November 3, 2002

“A LIBRARY is not just a receptacle to store information, but reflects a societal need for a certain level of information. The need arises when society reaches a stage of cultural maturity that can only be sustained and developed through a symbiotic relationship with the available information on the basis of which knowledge is built.”

This is how the author of an article “Alexandria library, a true successor of its ancient namesake,” in Arab News (arabnews.com) welcomes the opening of the great Alexandria Library - officially baptized as Bibliotheca Alexandrina recently. The new, huge, postmodern structure, resembling “a gigantic discus embedded in the ground at an angle, is intended to represent a second sun rising beside the Mediterranean.”

The idea takes an obvious inspiration from the Great Library of the city said to be founded by Alexander in the 3rd century BC, and is considered “an ambitious attempt to recreate a glorious chapter in Egypt’s history as the cultural capital of the world”. The Great Library, “acclaimed as the greatest of all classical institutions” is said to have had close to half a million texts.

“The ancient Alexandria library was not only a storehouse housing manuscripts gathered throughout ancient times, from 400 BC to 300 AD, it was the intellectual centre of Hellenistic culture. The port of Alexandria was a favoured destination for ships from all over the civilized world. The authorities would visit the ships, borrow whatever documents or manuscripts they carried, copy the data they contained by hand and give the original texts back. The library thus accumulated all available information that could be accessed at the time and scholars flocked to work on the manuscripts collected from all parts of the then known world... Nobody knows exactly when or how the Alexandria library disappeared, although it is commonly believed to have been burnt down.

“The Alexandria library had a specific function, which was to collect, classify (its catalogues were among the earliest examples of bibliography) and preserve human knowledge, culture and civilization in a variety of fields and guarantee their transmission to future generations. Painstakingly copied out on parchment, the library’s collection of volumes was necessarily limited in number and vulnerable to fire and other natural — or man-made — disasters. This is in fact what happened to the Alexandria library, which disappeared completely, its invaluable collection of volumes irretrievably lost.”

This was a great setback to the human civilization and a great effort was needed to restore the knowledge lost by the library’s destruction. This great effort was the contribution of Muslims who made their own valuable contribution to human knowledge. However, the course of history changed with the invention of the printing press in 1434 in Germany, providing the impetus for the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. With paper relacing parchment, knowledge became accessible to common people and ceased to be a jealously guarded preserve of the elite. With these radical developments the civilization’s centre of gravity too shifted to Europe.

The institution of the library underwent a fundamental change in the post-Gutenberg world as it was no longer meant to be a place to preserve and display a collection of rare manuscripts but an instrument for the propagation of knowledge. According to the Arab News commentator, it is going to take the next leap in the future.

“The time has come,” he says, “ to launch the interactive book of the communication age, which will not have one specific author only, but will be constantly enriched by new contributions all the time. All the ingredients for such a book already exist. Stored in a computer’s memory, its paper format is only a moment in its indefinite development, the moment where the book is available to be read, but which will never be its definitive form. Books of this kind will never suffer the fate of the volumes housed in the ancient Alexandria library.”

However, one wonders if it is not asking too much of a country apparently more concerned with adding another to its long list of tourist attractions than furthering the human civilization to a higher plane. Interestingly, the article mentions Israel as “the first and foremost challenge” this undertaking has to face. Now, apart from the political and security threat represented by the state of Israel, this small country produces more PhDs per year than all the countries with a Muslim majority population put together. If a library “reflects a societal need for a certain level of information” a semi-literate nation like Egypt hardly seems the place suitable for this kind of undertaking.

“The fulfilment of the task,” the author observes, “requires nothing less than a cultural revolution, which in turn requires the eradication of illiteracy, not only of the classical, established, type of illiteracy, namely, the inability to read and write, but also present-day illiteracy, that is, computer-illiteracy.”

However, the official projects, named significantly the “Revival of the ancient library of Alexandrina project”, as mentioned on the website of Bibliotheca Alexandrina (http://www.alexandria.lib.va.us/) reflects a concern with the past more than the future. The introduction begins with noting that “the international community has taken the first step towards effacing the disaster caused by the fire that burned down the old library, more than 1600 years ago, by supporting” the project.

Another commentator, Mark K. Anderson, in his article “Raising Alexandria library” available at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,52028,00.html describes how the celebrity plans for the opening of the “$200 million facility that will house as many as eight million books” were abandoned in favour of a quieter inauguration. “Also coming online was the library’s website, which offers an Internet archive of 10 billion Web pages, as well as a library of American and Egyptian television and movies.

“The original library of Alexandria housed 500,000 scrolls, which made it a center of culture and scholarship from the third century BC into the early Christian era. The modern Bibliotheca aims for similar stature as a global hub of information.

“Historians quibble over details of the original library’s demise. Various researchers claim that Julius Caesar burned it in 48 BC, that Augustus Caesar destroyed it in his pursuit of Mark Antony, that early Christian monks burned it in 391, that Muslim zealots decimated it in 642. In short, the place was doomed. It contained too much knowledge that offended too many people.”

In an email interview with Anderson, Brewster Kahle, founder of Internet Archive, San Francisco, declared: “We are donating a subset of our collections to help the Bibliotheca Alexandrina start their digital library.”

The Bibliotheca’s “offline holdings” are more focused on specialties. Mohammed M. Aman, of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies, has crafted the library’s acquisition policy. As the Mediterranean is one of the most polluted bodies of water in the area, so efforts are being made at building a good collection on global environmental protection. Other areas of specialization include Egyptian history and culture, comparative religion, a history of science and Mediterranean civilizations and women’s studies. “We have honoured women who have been pioneers, from mathematicians to queens and rulers of civilizations, like Cleopatra and Nefertiti,” Aman told Anderson.

Aman noted that, since the Bibliotheca was first conceived in the 1980s, its primary champion has been the First Lady of Egypt, Suzanne Mubarak, wife of president Hosni Mubarak. Indeed, Anderson says, “the library has come under fire for being her pet project, siphoning away money from Egypt’s social programmes to fund an institution for the country’s elite.”

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