Month: September 2023

The Arab Kingdom

Amid the chaos of the First World War, a new pan-Arab empire was proclaimed. It faltered, but its historical lessons remain.

In December 2022, Abdullah II, the king of Jordan, gave an interview to the CNN anchor Becky Anderson. Sitting close to the Jordan River, not far from where Jesus is believed to have been baptised, this Muslim ruler expressed his concerns about the status of Jerusalem and the Christians under pressure from the new, extremist Israeli government. He emphasised that the ‘Hashemites’, his family, are the custodians of both Christian and Muslim sites in the holy city. Abdullah II cited his great-great-grandfather Sharif Hussein. It was from Hussein’s time, sometime at the end of the First World War, according to Abdullah II, that the Hashemite custodianship of Jerusalem’s holy sites originates. His ancestor even gave sanctuary to Christian Armenian refugees in Jordan, said the king proudly on CNN.

Abdullah II’s remarks presented him as a confident and reassuring monarch but they also refer to a history of modern Arab kingship and the modern Middle East that has mostly been forgotten. Wikipedia in English, for instance, tells us that the custodianship of the Muslim sites in Jerusalem by the Hashemites follows from a ‘verbal agreement’ of Hussein with the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine in 1924. The Indonesian version of Wikipedia repeats the claims of the English article. The Arabic version, however, tells us about the financial help Hussein gave for restoring the holy sites of Jerusalem and subsequent donations by the Hashemite dynasty for further improvements to the holy city. So, who was Hussein and what’s his relevance today?

Sharif Hussein is a legendary figure of the 1910s and ’20s. For some – certainly for Abdullah II – Hussein was the nationalist leader of the ‘Arab revolt’ during the First World War who won the war for the Arabs. In an alliance with Britain, he revolted against the Ottoman Empire in 1916 in order to establish a giant independent state that he called the ‘Arab Kingdom’. Others see him in less heroic terms. They blame him for ‘stabbing the Ottomans in the back’, the inability to stop the partitions decided by Europeans, and the Zionist settlement of Palestine – so, in a way, for losing the war.

The importance of Hussein and his Arab Kingdom for today is a forgotten experiment with state-formation exactly 100 years ago. Modern states do not originate only from nationalism. Abdullah II’s remarks at the Jordan River evoke Islam as a principle of government and Muslim rulers as protectors of Christians. This use of Islam is very different from what we usually hear about religion in the Middle East – for instance, ‘sectarianism’ (religion-based claims to institutionalised representation within nation states, often erupting in violence) or the fascist brutality of ISIS. But neither should we follow the king of Jordan into a monarchist-nationalist nostalgia. His great-great-grandfather Hussein was not born a nationalist. Here, I tell Hussein’s story as an exercise in unearthing ideas about Muslim government that we can call ‘imperial’. This is important because the imperial techniques of state-making defined the early 20th century in many regions of the world, and not nationalist or egalitarian revolutions.

Sharif Hussein bin ‘Ali was the scion of an important family from the sacred city of Mecca. Sharif means ‘nobleman’. Individuals who claim that they are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad use the Arabic honorific terms sharif (plural ashraf) and sayyid (meaning ‘master’, plural sada). Tens of millions of Muslims today claim this heritage. Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator until 2003, was one of them, for example. The rulers of Morocco, too, are ashraf. (The Saudi kings are emphatically not.) Furthermore, among all ashraf and sada, only the Jordanian ruling family and their relatives are called ‘Hashemites’ publicly, after Hashim, a legendary ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. So, yes, both Hussein and his great-great-grandson King Abdullah II, sitting next to the Jordan River talking to CNN, are also ashraf, descendants of the Prophet.

Panoramic view of Mecca, c1845. Courtesy the Khalili Collections

Yet Hussein was born not in Mecca, but in Istanbul, at the metropolitan centre of the Ottoman Empire, sometime in the 1850s. The Ottoman Empire, a vast, three-continental administration in Europe, Asia and Africa, existed roughly between the 14th century and 1922. This empire was the Mediterranean Muslim superpower. The Ottoman emperor – sultan – assumed the title of the caliph of (Sunni) Islam, too. Today, in its final former territory across Europe and Asia, we find the states of Turkey, Albania, Bulgaria, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Saudi Arabia, as well as Egypt, Libya and Tunis in North Africa. In 1914, at the threshold of the First World War, its directly ruled population was estimated at around 25 million (at that time, the US population was about 100 million; Austria-Hungary was about 50 million).

For the Ottomans (a non-Arab, Turkic Muslim imperial dynasty), the most important ashraf were those in Mecca and Medina, the sacred cities in the Hijaz region of Arabia. Hence the value of Sharif Hussein bin ‘Ali for this Muslim empire. The loyalty of the Meccan descendants of the Prophet meant the symbolic recognition of the Ottoman caliphate. Since their conquest in the early 16th century, the Ottoman sultans usually appointed a sharif to serve as the emir of Mecca, its local ruler. From the mid-19th century, the descendants of the Prophet became closer and closer to Istanbul, literally. Hussein was born in Istanbul because his family branch in exile competed for the emirate of the holy city. He knew Turkish, his wife was Turkish-speaking, and his sons received Ottoman education. Hussein, known in the Ottoman administration as Şerif Ali Paşazade Hüseyin Bey (in Turkish transliteration), became quite an Ottomanised descendant of the Prophet.

The logic of the time was not to create nation-states but to transform empires into looser organisations

From the 1870s, the descendants of the Prophet received political roles in the Ottoman imperial capital. Many other more ordinary Arabs from the provinces also became part of the modernising imperial bureaucracy. Hussein and his sons (and the rival sharifian Meccan family members), circulating between Mecca and Istanbul, benefitted from this modern experiment fusing Islam with imperial patriotism. It’s helpful to think of this as an ‘unelected system of representation’, for the sultan suspended the imperial constitution in 1878 and substituted the parliament with these new practices. The ashraf ‘represented’ their regions (in a way, Hussein’s family stood for Mecca and the Hijaz region) but also in general the Muslim community. Many ashraf sat on imperial councils, travelled on steamships and the new railway lines, and so provided a symbolic cover for the empire. After the coup d’état usually known as the Young Turk Revolution to restore the constitution in 1908, Hussein’s sons became elected members of the new imperial assembly. And from 1908, Hussein held the imperial office of the emir of Mecca.

