Abdullah, Mohamed Morsi (محمد مرسي عبدالله)

Mohamed Morsi Abdullah (December 18, 1929 - October 4, 2005; محمد مرسي عبد الله) was an Egyptian-Emirati historian and cartographer who was one of the earliest social scientists in the United Arab Emirates. He was born in Beni Suef, Egypt to a middle-class family, with his father serving as a police officer and later a government administrator and his mother coming from an esteemed family that was descended from the Prophet Mohammed (thus Abdullah was sometimes known as Sharif Mohamed Morsi Abdullah). Abdullah enrolled at Cairo University as an engineer, but soon switched to the liberal arts, focusing on history. After graduation, he worked in the tourism sector and as a teacher in several countries, eventually becoming a high school principal in Doha, Qatar. Abdullah became convinced that Arabs needed to write their own history rather than leave the task to Western historians, and thus he earned a master's degree in at the University of Cairo in 1965 with a thesis on Saudi-Omani relations, utilizing British, French, and Ottoman archives. Due to his expertise on international relations on the Arabian Peninsula, he was recruited to work in a Documents and Research Bureau (مكتب الوثائق والدراسات, forerunner to the U.A.E. National Archives), where he prepared the first official maps of Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates. Abdullah was encouraged by Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the ruled of Abu Dhabi and the first President of the United Arab Emirates, to pursue a doctoral degree at the University of Cambridge, which he completed in 1975. Soon before completing his degree, Abdullah was appointed the Director General of the Documents and Research Bureau, a position he held until 1999. Abdullah was an active historian who published several books on the history and foreign relations of the United Arab Emirates and Abu Dhabi specifically.