A story of courage and conviction

Among the more than 1,300 young men who received their degrees from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) recently, there was one especially talented 25-year-old, Mohannad Jibreel Abudayyah.
He was chosen from among the 20 top graduates to represent all the graduating students and to speak on their behalf at the graduation ceremony. Many eyes moistened as Mohannad addressed the gathering that had Eastern Province Deputy Gov. Prince Jelawi bin Abdul Aziz bin Musaed as chief guest.
Mohannad’s is a story of courage, conviction and determination. Although he lost his eyesight and one leg in a road accident five years ago, he never lost the will to succeed. It is this trait that has endeared him to hundreds in Saudi Arabia and abroad.
“On Graduation Day, I thanked all the teachers and professors at the university on behalf of all my fellow graduating students,” he told Arab News. “Then I personally thanked KFUPM Rector Dr. Khaled S. Al-Sultan. If it wasn’t for him, I would not have succeeded in doing my degree in industrial engineering. Alhamdulillah.”
Not many universities were willing to take him on. “Dr. Khaled S. Al-Sultan provided me with the opportunity and helped me during my stay on the campus. He was very helpful, and I have special words of gratitude for him.”
Among those watching the ceremony at the massive stadium on the KFUPM campus in Dhahran were Mohannad’s father, wife, son and brother. “My father was in tears when I received the degree and delivered the speech,” said Mohannad. “He became very emotional.”
In a previous interview with Arab News, Mohannad explained that as a youngster, his passion was to take apart electronic toys so that he could understand how they worked. “I was notorious for dismantling all toys — so much so that there was word in the extended family that I should not be allowed to touch anybody’s toys. Whenever I was around, my cousins and elders would prompt others to hide them all. ‘He is coming; remove all the toys,’ they would say,” said Mohannad. “My idea was not to break toys per se — I wanted to understand the technology behind them. I would unscrew them and would try to put them back together, sometimes unsuccessfully.”
Something that held his fascination for a long time was the transistor. “I would look at it and wonder for hours how it worked. Such was my passion for understanding the mechanics behind it that I saved every halala that I got in pocket money during my childhood days in Jeddah. When I had enough money, I went out and bought a radio. The idea was to open it and to see what went into that small machine, how it worked, how it managed to bring all those sounds from across the globe into my room? I remember asking a cousin: ‘How does this work?’ He took the new radio and pointed at the on-off button. ‘Just press this one, and it will work; it is that simple,’ he told me. ‘No, not that. I mean how does it work?’ He excused himself saying he didn’t know and that he didn’t care. ‘In fact,’ he told me, ‘no Saudi will be able to help you. Only the Japanese know all that stuff,’” said Mohannad.
He recalls vividly that conversation of years ago. “I told my cousin, ‘Why do only the Japanese know? Why do we not know?’
"My cousin was plainly irritated by my persistent inquiries. ‘We lead a good life. God has given us the money to buy all the technology in the world. They make; we buy. This is what I call a good life. Alhamdulillah.’ I told him he was wrong. ‘Those who are making the technology have a better life. What if they were not there to invent all these things? What use is our money then?’ I asked my cousin. He couldn’t take it any longer and went away, leaving the conversation in the middle of nowhere.”
To make matters worse, there were no books to guide Mohannad. “I would spend all my time just thinking about technology. What makes the refrigerator work? How does that clock sound an alarm exactly at the hour it is set to? What technology is at work bringing those images live to our television screens? How does that airplane fly in the sky? They were all simple questions. But nobody had the answer,” he said. “People would get irritated by my questions. When I got no answers from my parents and cousins and friends and uncles and aunts, I decided to search for answers in books. Those were not the days of Google and Wikipedia. Unfortunately, there were no books on science and technology in Arabic, or maybe they were there but not available in Saudi Arabia. I decided to take the time-tested trial-and-error route. I removed one part and then another and used different permutations and combinations till I succeeded in getting the radio circuit right. Since then I have dreamed of nothing else but to be an inventor — to make a qualitative difference in the lives of people through my inventions.”
Mohannad once convinced his brother to hand over his car to him to experiment on. “You will not believe it, I told my brother, ‘Give me your car, and I will turn it into an airplane.’ My poor brother — he agreed. The end product was neither a car nor an airplane. It was a piece of junk. That only confirmed the worst idea about me: Mohannad simply destroys things.”
Mohannad lost his eyesight and one leg in a road accident five years ago. “I had a flat tire and was trying to fix it. I had parked my car far off the road but a young guy slammed into my stationary car. I was fixing the front tire. The whole vehicle fell on top of me. I became unconscious. What happened next was horrible. I was taken by ambulance to an ill-equipped hospital. There, they wanted permission to operate on me — and they needed the money before they did anything. My father was in the United States at the time, and I was unconscious. They just amputated my leg rather than repairing it. When I woke up several days later, I realized I had not only lost my leg but my eyesight too.”
His whole life changed after the accident, but the passion to invent only got more insistent. It was this determination that brought him to the prestigious university in Dhahran.
Since his accident, Mohannad has delivered numerous lectures, telling young inventors how to get started and how to keep going in the face of adversity. “I have trained more than 600 people interested in the process of invention,” he said.