Pouring Money Into Culture and Education

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By ZVIKA KRIEGER

Total spending by Gulf Cooperation Council countries on educational projects for this year now exceeds their $20-billion in arms purchases from the United States. Among the highlights:

Qatar is devoting 2.8 percent of its gross domestic product to scientific research, with the recently established Qatar National Research Fund administering more than $25-million in research grants over the next three years.

Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, the emir of the United Arab Emirates, recently started a $10-billion foundation — one of the largest charitable donations in history — to "develop world-class knowledge" in the region; the foundation has already begun 15 projects, including establishing the Arab Research Network, an independent commission to monitor quality at Arab universities, and a scholarship program for students wishing to pursue graduate degrees at Arab universities.

Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar are all building multibillion-dollar science and technology parks to jump-start their research efforts.

Abu Dhabi is also pouring millions of dollars into one of the world's most ambitious book-publishing projects, hoping to almost triple the number of books published in Arabic every year — from about 300 to about 800 — and translating up to 500 books annually, starting with authors like Milton Friedman, Stephen Hawking, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Abu Dhabi has also started a new English-language newspaper — with aspirations of becoming The New York Times of the Middle East — that has already hired top writers and editors from The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, The New Yorker, The Times of London, The Daily Telegraph, and, of course, The New York Times.

Among other developing cultural institutions in the Gulf, the most high-profile project has been Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island, a $28-billion complex that will include branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim, as well as a maritime museum, a performing-arts center in negotiations to be run by Lincoln Center, and a 1.5 kilometer canal-side pavilion for a biennial-arts festival modeled on those in Venice and Berlin.

Abu Dhabi also recently signed a $2-billion deal with Warner Brothers to open a megastudio and jump-start a nascent entertainment industry, dovetailing with the critically acclaimed Dubai International Film Festival.

Events like the Gulf Art Fair, the Sharjah Biennial, and artparis-Abu Dhabi are making the region into a major player in the international art world, with both Sotheby's and Christie's opening up their first Middle East branches in the Gulf last year.