Being a descendant of the Prophet and an Ottoman imperial notable was a uniquely powerful combination in a city where a growing number of Muslims from all over the world came to perform pilgrimage in the age of steam. No wonder that the European empires (with large Muslim colonies and domains) were keen on gaining Hussein’s attention, and Hussein was also keen to gain their attention, especially the British. Hussein had been loyal to the Ottoman Empire before 1908 but hated the Young Turks and the restored Ottoman constitution. He thought that the Quran should be the only constitution in the empire; and he also feared losing his position as emir of the holy city. In the 1910s, Hussein and his sons made cautious contact with the British consul in Cairo. Intriguing, in early 1914 Hussein’s son Abdullah asked the British consul to consider a British protectorate over the emirate of Mecca like the British did with the subdued Afghan emir.

This 1914 intrigue of the Ottoman ashraf of Mecca in order to switch empires was part of a much more complex momentum of imperial transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea. We must understand that the logic of the time, despite the popularity of ethnicity- and language-based patriotic ideas, was not to create sovereign nation-states but to transform empires somehow into looser organisations.

By the 1910s, many faith- and ethnicity-based groups in the Ottoman Empire demanded reforms to transform the empire into a federation. Bourgeois Arabs were no exception as some Syrians started to imagine a decentralised Ottoman Empire with Arab autonomy. Other Arab groups – for instance, the religious entrepreneur-journalist Sheikh Rashid Rida and his activists, with some European encouragement – imagined a new empire as a Muslim association of emirs, and some other sheikhs even advocated for an Arab caliph instead of an Ottoman one. In many of these 1910s plans, the ashraf had a role and Hussein, as the ruler of Mecca, personally could expect a potential caliphate. European commentators imagined this would-be Arab caliphate as a type of papacy, restricted to the holy cities in the Hijaz. This would have ended the age-old Ottoman system of combining the emperor and caliph titles. In short, the spirit of the time was to create autonomous polities in some sort of federation as a better way to accommodate economic and political demands of ethnic groups, and to challenge the Ottoman leadership of Sunni Islam.

A flag of Hijaz, also known as the flag of the Arab revolt, presented by Sharif Hussein, King of Hijaz, to King George V of the United Kingdom in 1918. Courtesy the Royal Collection, London

And in October 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Great War as a member of the Central Powers. Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans fought together against the Allied Powers, the British-French-Russian alliance. The Ottoman caliph declared jihad on the Allied Powers (not, to be noted, on his own Central Power allies, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians). For the Allied Powers, Hussein, the emir of Mecca, was the most useful symbol against the Ottoman caliph. As a descendant of the Prophet, as an Arab, he was a potential challenger of the Ottoman claim to the caliphate (and, for the better, this emir of Mecca had already requested British protection). After an exchange of letters with the British High Commissioner in Cairo (this correspondence came to be known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence), Hussein declared his revolt – the ‘Arab revolt’ – against the Ottoman government in June 1916. Ever since, there has been a debate over what the British promised exactly, what a promise means in informal diplomacy, and whether the British betrayed their promises later.

Bedouin Arabs with the flag of Hijaz during the Arab Revolt in 1917. Courtesy the Library of Congress

Despite the assurances about a large Arab polity in the correspondence with McMahon, no Allied planners really expected that the emir of Mecca would want something more than a small emirate with the holy cities in the Hijaz. When, in October 1916, Hussein and his sons announced their claim to a giant polity, with Hussein as ‘King of the Arabs’, it took the Allied Powers by surprise. The ‘Arab Kingdom’ was an idea about a new empire stretching from the Levant (what is today Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon) to the Iraqi regions, even Arabia, thus including most of the Arabic-speaking Asian Ottoman provinces (but not the North African ones). Overcoming their surprise, in January 1917 and later repeatedly, the Allied Powers recognised Hussein as king only over the Hijaz, a small portion of Arabia. But this new ruler and his sons were not satisfied with a kingdom of the Hijaz. They maintained their claims to a much larger state, a new Muslim-Arab empire. This is why, when the sharifian troops entered Ottoman Damascus in October 1918 under the orders of his second son Faisal, many Damascenes understood that they are now in the ‘Arab Kingdom’, being the subjects of Hussein, a new Muslim sultan.

Empire is often a rhetorical term to mean something evil. Think about the empire in Star Wars. But we historians use ‘empire’ as an historical-analytical category of government, whose organising logic differs from the ideal of the nation-state. Empire is a large organisation that uses all available means (violence, dynastic marriage, religion and ethnicity) to establish political and economic claims on diverse regions with diverse peoples. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper call to our attention, empires welcome and embrace ‘diversity’; it is nation-states that require a homogeneous population. Historical empires subjugated and colonised peoples, but the important issue for our purposes is that empire is a different way of subjugating and organising peoples from that of the nation-state.

At the end of the Great War, the political visions about the future of what became the Middle East – the Allied agreements about partition, the well-known 1917 British promise of Palestine to Zionists as ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, Hussein’s Arab Kingdom, some bourgeois Syrian federative visions, and the very much existing Ottoman loyalists – were not about sovereign nation-states. These plans and visions all implied some type of empire. Perhaps, the most fitting for post-Ottoman Arabs was a federative polity, with or without a dynasty. The imperial logic of organising peoples and territories dictated the political imaginations up to about 1922.

During 1918 and 1919, the sharifian advocates of the Arab Kingdom projected Islam and Arab ethnicity as the founding norms of a new political order. From early 1918, the official journal in Mecca and his sons called Hussein ‘the Commander of the Faithful’ in Arabic (amir al-mu’minin) while the new king craved for the title of caliph. Both the sharifian and British propaganda started to advertise Prophetic descent as an important quality for Muslim rulership. The Arab Kingdom was to be ruled by Hussein and his sons, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Islam, Prophetic genealogy and ethnicity were to serve as the constitutional foundations of Hussein’s Arab Kingdom. We can call this idea of a state a ‘genealogical empire’.

Using religion in state-formation is considered today outside of international norms

Hussein’s genealogical empire was the first of many post-Ottoman Muslim imperial projects in the 20th century. Like the case with Christian, Hebrew and Buddhist imperialisms, there had been various kinds of Muslim empires in history, from the late-antique Muslim-Byzantian caliphates to the last great empires of the Mughals in India, the Qajars in Iran, and the Ottomans in the eastern Mediterranean. In a way, the Arab Kingdom was to contain recycled Ottoman institutions: the caliphate, a monarchy, Islam, the ashraf, and of course the ex-Ottoman peoples, such as Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Jews and Kurds, some of whom were Christians and even Shi‘i Muslims. The Ottoman politics of diversity had to be transformed into a new Muslim framework.

