A Swiss initiative to establish a global center for the desert

A group of Swiss elites launched a global initiative to create a global center to attract researchers, stakeholders and visionaries dedicated to understanding and protecting the desert, to be a symbol of a future practice that combines historical awareness, creative research and social responsibility.

The initiative was the idea of ​​the Tariqi and Swiss novelist Ibrahim Al-Koni, and was hosted by New York University Abu Dhabi, with the participation of the Swiss thinker and academic, Dr. Reto Sorg, head of the Robert Walser Studies Center in Bern, the Swiss academic and lecturer at the University of Copenhagen, Dr. Jan Loeb, and the accredited ambassador of Switzerland. The United Arab Emirates has Dr. Arthur Mattley.

In the symposium, which was held in the presence of academics and media professionals, the participants revealed that the center’s mission will contribute to supporting research and scientific exploration of the desert, promoting a deeper understanding of the desert environment, promoting desert culture, art and literature, supporting sustainability and ensuring the responsible preservation of deserts and their potential for future generations.

According to Dr. Ritu Sorg, the group brought with it extensive experience in managing and developing international projects at the intersection of literature, academia, and the private sector, with our awareness that achieving Ibrahim Al-Koni’s vision for a multidisciplinary desert center requires the support of partners from a wide range of academic fields, especially the natural and social sciences, in addition to Local advisors and sponsors.

The initiative put education and public communication in mind, according to the statement issued by it, by producing knowledge about the desert and disseminating it on a enormous scale to bridge the gap between research and public participation.

International novelist Ibrahim Al-Koni said in a speech he delivered to the audience, “The desert is the legend in the alphabet of our existence, and migration in it is the lesson of this alphabet. As for herding, it is the school, because experience has shown that whoever is unable to train himself to herd livestock, he is unlikely to succeed in herding livestock. For this reason, herding was the craft of the prophets, because only he who has trained himself to be patient with the misery of livestock can embark on the adventure of taming livestock. On faith.”

He added: “The urban human being has, since time immemorial, been receiving the vision of salvation from the breath of the spirit of the Hijri model, as happened with the experience of every prophetic epic. Isn’t our choice today of the reality of this wild place (the Emirates) a good omen, for the release of the first letter in the alphabet for diagnosing the nature of This puzzle, called in our language a desert, not only as the birthplace of prophecy, but as the birthplace of formation, which was able here to achieve, through will in work, and wisdom in the mind, the dream of development in the word, (evolution), not by apostasy from development, translated in The concept of revolution, which has flooded the reality of our world with bleeding, to abort the Renaissance project, which bankrupt ideologies have sung about, so that the UAE becomes the model for investing in peace, not in professionalizing violence, in the experience of change, with an addiction to a magical opium, which is: love, so that it becomes the separation of capital. In it is the human being on the one hand, and the nature inhabited by this human being, on the other hand, as the warehouse that embraces the activity of this human being? It is the certainty that has become the greatest common denominator between Switzerland and the Emirates, to be the secret of their superiority, to make them the destination of every seeker of truth, in a world in which truth is estranged. It does not surprise us that we delegate them today to be witnesses to our initiative in doing justice to this paradise (the desert), molded from its clay, but we Those who deny His grace, let us finally do what would enable him to utter his argument and defend himself!