Up the corniche, along the Saudi Arabian coast where boats carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca sailed for centuries, a thicket of cranes rises over whitewashed mosques along the Red Sea.
Steel flashes and blowtorches glow as 20,000 workers build a $10-billion university ordered up by a king who hopes Western ingenuity will revive the economy of this ultraconservative Muslim nation. When finished next year, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will offer coed classes, Western professors, a curriculum in English and other touches loathed as dangerous liberalism by Islamic fundamentalists.
The West may be dependent on Saudi crude, now as high as $145 a barrel, but this campus outside the ancient fishing village of Thuwal is a recognition that the country that is home to Islam’s holiest shrines needs the likes of USC, Oxford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to survive globalization.
Religious schools can still be built, but the Saudi economy can't rely on oil revenue forever. The article was spot on when it mentioned globilization. For all the negatives that go with it, globilization is a reality. A Western education will go a long way to building a more diverse economy in Saudi Arabia, which is what it will need before the end of the century. That doesn't mean religious education has to be abandoned altogether.
"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is."
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