Using religion in state-formation is considered today outside of international norms. In 1919, the sharifian makers of the Arab Kingdom had to face the Ottoman Arab urban bourgeoisie who were rather advocating some type of federation, perhaps preserving an association even with Istanbul. For instance, in Ottoman Damascus, the sharifian occupiers had to compromise for a constitutional, federative ‘United States of Syria’, in which Faisal, the son of Hussein, was declared king in March 1920. But Sharif Hussein was not a federalist. In his imagination, this unrecognised Syrian princely polity was still part of his larger Arab Kingdom.

Next to the Arab federalists and the still-strong Ottoman loyalists, the sharifian imperial project also bumped into the intentions of the Allied Powers. This is the more familiar story about the modern Middle East. The French and British (and Russian and Italian) governments aimed at partitioning the Ottoman provinces. Just think about the Balfour Declaration in 1917, given by Britain’s foreign minister Lord Balfour to the Zionists to establish a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Ottoman Palestine, practically a promise for settler colonisation, a typical imperial gesture. The Covenant of the League of Nations in 1919 codified these agreements in the new international system. Hussein remained to be recognised only as the king of the Hijaz. There thus existed in 1919 a split situation – while the ‘Kingdom of the Hijaz’ was a minor Allied Power and as such participated in the Paris Peace Conference, the Hijazi (sharifian) representatives and administrators in the occupied regions projected the idea of the ‘Arab Kingdom’ with full force.

And even more complicated was the fact that Hussein’s polity was to be a subordinate to the British Empire. For instance, Hussein had no problem with a British appointment of his minister of war and often repeated that the British gave him power over lesser rulers in Arabia. Even more importantly, the British treasury financed the Hijazi (the sharifian) army and their occupation administration in Damascus, and in December 1919 the British government gave over the financing of this occupation zone to the French treasury. The French army did not trust Faisal, a would-be sharifian monarch in Damascus, who was too closely tied with his father Sharif Hussein, a potential caliph in Mecca, and with British politics. Besides, the French colonial empire had their own sharifian monarch in Morocco. In July 1920, the French army invaded the internal lands of Syria, expulsing the Hijazi sharifian regime and Faisal, the new king of the United States of Syria, and killed the Ottoman Syrian general Yusuf al-Azma. Thus, accidentally, the French army also ended the hopes of the local Syrian Ottoman loyalists about returning to Istanbul’s umbrella.

The possibility of a large Arab kingdom was not yet crushed as sharifian troops still held the Ottoman Hijaz railway stations in Transjordan, the mountains above the river Jordan. This is where Hussein’s third son Abdullah arrived in November 1920 to represent his father and establish his own emirate within the sharifian empire. The British planners agreed to this arrangement in April 1921 and at the same time transferred the defeated Faisal to rule a new country, the Iraqi kingdom. Thus emerged a chain of sharifian monarchies (the Kingdom of the Hijaz, the Emirate of Transjordan, the Kingdom of Iraq) in a loose association, under British control. This modular association of three Muslim rulers was still an empire, with Mecca as its centre. In 1921, British officials were astounded when Sharif Abdullah presented them with a constitutional draft of his new emirate that derived his authority over Amman from his father, Sharif Hussein, in Mecca. The operation of recycling the Ottoman Empire into a series of emirates held together by Prophetic genealogy, Islam, ethnicity, a railway, and dynastic claims was the defining project of the Middle East until 1924.

Abdullah II’s remarks today about the Hashemite protection of Christians and Jerusalem’s holy places originate in this moment and in this project. Muslim emperors had offered protection to persecuted communities in the past, and possibly Sharif Hussein was also glad to exercise this imperial gesture when his troops found Christian Armenian refugees in the occupied Syrian provinces. Furthermore, as a potential ruler of Jerusalem and a caliph – in fact, in March 1924 he did assume the caliphate in public – Hussein and his sons got in touch with the Jerusalem Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities. A Jerusalem delegation arrived in Amman in March 1924 to acknowledge Sharif Hussein as caliph (and another Jerusalem group to anxiously express their doubts). About this time, the Hashemites started to act as protectors of the holy sites in a symbolic competition (but also cooperation) with interwar Zionists.

But the core of the imagined Arab Kingdom – Mecca and the Hijaz – was gone by the end of 1925. Capitalising on the general dissatisfaction with King Hussein’s politics, a new conqueror, Sultan Abdulaziz of Najd in Central Arabia (‘Ibn Saud’) conquered the holy cities and expulsed the sharifian family. A new, this time Saudi, kingdom started in the Hijaz. King Hussein lived in exile – he was pointedly buried in Jerusalem near the Al-Aqsa mosque in 1931. So, when today Abdullah II claims protection over the holy sites, in fact he also claims his own ancestor’s grave.

In this story about the rise and fall of the sharifian Arab Kingdom – although never entirely gone, as Jordan is still with us – we have observed that religion, genealogy, federative ideas, ethnicity and monarchy were fundamental in the local making of modern Arab polities. While the Allied Powers partitioned peoples and regions, there was significant local involvement in the political furnishing of new states. The mixture of constituent fictions was not created by the Allied occupiers; instead, it emerged from how societies that succeeded the old Ottoman order continued to carry out imperial programmes in lieu of radical revolutions. At the same time, these successor societies were to be integrated into new European imperial orders, Greater France and Greater Britain, respectively. Western and Arab politicians, Orientalists, artists and the press further entrenched the essentialisation, racialisation and feudalisation of post-Ottoman Arabs in the 1920s and ’30s. The local and external logics of the imperial imaginary about Arab politics with its centrality on religion retained their force well into the second half of the 20th century, and, as we could observe in Abdullah II’s interview to CNN, even until today.

source/content: aeon.co / Adam Hestyan / edited Sam Haselby (headline edited)

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Sharif Husein and the campaign for a modern Arab empire

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ARAB

50 regional companies win ‘Gulf Sustainability Awards’ GSA 2023

The awards celebrated the tireless efforts of the regional organisations dedicated to environmental stewardship and social responsibility.

Around 50 companies across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region won the Gulf Sustainability Awards (GSA) 2023 for their exceptional achievements in environmental responsibility.

Held in Dubai on Wednesday, the event brought together a diverse array of sustainable companies, both large and small, from the public, private and semi-governmental sectors to compete for recognition.

The awards celebrated the tireless efforts of the regional organisations dedicated to environmental stewardship and social responsibility.

Many renowned speakers including Shruthi Boosey of Jana Consultants; Tatiana Antonelli Abella, founder of Goumbook FZE; Kevin Holliday, managing director at C3 – Companies Creating a Change; and Dr Samir Thabet, corporate sustainability manager at Nesma & Partners; among others.

