Riyadh: Dr. Zakir Naik and Dr. Abdulaziz Bin Abdulrahman Kaki were among the five recipients of this year’s King Faisal International Prize.
The winners were announced at a ceremony held in Riyadh on Tuesday evening, with the prize for Arabic Language and Literature being withheld. The prize for Services to Islam went to Dr. Zakir Naik, president of the Islamic Foundation of India, while the prize for Islamic Studies went to Dr. Abdulaziz Bin Abdulrahman Kaki, consultant at the Al-Madinah Al-Munawwarah Development Commission.
The prize for Medicine went to Jeffrey Ivan Gordon, Director of the Centre of Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University, while the prize for science was dually awarded to Michael Gratzel, director of the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Omar Mwannes Yaghi, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.
This year’s recipients were announced by the Secretary General of the King Faisal International Prize, Abdullah Bin Saleh Al-Uthaimin, with Prince Khalid Al-Faisal, Emir of Makkah and director of the King Faisal Foundation, opening the ceremony at Riyadh’s Al Khozama conference center. According to the Foundation, the award in the category of Arabic Language and Literature was withheld this year because of “incomplete fulfillment of the prize requirements.”
Each year prizes are typically awarded across the five categories. Prize recipients each receive a gold medal, a certificate hand written in Arabic calligraphy summarizing the laureate’s work, and an endowment of SR750,000. This year’s dual recipients in the Science category will share the prize money. The King Faisal Foundation website describes the Prize’s aim as benefiting Muslims in the “present and future,” inspiring participation in “all aspects of civilization”, and enriching “human knowledge and develop mankind.”
Nominations that comply with the Prize’s general conditions go through a rigorous three-stage review and short-listing process, which includes specialized experts in each field, international referees, and selection committees that make the final decision in each category. The selection committees for this year’s Laureates conferred and reached their decision in Riyadh on Feb. 1. The prize was inaugurated in 1979 and, with this year’s prizes, has been awarded 37 times. Of the more than 230 King Faisal International Prize laureates to date, 17 have also received Nobel Prizes. The prize was original inaugurated in three fields – Service to Islam, Islamic Studies, and Arabic Literature – with Medicine added in 1981 and Science in 1982.