October 17, 2002	Thursday	Sha'aban 10, 1423

ALEXANDRIA (Egypt), Oct 16: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Wendesday opened the new Alexandria Library, a revival of the ancient beacon of learning, before royals and leaders from around the globe.

“In celebrating today the rebirth of the Alexandria Library, we want to revive the human patrimony in this part of the world,” Mubarak said in his inaugural speech broadcast live on state-run television.

The opening ceremony was held amid drum rolls and eclectic music.

Mubarak called the library “a beacon of knowledge and a meeting center of civilizations,” adding that “cultural dialogue must be a substitute for violence in a world torn by conflict.”

The library’s inauguration was initially planned for last April and postponed because of almost-daily student protests in Cairo, Alexandria and other Egyptian cities in support of the Palestinian uprising against Israel.

Its inauguration comes amid a brewing US-led showdown with Iraq over its alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, a topic discussed earlier here by Mubarak and his guest French President Jacques Chirac.

Chirac as well as Greek President Costis Stephanopoulos were among hundreds of foreign guests in this Mediterranean port city, named after its ancient Greek warrior-founder Alexander the Great.

Others topping the list were Romanian President Ion Iliescu, as well as Queens Sofia of Spain and Rania of Jordan.

Egyptian government newspapers said Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri had been expected, but Beirut said he was busy with a cabinet meeting ahead of a summit of French-speaking nations at home.

Writers, poets, historians and intellectuals from around the globe, including 14 Nobel laureates of various fields, were here.

Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1986 and a member of the library’s board of trustees, also hoped the ancient glory days would return.

“Let it provide solace for much that has been lost, destroyed and pillaged. Let it serve as inspiration for the flowering that is yet to come,” Soyinka said in his speech.

The 225-million-dollar library’s Norwegian architects Snohetta and Austrian-born colleague Christoph Kapeller have drawn inspiration for their design from the great ideas bubbling on Alexandria’s shores two millennia ago.

Standing out from the shabby modern apartment blocks around it, the dazzling glass and concrete library looks like a solar disc — an ancient symbol of knowledge — tilting toward the Mediterranean Sea.

Abandoning part of its ambition to become a new world beacon of culture, as was the ancient one, the aim of the establishment has been scaled down over the years to serve mainly Egyptians.

Around 240,000 volumes are already stocked in the library, far short of the eight million eventually planned.

But Egypt wants the complex to reflect the spirit of the ancient library, which held more than 700,000 catalogued volumes in its heyday in the centuries after Alexander the Great founded the city in 332 BC.

Nahed Ismail, an official at the library’s press center, said the library would allow all books to fill its shelves, though critics charge it is hypocritical to keep everything inside the library but not outside, where there is still censorship.

The new library is financed by Egypt, dozens of other countries — almost all of them Arab and European — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, and by the UN Development Program.

The old library is believed to have been hit by several blazes — one of them during Julius Caesar’s siege of Alexandria in 48 BC — before the first major public reading place in history was finally burnt down around 1,600 years ago.

With these accounts in mind, the architects have tried to protect the building with state-of-the-art sprinklers, giant smoke curtains, and detection systems as well as a design that contains natural firewalls.

Schoolchildren, students and civil servants in Alexandria have been given a holiday from Tuesday to Thursday, to allow them to participate in the festivities, which are protected by an increased police presence.—AFP