Mr. Sami Abdullah Almaqlouth
King Faisal Prize in Service to Islam 2025 Laureate
Sami Almaghlouth memorized the Holy Quran and earned a bachelor’s degree in education with a specialization in History and Geography, graduating with second-class honors from King Faisal University in 1988. He worked in public education for three decades and is currently serving as a consultant in the Atlas Department at the General Authority for Survey and Geospatial Information.
He was assigned to work in the Ministry of Education’s Agency for Educational Development and was also assigned to establish (The Electronic Encyclopedia of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), implemented by the General Administration of Educational Technologies at the ministry. He served as a member of the Social Sciences Curriculum Development Team for the Comprehensive Curriculum Development Project at the Ministry of Education and was appointed as a supervisor for the technical support and instructional design for the project. Additionally, he was a member of the team which authored the (Geographic School Atlases) for the Ministry of Higher Education.
Mr. Almaghlouth was entrusted with several projects for various organizations, most notably: editing the Atlas of the History of Islamic Preachment document for the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and Endowments; developing a document on incorporating tourism and archaeological concepts into educational curricula for the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage; and reviewing geographic names on Al-Ahsa Governorate maps and annotating historical names for the Civil Survey Authority. He was appointed as the director of the Illustrated Atlas Project for Tourism and Antiquities Education, executed by the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage. Recently, he was assigned with developing a concept document for a jurisprudence Atlas for the Saudi Jurisprudence Association, in addition to having prepared a concept document for the Arabic Language Atlas for the King Salman Global Academy for Arabic Language.
He also served as an Imam and preacher for more than seventeen years at a grand mosque in Al-Ahsa Governorate.
Among his notable works include the Atlas of Places in the Holy Quran, the Atlas of Prophets and Messengers, the Atlas of Islamic Sects and schools of thought, the Atlas of Scholars of Hadith, the Atlas of Scholars of Tafseer, the Atlas of Modern World History (from the European Renaissance to the end of World War II), and the Atlas of the Ten Quranic Reciters and their Twenty Narrators.
He has received several awards, including the Saudi Author Award from the Saudi Publishers Association in 2015, and was honored as a pioneer of historical atlases in the Arab world at the Al-Ahsa Literary Club in 2017.