Our Heritage & Founder
His Excellency Ambassador Dr. Moosa bin Jaafar bin Hassan
1950 – 2020 · Founder of Al Ghafa
A man who spent his life building bridges between nations.
A man who spent his life building bridges between nations.
Born in 1950 into a prominent merchant family of Mutrah — Oman's historic maritime gateway, from which Omani traders set out across the Indian Ocean for centuries. He became the first francophone Omani, and the first Omani to earn a doctorate from the Sorbonne, in law, with the highest honours.
Oman's longest-serving Ambassador and, for thirty-five years, the doyen des ambassadeurs in Paris. President of the 33rd UNESCO General Conference (2005), and across his career President of the Arab Group, the Headquarters Committee and the Group of 77.
To be elected President of the General Conference of UNESCO is to be chosen, by the gathered member states of the world, to preside over the whole assembly — the highest deliberative body of the organisation. It is an office conferred rarely, and seldom upon the same figure twice.
Those who have held it form a remarkable lineage. Léon Blum — three times Prime Minister of France — presided over the inaugural General Conference in Paris in 1946. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher who would become President of India, took the chair in 1952. Anwar Ibrahim, today Prime Minister of Malaysia, presided in 1989.
In 2005, the assembled nations elected to that same chair His Excellency Ambassador Moosa bin Jaafar bin Hassan of the Sultanate of Oman — President of the 33rd General Conference. To occupy the office once held by Blum and Radhakrishnan is to belong to the small circle entrusted, in their hour, with the conscience of nations.
Author of the first study of Omani administrative law, and of a book whose title was the philosophy of his life: Dialogue: A Path to Love. To listen to him, an Arab daily wrote, was to follow an idea “from a noble hadith, to Umberto Eco, to the Buddha, to al-Mutanabbi or Shakespeare — never forgetting an Omani proverb.”
“From the Omani sailors who established their trading posts across the entire Indian Ocean, you have surely inherited that traveller's spirit. Your career perfectly illustrates that openness to the other which defines the great servants of Culture.”
Frédéric Mitterrand, French Minister of Culture, 2008 — calling him “among the noblest artisans of our shared universal culture.”
When he stepped down from the UNESCO podium — “Here I am today, an ordinary man… I come to return what was entrusted to me, so that another may take it forward.” Today his son, Salem Moosa Jaafar Hassan, leads the company he built. His Excellency passed away in Paris in 2020; his legacy is the company that carries his values.
