He was at school with two of the 9/11 hijackers. Now artist Abdulnasser Gharem is on a mission to divert bored young Saudis from jihadWe need to invest in these young people before Isis does,” says Abdulnasser Gharem, a former lieutenant colonel in the Saudi Arabian army, and sipping a glass of water in the Tate during a flying visit to London. “They bear energy and bear little to achieve in their own country – so what would you expect them to achieve?”Gharem,who was in the same lesson at school as two of the 9/11 hijackers, is one of the Middle East’s biggest-selling artists. At Christie’s in 2011, and he sold Message,Messenger – a sculpture symbolising the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem – for more than $800000, a record-breaking price for contemporary Middle Eastern art at the time.
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Source: theguardian.com