Tbh "enlightened despot" sounds about right, the point is that the second word also applies.
I don't think there's much of a contradiction in saying that, by the standards of a Middle Eastern sheikh, he was indeed a massive FF...but those standards are so amazingly, horrifically low that they allow a man who was in fact a brutal tyrant to be fairly described as an FF in comparison with his peers.
Yes, these points exactly. I was certainly not trying to claim that Qaboos was nearly
as much of an HP as the constellation of other Gulf potentates who ebbed and flowed around him.
