Saudis as well as expats can celebrate National Day with more than usual pride today. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah is opening the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, which he himself has described as bridge between world cultures. However, it is actually something yet greater than that. It is in truth a historic bridge between 1932 and the reunification of the Kingdom by King Abdul Aziz and the extraordinary modern society that Saudi Arabia has become today.
The remarkable pace of change is epitomized by KAUST itself. In just three years, an ultramodern campus has risen from an empty land besides the Red Sea, has been staffed with some of the finest international academic brains, has been equipped with state-of-the-art research facilities including one of the fastest supercomputers in the world and earlier this month opened its doors to 500 masters and doctorate students from the Kingdom as well as other countries, including the US and UK.
KAUST is all about knowledge. It is providing courses and advanced research facilities in applied mathematics, computational science, bioscience, chemical and biological engineering, chemistry, computer science, earth science and engineering, electrical engineering, environmental and marine science, materials science and mechanical engineering. The new university has been described as the king’s gift to the nation, but if it develops as planned into a leading international center of research excellence, it will also be the king’s gift to the world. Already KAUST is working on joint research projects with other academic powerhouses such the National University of Singapore, the Institut Francais du Petrole, Cambridge University in the UK and Stanford in the United States.
Then there are the other sources of Saudi pride. King Abdullah’s Palestinian peace plan remains the foundation of all efforts to bring justice to the Palestinian people. Through the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) headquartered in Jeddah, the Kingdom continues to press for Islamic unity and work to promote education and alleviate poverty as two key ways of checking the spread of terrorist indoctrination. Nor has the king stinted in the promotion of his own interfaith dialogue as a way to boost tolerance and understanding, in particular between the Muslim, Christian and Hindu cultures. Ignorance and suspicion underpin so many of the violent evils confronting the world and the interfaith dialogue, in which the king is playing such a leading role, is a potent defense against them. The king’s promotion of the empowerment of women is another area where Saudis should congratulate themselves. No successful society can afford to waste the intellectual capital of half of its population. Returning to the stunning vision of a knowledge-based future that is enshrined in KAUST, it is a given that all the fine minds attracted to its campus must be free to interact in the cause of research and discovery.
Thus as Saudis celebrate today, they can look back on 78 years of quite extraordinary advancement and look forward to a promising future, of which KAUST is only the latest of many glittering achievements to come.
