Prince Turki Al-Faisal is the co-founder and trustee of the King Faisal Foundation and currently serves as chairman of the Center for Research and Islamic Studies, which is one of the foundation’s institutions.

Prince Turki is the former director-general of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, a position he held between 1977 and 2001.

In October 2002 he was appointed as the Kingdom’s ambassador to the UK and the Republic of Ireland. He became Saudi ambassador to the US in 2005. 

Prince Turki is a trustee of the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford in the UK, and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in the US. 

Prince Turki received his high school diploma at The Lawrenceville School, New Jersey, in the US, and has a bachelor’s degree from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he studied alongside former American president, Bill Clinton. 

He also studied at Princeton, University of Cambridge, and the University of London, where he attended courses in Islamic law and jurisprudence.

Prince Turki spoke on Tuesday at the Misk Media Forum in Riyadh about diplomacy in the era of new media.

He said that government ministries of information no longer serve any purpose in the Arab world and should be abolished.

“In the era we currently live in, anyone can report the news simply by using their cellphone. I would hope that people who work to do so would always be honest about it, but I believe that information ministries no longer have a purpose.”