Page 439 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

436 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

students will be expected to attain. The presiding genius over all this, the
correspondent informs us, is ‘Sheikh Ahmad Salah Jamjoom, one of the
founding fathers of the university’, who is ‘keenly concerned about the preser­
vation of quality during expansion. He is insistent that the flood of students
and staff into the university should not water down the ideals of academic
excellence. The university is aiming to ensure undergraduate excellence by
laying down tight entry qualifications. . . Nor is this the limit of Shaikh
Jamjoom’s vision. ‘Knowledge must not only serve society: it must also serve
good,’ he told his interlocutor from The Times, who himself goes on to
embroider the theme rather richly in the concluding sentences of his article.

The Muslim world in general and Saudi Arabia in particular sees the wealth generated
by the oil bonanza as a chance to reverse the eclipse by the west of learning. They are
convinced of the possibility of developing highly sophisticated systems of, for example,
‘Islamic’ social science, ‘Islamic’ economics, ‘Islamic’ medicine and even ‘Islamic’
mathematics. The aim is the creation of a new Islamic Golden Age of culture and
learning: Islam with a modern face. The de-westernization of knowledge is the first
central task of the enterprise.

It is not only the savants and schoolmen of Saudi Arabia who see ‘the wealth
generated by the oil bonanza as a chance to reverse the eclipse by the west of
learning’. A number of ambitious academics and administrators in universities
and other institutions of learning in Europe and North America have also had
their glimpse of El Dorado and made for it hot-foot. Sums of money, some of
them of considerable proportions, have been solicited from the oil shaikhs and
the court of the ‘Shadow of God upon earth’ for the establishment or expansion
of programmes of Arab, Persian and Islamic studies in France, Britain, Canada
and the United States. Georgetown University in Washington, a Jesuit founda­
tion, has accepted, without any evident misgivings, several hundred thousand
dollars of Arab oil money for the establishment of a chair of Islamic and Arabic
studies. The donor is the government of Libya, the head of which, as is well
known, is a fanatical Muslim, a supporter of terrorist movements and one of
the principal paymasters of the Muslim fidaiyin who lately endeavoured to
crush the Latin Christian community in the Lebanon. At institutions as
different as McGill University in Montreal and the University of Exeter in
Devon there are now chairs or lectureships in ‘Arabian Gulf studies’, endowed
by one or another of the lesser Gulf governments. Indeed, it would almost seem
as if Edward Gibbon’s musings two centuries ago upon what might have been,
had the Arab armies not been halted at Poitiers a thousand years earlier, were
more of a prophetic than a visionary nature. ‘Perhaps the interpretation of the
Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might
demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of
Mahomet.’ , ni.
One could go on listing the ancient and modern foundations in the uiu