Most Influential techies who are Muslims
By Yasmin Ahmed

Dr Abdul Kalam, AR Rahman and Bollywood star SRK are in, and so is Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist. I tried hard but couldn’t see the name of Bin Laden anywhere. If you are still wondering, this is a list of the leading 500 movers and shakers of the Muslim World. The respected Wipro boss is not in.

The list compiled by The Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in Georgetown is as they say to highlight people who are influential as Muslims. The Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding is concerned with ‘Islam and the West and Islam in the West’ says the website. The Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding was founded in 1993 at Georgetown University in United States. Following a $20 million dollar gift in 2005 from Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal to the school's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, the center was renamed the Prince Alwaleed Bin-Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. As a part of their continuing endeavour to achieve this goal, a list of the 500 most influential figures in 2009 who are Muslims, have been collated; and then broken up into 15 categories—Scholarly, Political, Administrative, Lineage, Preachers, Women, Youth, Philanthropy, Development, Science and Technology, Arts and Culture, Media, Radicals, International Islamic Networks, and Issues of the Day—to help you understand the different kinds of ways Islam and Muslims impact the world today.

Techgoss has taken out the list of influential people in Science and Technology and they are as follows.

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- El Naggar is an important Egyptian geologist and scholar writing and speaking on science and the Qur’an. He is a fellow of the Islamic Academy of Sciences, and is well respected by the global scientific community for his work on geology. He has published close to 200 academic scholarly articles and scientific studies. He also works for the Arab Development Institute.

- Gholam Reza Aghazadeh has been the vice president of the Atomic Energy Organization in Iran since 1997 and is now president of the organization, which is responsible for all nuclear energy operations in the country. He has held various top positions in the post-revolution Iranian government, including minister of petroleum. Nuclear technology has become a national goal in Iran.

- Dr. Mehdi Golshani also in Iran is a professor of physics and founding chairman of the Faculty of Philosophy of Science at Sharif University of Technology. He has written extensively on Islamic science, arguing for its relevance in the modern world.

- Prof. Dr. Al Shamlan, a geologist by education, is the director general of the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, dean of the Faculty of Science at Kuwait University, and vice president of the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World. He served as the minister of higher education from 1988-1992.

- Kawkab al Sabah Mohammad Jamil Dayeh, deputy minister of health and director of the Bureau of Health, Environment and Population for the General Union of Women, is Syria’s newly appointed minister of state for environmental affairs, a position left vacant for the past five years.

- An engineer by profession, Dr A P J Abdul Kalam is a former president of India. Before becoming president, Kalam was the Scientific Adviser to the Defense Minister and Secretary of India's Defense Research and Development Organization from 1992 to 1999, during which he led the weaponization of strategic missile systems and nuclear testing in collaboration with the Department of Atomic Energy. This moved India from being a state with nuclear technology to a state with nuclear weapons. He is also author of India 2020, which presents his vision of an Indian superpower by the year 2020.

- Mohamed el Fatatry, a Finland-based Egyptian entrepreneur, is chairman and CEO of a social networking website for Muslims, Muxlim.com. The online community, created in 2005, has been recognized as a growing private venture, empowering users with a Muslim-friendly environment for cross-cultural communication.

- Writing under the pen name Harun Yahya, Adnan Oktar has gained international prominence as a spokesperson for creationism but garners influence from his numerous and extensively distributed publications about Islam, and Islamic children’s books.

- Rana Ali is the inventor of Qiblasat, a device that locates Qibla, the direction towards Mecca, via GPS (Global Positioning System) and gives accurate prayer times anywhere in the world. He is located in the U.K.

- Fazlun Khalid, also in the U.K. is the founder and director of the Birmingham-based Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences. He is an expert on Islamic environmentalism, and has written extensively on religion and conservation. He facilitated a 1995 conference where all major faiths pledged to cooperate on environmental issues.

- Mohamad Chakaki is a founding member of Green Muslims, a Washington DC-based group that seeks to relate sustainable environmental policy to faith. He is an environmental and community development consultant working on projects in the US and the Middle East.

- Fuad el Hibri in the U.S. is the CEO and chairman of the board of Emergent BioSolutions Inc., a multinational biopharmaceutical company that is the sole holder of an FDA-approved anthrax vaccine. He is the chairman of the consulting firm East West Resources Corp., and chairman and treasurer of El Hibri Charitable Foundation.

- Dr. Mehmet Oz is a cardiothoracic surgeon who has been a frequent guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. He is professor of Cardiac Surgery at Columbia University, leads numerous organizations and charities, and has authored three books about personal health. He will star in his own talk show called 'Dr Oz' in late 2009.

- Ahmed Zewail is a Linus Pauling Professor at the California Institute of Technology who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in femtochemistry. He has recently accepted President Obama’s invitation to serve on the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
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The most curious non-techie inclusion in this list that would interest techie minds must be that of Amar Khaled. Amar Khaled, an Egyptian, who is a pioneering Muslim preacher and effective social activist who is revered by many as the leader of a revival in the Muslim world. He has the most popular personal website in the world with 20 million regular users and 232,219 fans on 79 Facebook groups and approximately 2 million hits on 200 You Tube videos.

Looking at the Indians in the list Shah Rukh Khan is just SRK to the billions of fans he has; I wonder how many people identify with him as a Muslim in India? The same with AR Rahman and the well-beloved APJ Abdul Kalam.