Juhi Yasmeen Khan, one of the renowned judges and advisory board member of the ‘Gulf Sustainability Awards’, stated that, “It was very difficult to judge this year as all the entries did exceedingly well.”

Mohammad Mustafa, a student at the University of Wollongong in Dubai, gave a presentation about sustainability and how youth can contribute towards environmental protection and sustainability. His presentation received great acknowledgement from the attendees.

“This was the best Gulf Sustainability Awards ever. In seven years, I haven’t seen so much positive energy to change the impact of business on the planet positively,” said Neil Skehel, founder and CEO of Awards International.

“GSA finds and recognises the best sustainability initiatives of the GCC. Well done to our winners and the overall winner Qatar Museums. It’s through the united efforts of corporate houses, educational institutions, governmental and non-governmental organisations and even the media, where ideas can become actions. It was truly wonderful seeing the pioneers of the future and how we are capable of creating a positive impact on the planet and the entirety of the sustainability world,” he added.

“The bar is raised. I look forward to next year when the bar will be even higher.”

Young speaker and panellist Mustafa also shared his insights from the perspective of a Youth Ambassador for sustainability.

“This event genuinely is the keystone to enacting positive change into the world, and by having me as the youth speaker it opens the doors for the future generation,” he said, adding that “sustainability seems grand and something that requires a large amount of planning and resources, but every small impact can make the biggest change.”

Mustafa said youth are burdened with the problems of the climate crisis, but at the time they are blessed with ingenuity and creativity which they should use to shape their future.

Here are the Gold Award winners in various categories:

Best community development, Recaap by Veolia; Best Workplace and HR Practices, Schneider Electric FZE; Best Net-Zero Initiative, Taqa; Best CSR Initiative, Aster DM Healthcare; Government Sustainability Initiative, Saudi Mining Polytechnic; Reaction to Crisis, Abu Dhabi Ports Group; Best Sustainable Education and Awareness Programme, Sedco Holding; Most Innovative ESG Initiative, Taqa; Environmental Sustainability Programme, DP world; Learning and Educational Programme, Potential.com and HSBC; Innovation in Sustainable Technologies, Cafu; Sustainable Business Model, DGrade; Sustainable Business Model – large firms, Taqa; UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and Housing; Best Sustainable Product, Toppan Gravity (Gravity Group Ind); Best Sustainable Product – small firms, DGrade; Green Building, Qatar Museums – Fire Station; E-Waste Management, Schneider Electric; Water and Waste Management, DGrade; Water and Waste Management – large firms, Drydocks World; Sustainable Team of the Year, Taqa; Sustainable Professional of the Year, Verteco – David King; Overall winner, Qatar Museums, Fire Station.

source/content: khaleejtimes.com (headline edited)

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Winners of Gulf Sustainability Awards. — Supplied photos

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UAE / GCC

EGYPTIAN-AMERICAN: AI Captain! Rana El Kaliouby’s bold trek to the final frontier of Humanising Technology

Egyptian-American founder of Affectiva is on a mission to revolutionise the way we connect with our digital devices, and each other, by building in emotional intelligence.

The earliest memory that Rana El Kaliouby can conjure is of standing on a tiny blue plastic chair in a romper suit confidently declaring whatever was on her toddler mind at the time.

She is about three years old, revelling in her father’s attention as he dispenses tips – “look at the audience, enunciate your words” – and records the ramblings for posterity with the first commercially available home video camera.

These regular living room sessions led to El Kaliouby going on to give many accomplished public-speaking performances around the world as an artificial intelligence scientist and entrepreneur, most recently this month at the CogX Festival Deep Tech Summit in London.

Her big message after decades working in technology is that the final frontier lies at the point where AI can be immersed in emotional intelligence , or EI, to revolutionise the human-to-computer experience.

But it’s obvious that the first seeds of that life-fulfilling mission were sown more than 40 years ago in her childhood home in Kuwait where she was first encouraged to get to grips with ideas and machines.

“Our family is really big on education, the thing my parents invested in me and my sisters,” El Kaliouby, 45, tells The National.

“And because they were both in tech, we were always exposed to the latest and greatest gadgets. I was a big Atari game player,” she adds, laughing.

El Kaliouby looks back fondly on those clunky old VHS cassettes and hours the family spent playing Pac-Man as examples of the positive way in which electronic devices can bring loved ones together.

Less happy interactions with latter-day technology, however, brought about the realisation that something was missing – all the rich communication signals provided by non-verbal cues were being lost.

An enterprising mission

Her focus ever since has been on developing artificial intelligence that recognises facial expressions so that people can have better connections with their laptops, and, crucially, with each other.

Born in Egypt after her tech guru father, Ayman, met his future wife, Randa Sabry, on a university campus, it seems almost inevitable that El Kaliouby grew up to be a proud geek pursuing a career in computer science.

“It’s a cute story,” she says. “My dad was teaching COBOL programming, this obsolete language that nobody uses any more but was the programming language in the 70s.

“My mum, who was a business major, decided to explore this thing called computer science, and he was kind of interested in going out with her. She said, ‘I don’t do that. No dating allowed.’ And he was like: ‘Ok, then I’ll propose.’”

Soon after, the newlyweds moved to Kuwait, and her mother became one of the first female computer programmers in the Middle East, until having to flee when Saddam Hussein invaded.

Aiming for the stars

Next stop was Abu Dhabi, where El Kaliouby’s Muslim-Arab upbringing was conventional in many ways, bounded by “lots and lots” of rules that included not making any boy friends while at school.

“I always imagined walking around with a gold star on my forehead. I was a very nice, rule-abiding daughter. I stuck to the strict curfews. I never dated through high school or college and I think, by and large, I was always an A student.

“But, at the same time, it was very empowering. I have two younger sisters and the message was always: ‘You can do anything you want in the world.’”

She continued to meet these expectations into her early 20s, earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in Computer Science at the American University in Cairo, and marrying the founder of a start-up, Wael Amin.

Within a year, though, El Kaliouby was undertaking a PhD 5,000km away at Cambridge University despite both sets of parents saying: “Wait a second, you’re married now and you can’t leave.”

Amin, she says, deserves the credit for supporting her daring dream and agreeing to a long-distance relationship.

“It was really unheard of. I did break rules more as an adult as I explored my passions and my quest for being a researcher and an entrepreneur.

“That’s how I think I pushed the boundaries and definitely made my parents uncomfortable.”

And then? “I like the wording that my life went off the rails. I think that kind of encapsulates it.

