"The spirit of the Knowledge Society is the spirit of Pluralism - a readiness to accept the Other, indeed to learn from him, to see difference as an opportunity rather than a threat. Such a spirit must be rooted, I believe, in a sense of humility before the Divine, realizing that none of us have all the answers, and respecting the broad variety of God's creation and the diversity of the Human Family.

As the Ummah moves into the Knowledge Society, a variety of questions and choices will arise. And this brings us back to where we started. For my singular goal for the Aga Khan University, the University of Central Asia, and related institutions is that they should play a central role in addressing those questions and in guiding those choices.

Priority setting will be a particularly important challenge. One of the problems of the Knowledge Society is that it produces too much information. I recall President Nixon acknowledging publicly more than 30 years ago his dismay at the sheer volume of information that the President was expected to absorb daily. In such a world we can easily lose track of the forest by seeing only the trees. As a poet lamented: "Where is the Wisdom we have lost in Knowledge. Where is the Knowledge we have lost in Information?" As we work our way back again from Information to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Wisdom, a rigorous sense of priorities will be a central requirement."