Stepping into the future with confidence

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai, on Tuesday launched the Great Arab Minds Initiative, to be pushed and centred at the Museum of Future, to be backed by a Dhs 100 million fund. A high level committee comprising ministers of the UAE cabinet will administer it.

On the face of it, ‘Great Arab Minds Initiative’ looked like an attempt to celebrate the great minds of the past, and there are world-renowned Arab thinkers in the past like Al Kindi, and it seemed an attempt to resurrect the glorious past of the Arabs. But His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum runs counter to the stereotype expectations. Instead of turning to the past, he is looking at the present and the future. And we always associated the world museum with a storehouse of artefacts and art of a past. He has called it the Museum of Future, which might appear as a contradiction to many. But he turned the idea of the museum on its head and gave it a new twist to the word.

In many ways, he is suggesting without saying so explicitly, that Arabs should draw inspiration from the great Arab minds of the past and aspire to achieve intellectual breakthroughs of a similar kind. And he has the right logic to back it. If the Arabs had achieved great things in the past, there is no reason that the same people down the centuries cannot scale new intellectual heights. He has resisted the temptation of basking in the past glory of the Arabs, and he feels impelled that the Arabs of today must strive for better things as did their ancestors. Quite often, modernists and modernisers had renounced and denounced the past, and they thought that if one is to achieve big things in the present one must abandon the baggage of the past. There is also the other school which is content to cling to the greatness of the past and lament over the present.

Sheikh Mohammed avoids the temptation of following either of the two paths. He is original. Without getting lost in the maze of the past, he is saying that you should achieve new things in new areas in the present. The Arabs have had enviable great achievements in mathematics in the past. And it is possible to tap this tradition to produce modern mathematicians to push for breakthroughs in space science and in artificial intelligence.

And very rightly too, Sheikh Mohammed has identified the areas where things are to be done and he believes that there are people across the Arab world doing it, and who need support. The areas are physics and mathematics, data science and artificial intelligence (AI). There are indeed the thrust areas for the future. It is evident that Sheikh Mohammed is creating an incubator for ideas and those who are thinking out those ideas.

The UAE has taken through this initiative of Sheikh Mohammed to move into the future with hope and confidence. Many of the breakthroughs in modern science in 16th and 17th centuries Europe came from the silent encouragement given to science by the rulers of the day. Sheikh Mohammed is also sending a message to other leaders in the Arab world as to what needs to be done to get out of the morass of the present as it were, and not forever follow the technological path opened by Europe and America.

He is declaring that the Arabs may have enough money to buy the latest technology, but that is not enough. Arabs have to be trailblazer in science and technology. This is the right view and the right step.