View / Gulf philanthropy is key to scientific breakthroughs

The war between Israel and Iran demonstrated the strategic value of advanced technologies and holds lessons for the Gulf, specifically on who foots the bill for innovation. States in the region have traditionally relied on the government and universities to fund research and development (R&D), with philanthropists making an anemic contribution. This model must change if these countries are to keep up with the innovations shaping a rapidly mutating military environment.

Today, most of the Gulf’s technological development is done by large state-owned corporations such as Aramco and Masdar, or government-funded institutions such as the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research and Sultan Qaboos University. Strategically important technologies, such as solar-powered desalination, are being developed by the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology, another government institution.

Universities have long offered a partial workaround to public dependency: tuition revenues can support labs and research careers, with scholars relying on teaching other students to support their scientific inquiry. But the rise of AI-powered personalized education is threatening this practice. Virtual tutors already outperform human professors in both efficiency and customization. It is not hard to imagine a near future where this private funding dries up, and Gulf scientists will have to lean even more heavily on the state when looking for resources to fund their research.

Private companies could plug the gap, but this doesn’t apply in the region. The reliance on hydrocarbon income created a unique commercial environment where the private sector has a limited incentive to allocate resources to R&D. This may change over time, but it is likely to be a very gradual evolution that will not occur fast enough to compensate for the AI-induced disruption to university funding.

That leaves philanthropy: the most compelling alternative is for Gulf philanthropists to begin directing a larger proportion of their expenditure to blue-sky research that can have strategic value. Notably, the problem is not convincing them to spend more on charitable activity, but rather that the culture of philanthropy needs to change, as it has typically emphasized poverty alleviation, humanitarian relief, and basic education over supporting scientific inquiry.

There’s a precedent in Arab and Muslim history. During the Golden Age of Islam (750–1258), following in the path of Caliphs such as Harun Al-Rashid, private patronage of scholarship was in vogue, with many of the inventions and intellectual discoveries made by Muslim polymaths owing their funding to private philanthropists. One of the most celebrated examples is Fatima al-Fihri, a wealthy merchant’s daughter who founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in 859, an institution that functioned as an intellectual hub spanning many disciplines.

People today would be forgiven for imagining that strategic scientific discoveries are funded either by the state or large corporations, with philanthropic support being limited to academic pursuits that do not have a tangible impact on daily life. However, such a view would be inaccurate, as many philanthropists have funded research that has gone on to demonstrate strategic value — even if that might not have been obvious at the time.

For example, American financier Alfred Loomis brought together top physicists in his philanthropic labs, spawning the discovery of radar, which went on to contribute to the Allied victory in World War II. More recently, the late hedge fund billionaire Jim Simons poured some of his wealth into mathematics and computational science, seeding advances in cryptography and cybersecurity.

Wealthy individuals in the Gulf have been raised in a culture where strategic affairs are considered the exclusive domain of the state and where they could not possibly imagine funding a discovery that goes on to improve their country’s military or provides their nation with a competitive edge in some critical economic sector. This thinking must be replaced by a more empowered attitude aligned with the Gulf’s economic visions.

While there’s no question that alleviating poverty is a meritorious pursuit, so too is funding the discovery of a technology that allows millions to live more comfortably 20 years from now. Philanthropy in the Gulf must evolve to reflect the new strategic realities, where scientific breakthroughs can determine a nation’s fate just as much as diplomacy or firepower. A visionary Gulf philanthropist should no longer ask whether funding science is their responsibility — but rather for which discoveries they want to be remembered.

Omar Al-Ubaydli (@omareconomics) is the Director of Research at the Bahrain Center for Strategic, International and Energy Studies (Derasat), and a contributor to Semafor.