Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar Assad (AP)
For the first time in their history, the rich countries of the Arab Gulf are setting aside more money for education than for arms. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia alone are planning to spend more than $22 billion on ambitious projects to close the knowledge gap with the West. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar, the other countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), are also spending sizeable sums on education. Total spending on educational projects exceeds the $20 billion in arms sales from the United States to the countries of the GCC now under discussion.
That order of priorities highlights a quiet revolution in an area once described as a "scientific desert." The label, in a U.S. scientific publication, stung as much as a devastating 2002 report by the United Nations Development Program, written not by Western scholars but by Arab experts. They portrayed the Arab region as living in isolation from the world of ideas and lagging behind the rest of the world on virtually everything, from education to respect for human rights and on the status of women. …
Arabs established the world’s first universities and hospitals. Scientific discoveries ranged from algebra to optics. The decline of Arab civilization in modern times can be measured by the number of Nobel Prize winners: Of the 750-odd prizes awarded since 1901, only five have gone to Arabs… The push for modern education is a far cry from the Koran-based learning-by-rote model and the narrow thinking which gave birth to the extremism that led 19 Arabs to commit the 9/11 attacks. Access the full article>>