uncensored news in Arabic from Qatar's capital, Doha, and has revolutionized the region's media landscape.

Sheikh Hamad has striven to modernize his country with economic reforms and education initiatives.

He has three wives and numerous children. His second wife, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser al-Misnad, is often seen in public at his side.

As chairwoman of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science & Community Development, the attractive mother of seven, who often wears a light, fashionable veil at conferences, is a policymaker in her own right and one of the emirate's most important decisionmakers along with the emir and Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al- Thani, a distant relative of Sheikh Hamad.

The prime minister, who is also Qatar's foreign minister, is regarded as the emir's right-hand man. It is he who has been negotiating Qatar's offer to buy into Porsche, which ran up a large debt when it increased its stake in Germany-based Volkswagen.

The Qatari emir's powers are practically unlimited; his country is neither a democracy nor has political parties. Because of his modern style of rule, however, the emir is held in high esteem by many of his countrymen.

Sheikh Hamad has aroused international attention with a number of regional mediation efforts. The most successful of these was an accord he helped broker last year between Lebanon's pro-Western government coalition and the pro-Syrian opposition led by the Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah.

He maintains good relations with Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the radical Palestinian group Hamas. The emir has close ties to the United States as well, and permitted it to set up a large military base in Qatar's desert, which was the command centre for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

An avid sportsman and diver, Sheikh Hamad has overseen the construction of large sites for international sporting competitions in Doha. Among his more recent projects is the spectacular Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, which opened in November 2008.