RIYADH: The winners of the King Faisal Prize for 2021 received their awards on Tuesday at a glittering ceremony in Riyadh.
The awards, the most prestigious in the Muslim world, recognize outstanding achievement in service to Islam, Islamic studies, Arabic language and literature, medicine, and science.
The award for services to Islam was received by the Kuwaiti entrepreneur Mohamed Al-Sharikh, founder of the Sakhr software company, which created the first Arabic language operating system for computers.
Sharikh was honored for his work in developing the first software for English translations of the Qur’an and Hadith. “Winning this award represents an ambition for many of us. Thank you to those who nominated me, and thank you to the award’s management and staff,” he said.
The other winners were Moroccan professor Mohamed Mechbal (Arabic language and literature); Stephen Mark Strittmatter, an American neurologist at Yale School of Medicine, and British professor Robin Franklin of the Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute (co-winners in medicine); and Prof. Stuart Parkin from the UK, an experimental physicist at Stanford University in California (science). The Islamic studies prize was not awarded this year.
Mechbel was recognized for work that lays the foundations for the creation of modern Arab rhetoric. Strittmatter and Franklin were rewarded for their pioneering work in the field of regenerative medicine in neurological conditions. Parkin was honored for innovative research that has resulted in a 1,000-fold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives.
“It’s a great honor, and an honor for all scientists around the world,” he said. “The King Faisal Prize means a lot more funding for crazy ideas, and they are the way forward for a better future.”
Each winner received a $200,000 prize, a 24-carat gold medal, and a certificate in Arabic calligraphy signed by prize board chairman Prince Khalid Al-Faisal.
