Building an Academic Oasis In the Arabian Desert

摘要

Sharjah, united arab emirates—The white-robed scholar crouches on the floor of his spacious study and opens a reprint of Claudius Ptolemy's classic treatise on geography. An expert on Arab history and current affairs, Sultan Bin Mohammed Al-Qassimi leafs gently through the atlas, relishing the aroma of the century-old book. "My wife jokes that this is my drug," he says. He points to a fortified town on the Gulf coast of the Arabian Peninsula that today is the capital of the oil-rich emirate of Shar-jah. His emirate. The academic in Shaikh Sultan plans to write an authoritative history of Arabia around the time that Ptolemy, the Egyptian astronomer and mathematician, compiled his maps in the second century C.E. But the leader in him wants to make Sharjah an intellectual powerhouse for the 21 st century.