“Cambridge opened my horizons. It’s like I discovered the world and it was hard to unlearn that.”

The enthusiasm for her life’s work comes across even through the medium of our Zoom interview, but it’s also clear that this was not an easy time.

El Kaliouby arrived in England a few days after the September 11, 2001 attack in America, a young Arab woman then wearing a hijab.

“I was visibly Muslim. My parents were very concerned about my safety.”

The perpetual smile she adopted by way of a peace offering was also something of a mask, hiding the loneliness and separation from those she loved.

Back then, the technological means for staying in contact across the distance was largely restricted to the kind of messaging that proved a barrier to expressing true feelings, making El Kaliouby all the more determined to humanise technology.

“My PhD was centred around building a machine with emotional artificial intelligence, and I recognised at the time that a lot of the ways I was communicating with my family back home, and especially my husband, was through chat.

“We didn’t have video communication and it was certainly very expensive to make phone calls so we would use texting.

“I often felt I could hide my emotions behind the machine. There were many days where I would be homesick or even in tears, but I’d never communicate that. The best I could do was send a sad face emoji.”

The personal hardships became a driving force for her work. In a career paved with “what if” moments, El Kaliouby began to ask: “What if we could teach technology to understand us in the same way that we understand each other?”

“It’s not even in the choice of words we use. It’s our vocal intonations, our facial expressions, our body posture – and all of that was just getting lost via digitally mediated communications.”

Life was about to take another decisive twist as she received an email that the scientist, inventor and entrepreneur Professor Rosalind Picard was coming to give a talk on campus.

El Kaliouby had long been an admirer of this trailblazing woman in an almost overwhelmingly male-led field, whose book on designing computers to recognise human emotions she read while still in Cairo.

Life-changing encounter

“I often say this is the moment that changed the trajectory of my life,” she says of Picard’s request to meet some of the students.

So impressed was Picard by this intense young woman that she offered El Kaliouby a post-doctorate place on the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab before their first 20-minute conversation had ended.

“I remember thinking, ‘But I need to go back to Egypt. I have this husband waiting for me.’ And she basically said, ‘Just commute from Cairo. Show up whenever you want to.’’’

By then, El Kaliouby had a daughter, Jana, born in the UK, and a son, Adam, arrived in that other Cambridge in the US, but the constant round trips were becoming unsustainable.

“I was just doing that crazy back and forth. I would say it was OK until it went insanely chaotic when I started the company.”

The company was Affectiva, founded with Picard in 2009 with the goal of creating a commercial applications of emotion-sensing AI.

Growth was fast and it was an exciting time but there was another, darker side. “I was travelling so much, there was very little presence in anything I did,” El Kaliouby says.

Big lesson learnt

“I feel like I was out of balance. I didn’t make any time to sleep well. I would wake up at three in the morning almost every day and fire all these emails to my team. And so these poor people would wake up at six or seven in the morning with a whole slew of notes from me.

“I would go on vacation with my husband and my two young kids, and I’d just be on call all the time. There were zero boundaries, zero balance, and that was a big lesson learnt. There’s always time for self-care. There should always be time to spend with family and loved ones and friends. And, I didn’t do that, you know?”

By 2016, she was a divorced mother of two young children living full-time in America, and decided to bare that vulnerability in her role as chief executive of Affectiva.

Staff could see on El Kaliouby’s calendar that 3.30pm was demarcated to collect her son from school, and she explained to them that a Zumba class each Friday ensured a happier, healthier leader.

“I think it made for a much more authentic environment,” she says.

The family now lives in what El Kaliouby describes as a charming New England home filled with distinctive Middle Eastern touches and often by the aroma of molokhia soup made to her mother’s recipe.

Love for Egypt

“It’s very modern but with a lot of Egyptian things, Arab and Islamic inscriptions. I think of myself as Egyptian American, and very Egyptian in a lot of ways. I love Egypt. A lot of qualities – the Arab warmth, generosity and even intimacy – that’s very much who I am and I would say it’s the same for my kids.

“But I also have embraced what people would call American values. I’m very ambitious, very driven, very globally minded.”

That ambition and drive has taken her far. Affectiva is employed by brands in about 90 countries for market research, but also helps children with developmental difficulties, such as autism , to better interact with those around them.

More recently, the company has developed technology to make driving safer by enabling cars to detect if a motorist is becoming drowsy or distracted.

It was acquired in 2021 by the Swedish AI giant SmartEye for what was said to be about $73 million, with El Kaliouby becoming deputy chief executive.

She has long predicted that the day will come when all devices have an emotion chip and we won’t remember what it was like before screens could comprehend the meaning of us frowning at them.

“When we first started doing this work, we always said this will become ubiquitous and ingrained in every technology. Now, I think it’s more true than ever because AI is becoming a lot more conversational and perceptual.

“You can imagine that the final frontier is this emotional and social intelligence. Initially, my work was very much around human-to-computer interaction, making machines more intelligent, and how they communicate with humans.

“Now it’s back to the human connection. How are AI assistants and AI technologies going to make us better humans, especially better at connecting with each other?”

Along the way, she has learnt that daily affirmations are as integral to life as algorithms, and celebrating the small achievements, such as growing her own tulips, is as important as publishing a best-selling memoir, Girl Decoded.

Among the accolades amassed, El Kaliouby can cite becoming a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, being listed on the Forbes Top 50 Women in Tech, and receiving the Smithsonian Magazine’s American Ingenuity Award in Technology. Earlier this year, she was invited to ring the opening bell on New York’s Nasdaq exchange as a female pioneer in AI, and was recently made a 2023 Eisenhower Fellow.

None of this seems to have gone to her head, however, perhaps because her family does a good job of keeping her grounded.

When El Kaliouby gave a TED Talk some years ago, she explained that in emotion science all facial muscle movements are measured as action units with specific numbers for each.

Words from the wise

In a throwback to those early guided sessions in the family living room in Kuwait, the night before she walked on stage, her daughter Jana, 12 at the time, helpfully texted: “Good luck mummy!! I’m sure your gonna do awesome. Remember: don’t play with your hair, connect with audience, give them a present, gesture on words, gesture to emphasise.”

The response sent in live time was the old-school 🙂 emoticon but the algorithm that is El Kaliouby’s labour of love would have strongly detected action unit 12, the main component of, in this particular case, a very indulgent smile.

From her parting message to readers of The National, it is clear that she won’t rest until the technology responds just as accurately across the whole gamut of social and emotional states irrespective of people’s age, gender or ethnicity. Going forward, El Kaliouby insists, the watchword has to be inclusivity.

