UAE Launches ‘Great Arab Minds,’ Backing it with $27 Million

The Museum of the Future will serve as the initiative's headquarters. Asharq Al-Awsat
The Museum of the Future will serve as the initiative's headquarters. Asharq Al-Awsat
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UAE Launches ‘Great Arab Minds,’ Backing it with $27 Million

The Museum of the Future will serve as the initiative's headquarters. Asharq Al-Awsat
The Museum of the Future will serve as the initiative's headquarters. Asharq Al-Awsat

UAE Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has announced the Museum of the Future in Dubai will lead the ‘Great Arab Minds’ initiative.

The goal of the initiative is to seek out distinguished Arab scholars, thinkers, creators and innovators across all fields, sponsor them, build their capacities, and develop their ideas in cooperation with global partners to increase their positive impact on the region.

The five-year initiative seeks to pick out the most important 1,000 Arab brilliant minds in the fields of physics, mathematics, coding, research and economics and support them practically and in their research.

The Ruler of Dubai announced that 100 million Dirhams (27 million dollars) would be allocated to the initiative, with a committee of four Emirati Ministers tasked with developing a system for identifying and supporting exceptional Arab thinkers and talents. He also said that the Museum of the Future would serve as the Great Arab Minds initiative’s headquarters.

In a series of tweets on the 16th anniversary of his accession, Sheikh Mohammed said: “Today we launch a new project to search for 1,000 Great Arab Minds in the fields of physics and mathematics, software and data science, and others. Our goal is to empower them and help them play a positive role in the region.”

“We have built a science museum that meets global standards- Museum of the Future- and we will soon open it, god willing. It will be the administrative and intellectual center of this new Arab scientific movement. Personally, I am betting on science, scientists, and thinkers changing the Arab world’s state of affairs,” he added, before saying: “These great minds will be supported in their research and practice, as they will be linked with the biggest thinkers, scientists, and companies in the world and their ideas will be developed so that their positive impact on the region is strengthened.”

According to the details released Tuesday, Great Arab Minds seeks to launch, under the UAE leadership, the largest movement of its kind in the Arab world to develop an elite of Arab scientists, thinkers, and innovators across key fields, to create a nucleus of a society of knowledge and innovation in the Arab world and provides added value for the scientific and innovative communities around the world.

The massive initiative aims to support the best of the Arab world’s minds and talents, shed light on these extraordinary thinkers, talents and their achievements. It is framed within a long-term vision to maintain the brilliant and innovative youths of the Arab world and make use of their capacities to the greatest extent possible, thereby making the Arab world attractive to these geniuses because it rewards them instead of pushing them to emigrate.



'Incomprehensible': Red Cross Museum Fears Closure amid Swiss Funding Cuts

The collection houses around 30,000 objects as well as archives and the first Nobel Peace Prize medal, given to Red Cross founder Henry Dunant. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP
The collection houses around 30,000 objects as well as archives and the first Nobel Peace Prize medal, given to Red Cross founder Henry Dunant. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP
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'Incomprehensible': Red Cross Museum Fears Closure amid Swiss Funding Cuts

The collection houses around 30,000 objects as well as archives and the first Nobel Peace Prize medal, given to Red Cross founder Henry Dunant. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP
The collection houses around 30,000 objects as well as archives and the first Nobel Peace Prize medal, given to Red Cross founder Henry Dunant. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP

The Red Cross museum in Geneva is warning that it risks closure after its funding was axed in a broad government cost-cutting plan, with some suggesting it could be moved to Abu Dhabi.

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum has been a national institution in Switzerland for nearly four decades, playing a key role in promoting and explaining international humanitarian law and principles in the birthplace of the Geneva Conventions.

Museum director Pascal Hufschmid said he was shocked to learn last September that the fate of the museum was, apparently inadvertently, being threatened by a small administrative measure in a government savings drive, AFP reported.

"It jeopardizes the very existence of the museum," the Swiss historian, who took the helm of the institution in 2019, told AFP in a recent interview.

The museum, built adjacent to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) headquarters, opened in 1988. It welcomes around 120,000 people annually, ranging from elementary school classes to visiting dignitaries.

It keeps a collection of around 30,000 objects, including the first Nobel Peace Prize medal, given in 1901 to Red Cross founder Henry Dunant, an award shared with the French pacifist Frederic Passy.

It also houses the archives of the ICRC's International Prisoners of War Agency, established to restore contact between people separated during World War I, which have been listed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

'Incredible heritage'

"Through this incredible heritage," Hufschmid said, the aim is to create "a dialogue on what humanitarian action means on a daily basis".

He said the Swiss government had long recognized the value of the museum, and its role in telling "the story of an idea born in Switzerland, of major figures of Swiss history", like Dunant.

Since 1991, the private museum has received an annual subsidy from the Swiss foreign ministry of 1.1 million francs ($1.2 million), accounting for about a quarter of its overall budget.

But a general cost-cutting measure, proposed by a group of experts and approved by the government last September, included the decision to transfer responsibility for subsidizing the museum to the culture ministry.

At first, Hufschmid said he was not too concerned at what appeared to be merely an administrative change, until he realized "the transfer actually meant a major reduction of the subsidy".

This was because the culture ministry requires museums seeking its funding to take part in a competition, facing off against hundreds of other museums.

When successful, Hufschmid said, museums typically obtain a subsidy of "between five and seven percent of their expenses, (which) in our case would mean approximately 300,000 francs".

'Structural deficit'

"Suddenly, I understood that we would be facing a structural deficit starting 2027, (and) that we would have to close," he said, calling the situation "totally incomprehensible".

He said the government decision was taken as Switzerland marked the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Geneva Conventions, and amid warnings of dwindling respect for international humanitarian law.

Hufschmid has since been lobbying parliamentarians and decision-makers with ideas to save the museum.

The Geneva canton has stepped up its support, and parliamentarians both at the regional and national levels have voiced support for the institution -- but so far the threat of closure remains.

Hufschmid has proposed nationalization among other possible solutions.

Others have raised the possibility of moving the museum, with suggestions that Abu Dhabi, which hosts other museums including an outpost of the Louvre, could house its collection.

But Hufschmid said such a move "doesn't make any sense". "We were shocked when we heard that, because we are so deeply connected to Swiss identity, to Swiss heritage, to ideas born in Switzerland... (as) the depository state of the Geneva Conventions," he said.

"We are a Swiss museum and we will stay in Switzerland."