Tamim was born in Dubai on 1 October 1951. He attended the Royal Police College in Amman, Jordan in 1970. He worked as a criminal investigator. He was also in charge of receiving and test driving a new electric police vehicle in 2013.
He is known for speaking his mind and beyond. In 2017, he made some comments about different nationalities/races which could contravene Dubai's law and could land him in hot water. , Pravda online accused the UAE of adopting " policies against Jews" when, on 1 March of that year, Tamim allegedly said that "anyone who looks or sounds like a citizen of Israel will be blocked from entering the country, even if a suspected individual produces a passport of a different state". Pravda responded by asking the rhetorical question: "Will Emirates liken itself to the Third Reich and use rulers and protractors to measure the shape of the nose, earlaps and the skull structure? If it does, the UAE will lose all of its friends in the West". He has received criticism for stating that he would alert Israeli authorities if he learned of a planned terrorist attack on their soil. Furthermore, in July 2013, he received criticism for contesting the notion that Israel was the enemy of Arabs by declaring that the Muslim Brotherhood pose a significantly more substantial threat. He is a major critic of Qatar's support of the Muslim Brotherhood, and in April 2014, stated that “Qatar should not be ‘a safe haven’ to the so-called ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood". Additionally, he noted that the UAE should 'reclaim' Qatar. This caused already-strained relations between Emirates and Qatar to further deteriorate. He also launched a verbal attack against Kuwait in March 2014, accusing Kuwait of "destroying Iraq". In 2015, he was publicly rebuked by Emirati minister of foreign affairsAbdullah bin Zayed on Twitter as a result of expressing support for former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh. He also criticised the tactics employed by coalition forces during the 2015 intervention in Yemen. In February 2017, he praised United States President Donald Trump's ban on individuals from seven Muslim-majority countries. In October 2017, he wrote about the 2017 Qatar diplomatic crisis; saying the blockade on the country will end if it surrenders the 2022 World Cup. The message appeared to imply that the Saudi-led blockade was only enacted due to Qatar hosting the world's biggest football event. After hundreds of civilians were killed in the November 2017 Sinai mosque attack by ISIL, he blamed the attack on Qatari news networkAl Jazeera and suggested that Egypt should "bomb" the network in retaliation. On April 3, 2018 he tweeted "Why Indians are disciplined? While sedition, criminality and smuggling in the Pakistani community are rampant" he also mentioned that the Pakistanis pose a serious threat to the Gulf communities because they bring drugs to their countries and that the Indians are disciplined than the Pakistanis. His comments came after Dubai authorities arrested gang of Pakistanis involved in smuggling drugs. He has also made comments like this before.