“I’m on this mission to diversify the face of AI. So it’s a call to action to get involved. It’s super exciting and we need a lot of diverse people being part of it.”

source/content: thenationalnews.com (headline edited)

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AMERICAN / EGYPT

EGYPT: Architectural Historian May El-Ibrashy Wins Prince Claus Fund’s Impact Award

Egyptian architectural historian May El-Ibrashy is among the winners of the 2022 Prince Claus Impacts awards for her contribution and innovation in her community.

The Prince Claus Fund has announced on Tuesday the six recipients of the first 2022 Prince Claus Impact Awards. 

The new award honours individuals whose work in art and culture engages their communities in innovative, positive ways while addressing issues of urgent contemporary relevance.

El-Ibrashy is an architect whose work centres on community engagement through heritage conservation, rehabilitation, preservation, and re-signification. She is the founder of the Megawra Built Environment Collective, a twinship between an architectural firm and an NGO.

Through her work she has managed to create a real difference for the often-marginalised communities living in Cairo’s historic centre and has created an important counter narrative to the current government’s focus on urban expansion and renewal, creating a new sense of hope and pride for the communities she works with. 

Focusing on Al-Khalifa District in Sayeda Zeinab, Al-Hattaba district by the citadel, and Al-Imam Al-Shafii district, El-Ibrashy’s participatory conservation initiative is an inspiring successful community dialogue that has been going on for 10 years. The impact of the dialogue still resonates in the communities of Al Khalifa District, Al-Hattaba and Al-Imam Al-Shafii.

The other five recipients are: 

Ailton Alves Lacerda Krenak (Brazil), an indigenous leader, environmentalist, and philosopher.

Alain Gomis (Senegal), a Senegalese-French film director and screenwriter.

Hassan Darsi (Morocco), a visual artist whose work promotes critical thinking about public spaces and citizenship.

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (Cuba), an artist and human rights defender.

María Medrano (Argentina) is a writer, poet and editor.

The Awards Ceremony shall take place in the Royal Palace Amsterdam on the 7th of December.

source/content: english.ahram.org.eg (headline edited)

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Egyptian Architectural Historian May El-Ibrashy.

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EGYPT

MOROCCO’s Arif Esa Appointed Deputy Chairman at International Trade Council (ITC)

Esa hopes that his new role will help him raise Morocco’s profile in the fintech and digital industry globally.

Founder and CEO of Moroccan fintech startup moneyIN Arif Esa has assumed the position of Deputy Chairman for the Banking/Finance/Blockchain & Trade Finance department at the International Trade Council (ITC). 

This appointment not only recognizes Esa’s outstanding contributions but also positions him as the first Moroccan entrepreneur to hold such a role within the ITC.

Esa, who holds a stellar track record in finance and fintech, with a portfolio of global recognition and awards, spoke with Morocco World News about his motivation for taking this role, as well as his new responsibilities and objectives.

“Accepting this responsibility was not just an honor but an opportunity to provide pivotal advice and give back to the community. It also aligns seamlessly with our global vision to establish Morocco and Africa as prominent players in the fintech and digital industry,” he said.

As a globally recognized figure, Esa’s reputation in the finance and fintech industry drew the attention of the ITC panel, which spans 179 countries, 79 government trade and investment agencies, 418 chambers of commerce, and a vast network of businesses and employees. 

After undergoing a “meticulous” evaluation process, Esa was humbled to be selected as the Deputy Chairman of this division, he said.

In his capacity as Deputy Chairman, Esa will play a key role in shaping the strategic direction of the ITC’s Banking/Finance/Blockchain & Trade Finance department. 

This role includes overseeing various key focus areas, including financial Instruments, risk mitigation, regulatory compliance, promoting innovative solutions, and capacity building, among others.

A bridge to Morocco

Highlighting the significance of his new role, the Moroccan entrepreneur emphasized, “I am excited about the impact we can collectively achieve, and I look forward to contributing meaningfully to the growth and transformation of trade finance and continuing to promote Morocco and the economy in the years to come.”

One of the central aspects of Esa’s new position is its potential impact on the Moroccan fintech landscape and businesses. His appointment is expected to open doors for Moroccan start-ups and fintech ventures on an international platform, he said.

“With my reputation, influence, and track record in the finance and fintech industry, I am poised to attract heightened attention and interest from investors, venture capitalists, and family offices,” he underlined.

In addition, the Moroccan entrepreneur intends to use his position to advocate for supportive regulatory frameworks for fintech start-ups in Morocco, fostering an environment that encourages investment. 

He also emphasized the importance of mentorship and personalized guidance, stressing that he is “committed to assisting start-ups in overcoming challenges, honing their strategies, and maximizing their potential for success.”

Esa’s engagement with international networks through the ITC is expected to provide Moroccan start-ups with expanded access to global markets, he noted, explaining that it will help them open doors to new markets and strengthen their credibility and standing on a global stage.

He further emphasized that his appointment “symbolizes a bridge between the Moroccan fintech ecosystem and the international financial landscape,” allowing him to “catalyze a transformational shift in how Moroccan start-ups are perceived, supported, and propelled towards greater success.”

Esa reflected on his journey with Morocco moneyIN, an instant payment solution, and how it prepared him for this new position.

“My journey with moneyIN Morocco has been a transformative experience that has uniquely prepared me for the prestigious role of Deputy Chairman within the Banking/Finance/Blockchain & Trade Finance department at the International Trade Council,” he explained.

He highlighted several key areas where his experience with moneyIN proved instrumental, including his ability to navigate the rapidly evolving fintech landscape and understand the potential of technologies like blockchain.

In particular, his background as an entrepreneur equipped him to empathize with the challenges start-ups face and advocate for measures that facilitate their growth.

His engagement with start-ups underscored the importance of mentorship and education, which Esa plans to extend globally.

Esa concluded by offering valuable advice to aspiring Moroccan entrepreneurs, encouraging them to “dream boldly, embrace disruption, and lead with integrity.”

He emphasized the importance of resilience, continuous learning, and global thinking, saying, “Aspire not only to make a mark but to leave an indelible legacy of positive change that reverberates across borders and generations.”

source/content: moroccoworldnews.com (headline edited)

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MOROCCO

SHARJAH, U.A.E: Najla Al Midfa, CEO of Sheraa Wins Arabian Business Award

Najla Al Midfa, CEO of the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Centre (Sheraa), has received the coveted Arabian Business Arab Woman Award for Entrepreneurship during the Arabian Business Arab Woman Awards 2023, held at Jumeirah Mina A’Salam Hotel in Dubai.

