The Arab Region Knowledge Evolution
Recently, there have been a couple of noticeable groundbreaking models pursued by Dubai and Qatar to transubstantiate the region’s population into a‘‘knowledge society. ’’ Both of these initiatives deemed human development a central goal and targeted narrowing the knowledge gap between the Arab region and the rest of the world. At the latest Middle East World Economic Forum, held in Jordan in May 2007, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, launched an endowment of ten billion US dollars for an avant garde foundation called the‘‘Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation’’ to promote knowledge in the region.
The second major initiative occurred in Qatar, where the government gathered leading world university representatives into a center for knowledge-creation called ‘‘Education City,’’ which is headquarters for the ‘‘Qatar Foundation.’’ The main objective is to form the most powerful educational and research hub in the Middle East.
One of these efforts may lead to Beit Elhikma II or may produce distinguished geniuses such as Averroes (ibn-Rushd) (1126-1198), who created the first domestic and exoticknowledge hybridisation model that is not only admired, but also accepted, by Western societies. Averroes published his commentaries on Aristotle based on the epistemic fundament that ‘‘knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.’’ The comeback of the Arab mind in a systematic‘‘brain gain’’ program is needed as happened in India.
To align the intellectual capacities with new business requirements, the region must work on different fronts to invest in expatriates, to leverage its strategies to reverse the ‘‘brain drain’’ and to fill the knowledge gap at both intra- and inter-regional levels. To keep the momentum of the ‘‘Knowledge Society” paradigm, the sustainability of the paradigm needs uninterrupted diffusion and infusion of innovations and continuously relevant knowledge, which may need restructuring at the organisational level.
The chimera of ‘‘epistemic sovereignty’’ is an outmoded self-centeredness that is not acceptable in the current globalised marketplace. More pointedly, epistemological pluralism is required for success in the realm of the‘‘knowledge society’’. A ‘‘co-opetitive’’ relationship is considered crucial to build the ‘‘knowledge society’’. The Arab world can revert from the status of ‘‘knowledge entropy’’ to the former ‘‘golden age’’ of Islam – if the principles of modern knowledge are effectively leveraged and crossbred with traditions to result in a lucrative ‘‘knowmadism’’.
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