RIYADH: Former Tanzanian President Ali Hassan Mwinyi and the Egyptian academic Prof. Hassan Mahmoud Al-Shafei were named on Wednesday as joint winners of the 2022 King Faisal Prize for outstanding services to Islam.

Mwinyi, 96, was the second president of the United Republic of Tanzania from 1985 to 1995, and lives in Dar es Salaam. Al-Shafei is professor of Islamic philosophy at the University of Cairo, and president of the Islamic University in Islamabad.  

The two men were among seven winners in four categories announced at a ceremony in Riyadh. The awards are the most prestigious in the Muslim world.

The prize for Arabic language and literature was awarded jointly to Prof. Suzanne Stetkevych, a specialist in classical Arabic poetry at Georgetown University in the US, and Prof. Muhsin Al-Musawi, a literary critic, scholar, and professor of Arabic literature and cultural studies at Columbia University, also in the US.

Prof. David Ruchien Liu, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University and MIT, was honored in the medicine category.

The prize for science was awarded jointly to Prof. Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British mathematician and professor of mathematics at Imperial College London, and Prof. Nader Masmoudi, a Tunisian mathematician at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

The King Faisal Prize was established in 1977. Since then, 275 recipients from 43 countries have been honored, of whom 21 have gone on to win a Nobel Prize. This year’s awards will be presented at a ceremony later in the year.