The Arabian Business Arab Woman Awards 2023 recognised and celebrated exceptional women who have made significant contributions to various fields.

This prestigious accolade is a testament to Al Midfa’s relentless dedication to fostering entrepreneurship in the Arab world and her true commitment to empowering founders and innovators.

Najla Al Midfa’s passion for entrepreneurship has helped take Sheraa to new heights, empowering aspiring entrepreneurs not just in the UAE but across the Arab region and the world. Through various initiatives, Sheraa has emerged as a thriving ecosystem that nurtures and supports budding business founders, providing them with the tools and resources needed to transform their dreams into reality.

Commenting on the award, Najla Al Midfa eloquently said, “It is often said that every great dream commences with a dreamer standing atop the shoulders of giants. I humbly dedicate this award to two such giants, visionaries who have paved the way for us on this remarkable journey. H.H. Dr. Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Sharjah, who envisioned the emirate not merely as an Arab city, but as a global beacon for human advancement and progress, and Sheikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi, Chairperson of Sheraa, whose unyielding commitment to nurturing the next generation of changemakers knows no bounds.”

The Sheraa CEO gave homage to her team saying, “The incredible team at Sheraa embodies the essence of this vision, thanks to their relentless drive that every idea finds its purpose, every challenge morphs into an opportunity, and every enraptured dream inches closer to reality. And lastly, a tribute to the entrepreneurs we have had the honour of working with. You invigorate us every single day with your determination to push the boundaries of what is possible. Your ventures echo the realisation of the vision that guides us at Sheraa, reiterating that with collective effort, the sky is not the limit but the beginning.”

source/content: wam.ae (headline edited)

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SHARJAH, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (U.A.E)

SAUDI ARABIA: Saudi Economy Joins Trillion-Dollar Club: FSC

Saudi Arabia has reached a significant milestone as its gross domestic product crossed the coveted 1 trillion-dollar mark for the first time, revealed the umbrella body of the Kingdom’s business community. 

According to the state-run news agency, the Federation of Saudi Chambers revealed that the Kingdom achieved the GDP of SR4.15 trillion ($1.11 trillion), meeting the state’s goals for 2025. 

The Saudi Press Agency cited the FSC study reporting that the Kingdom achieved an economic growth rate of 8.7 percent in 2022, the highest among the member states of G20. 

The report also found that the private sector’s contribution to the economy increased to SR1.63 trillion, or 41 percent of GDP in 2022, with a growth rate of 5.3 percent. 

Strengthening the non-oil private sector is a crucial agenda of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, as the Kingdom’s economy has steadily reduced its dependence on oil. 

The report added that non-governmental investments increased to SR907.5 billion, with a growth rate of 32.6 percent in 2022, while the number of private workers rose from 8.08 million in 2021 to 9.42 million in 2022. 

Moreover, the number of Saudis working in the private sector increased from 1.91 million in 2021 to 2.19 million in 2022. 

Highlighting Saudi Arabia’s success in its economic diversification efforts, the Saudi Chamber of Commerce added that the value of non-oil exports reached SR315.7 billion in 2022, accounting for 20.5 percent of commodity exports. 

Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund said Saudi Arabia’s fiscal prospects are solid in the near term, with risks broadly balanced, driven by Vision 2030, which has been diversifying the Kingdom’s economy since its launch in 2016. 

According to the UN financial agency, Saudi Arabia has sufficient precautionary reserves, and the peg of the exchange rate to the US dollar served the Kingdom’s economy well. 

IMF added that Saudi Arabia has maintained its average consumer price index despite rising inflation in other nooks.

source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)

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The Kingdom achieved an economic growth rate of 8.7 percent in 2022, the highest among the member states of G20. Shutterstock 

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SAUDI ARABIA

SAUDI ARABIA elected President of ‘Asian Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions’ from 2027-2030, at its 59th meeting in Busan, South Korea

The Kingdom was selected in a vote by the Asian Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions during its 59th meeting, which took place in Busan, South Korea this week.

Saudi Arabia, represented by its General Court of Audit, has been elected to be president of the Asian Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions from 2027 to 2030.

The Kingdom was selected in a vote by the organization’s board of governors during its 59th meeting, a four-day event in Busan, South Korea, that concluded on Friday.

Hussam Al-Angari, president of the General Court of Audit, congratulated the Saudi leadership for the success of the country in being awarded the role, which he said “would not have been achieved without the high status enjoyed by the Kingdom,” the Saudi Press Agency reported on Friday.

He added that the honor reflects the great leadership role and reputation of the Kingdom, through its General Auditing Bureau, in the financial sector and in the fields of auditing, drawing up public financial-monitoring policies at the regional and international levels, and its effective participation in policy development and decision-making related to international professional policies and practices.

Established in 1978, the organization has 48 member states and is currently chaired by Thailand’s State Audit Office, while China’s auditor general carries out the duties of its General Secretariat.

The regional branch is affiliated with the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions, which is considered the professional reference and international incubator for public financial oversight and accounting.

source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)

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Hussam Al-Angari, president of the General Court of Audit, takes part in 59th Asian Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions meeting in Korea. (SPA)

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SAUDI ARABIA

TANZANIA: The Top Seven Human Evolution Discoveries From Tanzania

Fossil finds from Tanzania in the mid-20th century kicked off East African hominid hunting.

Lucy and Ardi are the poster children of human evolution. But these famous fossil skeletons may never have been found if it weren’t for Louis and Mary Leakey’s pioneering efforts. The pair made several discoveries at Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge in the 1950s and 1960s that inspired other anthropologists to come to East Africa in search of human ancestors. Here’s a look at some of the most important hominid fossil finds from Tanzania.

The Nutcracker Man (OH 5): The Leakeys’ first major discovery at Olduvai Gorge occurred in 1959. Mary found the roughly 1.8-million-year-old skull of a hominid with a flat face, gigantic teeth, a large crest on the top of its head (where chewing muscles attached) and a relatively small brain. They named the species Zinjanthropus boisei (now known as Paranthropus boisei). Nicknamed the Nutcracker Man, the species was too different from modern people to be the direct human ancestor that Louis had been hoping to find. But the discovery captured public interest in human evolution, and the Leakeys went on to unearth many more hominid fossils at Olduvai. OH 5 is the fossil’s official catalog name, meaning Olduvai Hominid Number 5.

