How the Gulf's rulers want to harness the power of science

A stronger R&D base, they hope, will transform their countries' economies. Will their plan work?

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Bayt al-Hikma, or the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, emerged in the ninth century – even before the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, widely considered the first academy of sciences.

The Banu Musa brothers, sons of an astronomer in Baghdad, created the first machine with a stored program there and scientific textbooks from the institute were translated and made their way to Europe.

That marked a high point.

Amid the siege of Baghdad in 1258, the Mongols destroyed the institute and threw all the texts into the Tigris river. Scientific discovery in the Middle East waned and has never returned to the heights of the Islamic Golden Age, as the era was known.

Of all the Nobel prizes for the sciences handed out since 1901, only two have gone to recipients from the region.

The Gulf's rulers want to do better than that. Beset with the rising urgency to diversify their economies away from fossil fuels, the governments of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are turning to scientific research.

The UAE launched a policy for science, technology and innovation in February 2024 and, seven months later, opened the research-led National University of Dubai.

In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has launched a revamped strategy for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust), the kingdom's science hub, which is modelled on Western universities, to focus on research aligned with his "Vision 2030" economic blueprint. The kingdom has also struck a cooperation agreement with Britain.

Qatar's third national strategy, which covers the six years to 2030, contains targets for patents, publications and R&D spending by scientific foundations and the private sector.