Soha Rashed ‘Rethinking Foresight Through an Arab Lens’

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features Soha Rashed, founder of the Arab Futures Society and a research fellow at the Carboun Institute.

We spoke about the development of futures thinking across the Arab world and why the global foresight community needs to embrace a wider range of cultural perspectives.

Soha describes her journey into futures studies, from studying at the Turku School of Economics in Finland to working with UNDP's global horizon-scanning network. Meeting Arab futurists internationally led her to recognise that foresight activity across the region was far richer than she had initially assumed, but often fragmented and difficult to discover. This inspired the creation of the Arab Futures Society, which aims to connect practitioners, make Arabic futures literature and terminology more accessible, and build upon existing knowledge rather than repeatedly ‘starting from scratch’.

A central theme she described is the need to challenge the idea that futures thinking is principally a Western intellectual tradition. Soha discusses historical examples of long-term thinking within Islamic societies and makes an important distinction between Arab foresight and Islamic foresight. She is particularly interested in how Arab cultural perspectives, language, religion and concepts of time might influence distinctive ways of thinking about futures. 

This feeds into a broader discussion about decolonising futures. For Soha, generating several scenarios through a single worldview does not fully deliver the plurality implied by ‘futures’. The discipline becomes richer when African, Arab, Latin American, Asian-Pacific and other perspectives contribute their own frameworks and assumptions…