Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who died on Friday, was a pro-Western moderniser whose low-key approach helped steer the United Arab Emirates through a tense era in regional politics by aligning the Gulf oil producer closer with Washington and its allies, including Israel.
Khalifa, who was born in 1948, had been ruler of the richest emirate, Abu Dhabi, and UAE president since the death of his father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, in 2004 but had rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2014.