Johnny’s Child (OH 7): The next big Leaky discovery came in 1960. Mary and Louis’ son, Johnny, found a lower jaw about 300 yards away from where the Nutcracker Man was discovered. The bone came from a young hominid; thus, the fossil was nicknamed Johnny’s Child. At the same spot, the Leakeys also dug up some hand bones and skull fragments. Using these skull fragments, the Leakeys and their colleagues estimated the roughly 1.8-million-year-old hominid’s brain size: 680 cubic centimeters. That was significantly bigger than the size of the average australopithecine brain, about 500 cubic centimeters. The hand bones revealed that the hominid had a “precision grip,” when a fingertip presses against the tip of the thumb. This movement allows for fine manipulation of objects, such as turning a key in a door or threading a needle. The precision grip led the Leakeys to conclude that this hominid was the one who made the stone tools found at Olduvai. Because of the tool-making and the big brain, the Leakeys decided OH 7 represented the earliest member of the genus Homo: Homo habilis (meaning Handy Man).

OH 8: Also in 1960, the Leakeys’ team discovered a well-preserved fossil foot belonging to H. habilis. The bones indicate the hominid had modern-looking foot arches, suggesting the species walked like modern people do. Tooth marks on the specimen’s ankle reveal the hominid had been a crocodile’s lunch.

OH 9: At the same time the Leakeys unearthed the first examples of H. habilis, they also recovered the skull cap of a more recent hominid dating to about 1.4 million years ago. At 1,000 cubic centimeters, the specimen’s brain was much bigger than that of H. habilis. The skull had thick brow ridges and a low, sloped forehead—key features linking the fossil to the species Homo erectus.

Twiggy (OH 24): Discovered in 1968 by Peter Nzube, Twiggy is a skull belonging to an adult H. habilis dating to roughly 1.8 million years ago. Although OH 24 is the most complete H. habilis skull from Olduvai Gorge, it was found crushed completely flat (and therefore named after the slender British model of the same name). Paleoanthropologist Ron Clarke reconstructed what the skull would have looked like, but it’s still fairly distorted.

LH 4: In the 1970s, after Louis died, Mary began excavations at Laetoli, about 30 miles from Olduvai Gorge. The fossils she was finding there were much older than the bones she and Louis had discovered at Olduvai. In 1974, for example, her team unearthed a lower jaw with teeth dating to 3.6 million years ago. It was cataloged as Laetoli Homind 4, or LH 4. Around the same time, anthropologists at the site of Hadar in Ethiopia were also finding hominid fossils dating to more than 3 million years ago, including the famous Lucy skeleton. At first, no one was sure what to call these older fossils. After analyzing both the Hadar and Laetoli specimens, anthropologists Tim White and Donald Johanson (Lucy’s discoverer) concluded that all of the fossils represented one species that they called Australopithecus afarensis. They chose LH 4 as the species’ type specimen, or the standard representative of the species. Mary did not approve. She didn’t believe the fossils from Laetoli were australopithecines. But under the rules of taxonomy, once a type specimen is designated, it’s forever associated with its species name. (For more on the controversy, see Johanson’s book Lucy.)

Laetoli Footprints: In 1978, one of Mary’s team members, Paul Abell, made the most famous discovery at Laetoli: He found the trail of about 70 fossilized hominid footprints. Based on the footprints’ age, 3.6 million years, anthropologists think they were made by an A. afarensis group. The footprints reveal this early hominid had a very modern way of walking. The big toe was in line with the other toes, not off to the side like an ape’s big toe. And the prints reveal the walkers had arches, unlike the flat feet of an ape. The footprints also suggest A. afarensis had a modern gait.

source/content: smithsonianmag.com (headline edited)

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An artist’s reconstruction of Paranthropus boisei, a hominid species that was first discovered in Tanzania. Image: dctim1/Flickr

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TANZANIA

SUDAN: Young Sudanese Inventor Moatasem Jibril, Utilises Electronic Waste to Build Robots

Moatasem Jibril, a young man from Sudan, is realising his dream of conducting technological experiments to manufacture robots by using recycled electronic waste.

Despite modest capabilities and living in a mud house in the city of Omdurman, west of the capital, Khartoum, Jibril did not give up on his dream of making a robot, even after having to quit university due to the deteriorating economic conditions of his family.

For about ten years, Jibril has been trying to create robots in a narrow space inside his family house, and he challenges poverty by working daily in the market to earn money to purchase the materials he needs for his project. He hopes that his dream will be funded by any businessman or institution.

Sudan is suffering from many crises, starting with a shortage of basic and imported commodities, as well as the depreciation of the local currency, in addition to the government’s measures to lift fuel subsidies at the request of the International Monetary Fund in 2021.

Childhood dream

Jibril’s dream of making robots arose from his childhood, inspired by cartoons.

“Making robots is a dream that has been in my mind since childhood, and I try hard to turn my dream into reality,” he said.

He started making robots nine years ago, after watching many movies that talk about inventors.

The young man mainly relies on the electronic waste that he obtains at a low price from local markets to build his robots, since the basic components exceed his financial ability.

He is searching continuously and painstakingly in electronic markets on the internet for any electronic parts offered for sale that are suitable for his industry, to buy them at reasonable prices.

Sudan is witnessing fluctuations in the abundance of foreign exchange, which raises the cost of imports and bears the final consumer the exchange rate differences, in addition to the rise in global prices, especially fuel and food.

Economic conditions

“In the initial stages, I moved more freely after studying and saving some money from my daily allowances,” Jibril said.

He was studying electronics engineering at the International University of Sudan. He often worked while studying, to save money to pay tuition fees and sit for exams. However, due to financial weakness of his parents, he missed many exams and eventually found himself dismissed from the University.

Jibril did not pay attention to the ridicule of his school and neighbourhood friends, and continued to implement his idea day and night.

“I still suffer from the mockery of colleagues and friends at the University when I begin to explain my project related to the manufacture of robots,” he said. “They consider it mere triviality, despite my continuous explanation of the idea of the project using engineering methods and three-dimensional designs.”

Jibril hopes that his economic conditions will improve, so he can return to the University to complete his academic studies in engineering and software fields.

He aspires to complete a project in building robots on a scientific basis and then start selling them.

As for his big dream, it is to go beyond the robotics industry and reach the stage of manufacturing micro-precision missiles and apply his motto that says: “Everything is possible with determination and persistence.”

He is looking forward to the future by completing his academic studies and hopes to find sponsorship from local or international institutions that will adopt his project to crown his success story and reach the world.

source/content: middleeastmonitor.com (headline edited)

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Sudanese Moatasem Jibril, who dropped out of his electronics engineering course for economic reasons, works on a robot in his house using waste products in Khartoum, Sudan on 2 March 2023 [Mahmoud Hjaj/ Anadolu Agency]

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SUDAN