Abdul Karim Almohamad

Saudi Arabian inventor who developed the first Arabic-language computer software

Abdul Karim Almohamad (1940–2020) was a visionary Saudi Arabian engineer whose 1973 invention of the Al-Arabi software system broke linguistic barriers in computing. Born in Riyadh during a time when Arabic was excluded from global technology, he earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford University (1968), the first Arab student to do so. His breakthrough came with the creation of the first Arabic word processor and font encoding system, enabling Arabic text display on computers.

Almohamad's Arabic Computing Standards (1975) became the foundation for Unicode's Arabic script implementation. He developed the first Arabic-language operating system kernel (1980) and co-founded Almohamad Technology Institute, which trained over 2,000 Arab software engineers. His work was critical in the Arabization of telecommunications systems across the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

Despite facing resistance from Western tech giants, his innovations are embedded in modern devices like the Microsoft Arabic OS and Google's Arabic NLP tools. Almohamad received the UNESCO-ITC Prize (1997) and his legacy is preserved in the Riyadh Technology Heritage Museum. His 1985 book Computing in Arabic Script remains a foundational text in global computing history.