On October 4, the US and 16 other countries endorsed the Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science, calling for stronger scientific institutions, ambitious research and artificial intelligence to accelerate discovery.
The phrase is striking because people usually name golden ages retrospectively. Governments can create conditions for progress, but history decides whether an era deserves the title.
In ninth-century Baghdad, scholars focused on immediate concerns: calculating, translating, observing and mapping the heavens. What made the period extraordinary was not a declaration of intellectual greatness, but a concentration of curiosity, scholarship, patronage and institutions devoted to discovery. Greek learning met Arabic scholarship; Indian mathematics entered new intellectual settings. Knowledge arrived from elsewhere, but rarely left unchanged.
When I spoke at the Harvard Islamic Finance Conference in September, I returned to a word we use almost every day: algorithm. Its origins lie in the Latinised name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a scholar who worked in Baghdad. I found that inheritance both inspiring and uncomfortable. How did a civilisation once known for producing knowledge become, in so many fields, a consumer of technologies developed elsewhere?
Al-Khwarizmi did not invent modern artificial intelligence. His work travelled far enough to enter the vocabulary of a technological world he could never have imagined. The lesson is that intellectual influence comes from producing something others find valuable enough to study, develop and carry forward.
That is what I mean by Golden Age 2.0: not recreating Baghdad, but recovering the ambition to contribute.
The question has grown urgent because the relationship between knowledge, capital, and productive power is changing. AI is altering access to certain forms of expertise. Biology increasingly intersects with data and machine intelligence. Robotics carries software into the physical economy. Tokenisation introduces new ways to represent ownership and financial claims. Meanwhile, these technologies’ energy demands remind us that the digital economy remains deeply physical.
The starting point for participation is changing too. Geography once restricted access to the right library, laboratory or scientific community. The internet weakened some barriers; AI may weaken others by putting sophisticated analytical assistance within reach of people who could never have assembled equivalent expertise internally. Universities, laboratories and physical infrastructure remain indispensable.
Yet access should never be confused with power. Intelligence can become cheaper to consume while ownership of the systems producing it remains concentrated. Using a sophisticated model does not give someone ownership of the research, processors, energy infrastructure or company beneath it. Technology can appear democratic at the interface while economic value accumulates very differently underneath.
The distinction is important for digital finance too. Markets can become easier to enter while relatively few institutions still control the infrastructure beneath them. More participation at the surface does not necessarily mean more influence over their underlying rules. We must ask what capability is being created alongside access.
Consider the scale. In May 2026, Anthropic announced a funding round valuing the company at $965 billion. That exceeded the combined 2025 economic output of Pakistan and Egypt, roughly $772 billion. Valuation and GDP measure different things, but the comparison shows the scale of what is being financed.
Gulf investment in computing infrastructure, research and models is an important beginning. The challenge is to extend the capacity to produce intelligence across more of our societies. Owning a stake in someone else’s company can generate returns. It does not automatically develop the expertise to build something comparable ourselves.
We should use excellent technologies wherever they originate. The question is what their use leaves behind. Do students become researchers? Do users become builders? Do universities generate original work alongside qualifications? Does capital reach technically demanding ideas? Do institutions acquire enough knowledge to exercise independent judgement over systems shaping their economies?
These are better measures than application downloads, trading volumes or references to AI in national strategies. A society can look thoroughly modern in what it consumes while possessing little influence over the technologies on which that modernity depends.
This is an institutional challenge, not simply a technological one. Easier access to tools cannot substitute for organisations that support serious enquiry, reward original work and give promising ideas time to develop. The opportunity is not to discard universities and laboratories, but to help more people enter their work of discovery.
The Muslim world cannot sensibly be treated as a single economic system. Its societies have profoundly different institutions, resources and capabilities. The ambition should not be an imagined Islamic Silicon Valley, or replacing one dominant civilisation with another. It should be multiplying the places from which consequential discoveries and companies emerge.
Pakistan belongs within this possibility without needing to become its centre. Our work across digital finance, virtual-asset regulation and emerging technologies should be judged by what remains after the announcements: knowledgeable regulators, stronger research, entrepreneurs building beyond domestic markets and investors capable of assessing difficult technical ideas.
For young Pakistanis, the ambition should be more than becoming sophisticated users. It should be the opportunity to help determine what these technologies become.
Islamic finance shows its significance. Its intellectual tradition examines ownership, risk, contractual responsibility and the relationship between finance and real economic activity. These questions do not disappear when an asset becomes digital or a financial arrangement becomes programmable.
Who bears loss? Who captures gain? What obligations accompany ownership? These are questions for the design of financial systems, not merely their subsequent approval.
Scholars should work with economists, engineers, entrepreneurs and regulators while systems are being developed. Islamic finance can then contribute to their formation, rather than principally deciding how finished products might be adapted. Money is becoming programmable. Whose values will it carry?
The larger principle extends beyond finance. Openness is not the opposite of originality. What separates openness from dependence is what happens after knowledge arrives: whether it remains a finished product to consume or becomes material for experimentation and creation.
Technologies often travel more easily than the expertise accumulated in producing them. Finished software does not reveal every engineering failure preceding it. An imported industrial system does not automatically transfer the knowledge developed through its creation. Deeper transformation begins when knowledge moves in both directions: what arrives is absorbed, questioned and extended until what leaves carries value of its own.
This ambition belongs equally to societies across Africa, Latin America and Asia whose talent needs stronger institutions through which to develop. No part of humanity needs to decline for another to contribute.
Al-Khwarizmi’s legacy endured because his work became useful beyond its origins. The way to honour that inheritance is not to insist that others remember it, but to produce new contributions worthy of travelling as far.
The achievement would not be that the Muslim world had recovered its past. It would be that producing knowledge had once again become one of its ordinary ambitions. We cannot rent that future. We have to build it.
The writer is a minister of state and chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA).
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect Geo.tv’s editorial policy.
Originally published in The News
2026-10-09 09:20:00
