Winners of King Faisal award announced

18 Jan 2011

RIYADH: The General Secretariat of the King Faisal International Prize announced names of the recipients of the award for the year 2011, Monday.

Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, the former prime minister of Malaysia, was named the recipient of the 2011 King Faisal International Prize for Service to Islam.

The General Secretariat of the prize said that the selection panel had chosen Badawi for his “work to improve bilateral and multi-lateral cooperation relations and his active leadership of ASEAN – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – as well as the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organization of the Islamic Conference when the Malaysia held presidency of the latter two in 2003 and 2008.

The General Secretariat said that Badawi was further noted for his work in building Malaysia’s economic competitiveness through modern agriculture and high precision industries as well as human resources and education.

“Badawi has been greatly concerned to encourage Islamic religious studies and he set up private religious schools to become a fundamental part of the educational system,” the secretariat said.

The secretariat also described Badawi as keen to “develop the Islamic legal administration and strengthen Zakat, endowment and Haj organizations”.

“He also established the International Institute for Higher Islamic Studies in 2008 to broaden the field of Islamic intellectual discourse to overcome political parties.”

The King Faisal Prize for Islamic Studies was awarded jointly to Khalil Ibrahim Inalcik from Turkey for his book “The Socio-Economic History of the Ottoman State”, and Muhammad Adnan Bakhit Al-Sheyyab from Jordan for his work, “Studies in the History of the Sham in Three Volumes”.

The prize for Medicine, dedicated this year to stem-cell treatment, was awarded to Professor James Alexander Thomas from Wisconsin University and Japanese professor Shinya Yamanaka from the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco and Kyoto University, for their research in the field of stem cells. The King Faisal Prize for Science was dedicated this year to chemistry, and went to US professors George M. Whitesides and Richard Neil Zare. The prize for Arabic Language and Literature was withheld this year with the selection committee citing a “lack of works meeting requirements”. The 2011 topic had been set as “studies concerned with  tendencies of renewal in Arabic poetry up to the end of the ninth Hijri century”.

Winners of the King Faisal International Prize are awarded SR750,000, a certificate in Arabic calligraphy describing the work for which the prize was awarded, and a commemorative 24-carat, 200-gram gold medallion. – Okaz/Saudi Gazette

Source: http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentID=2011011891612