3 - 9 May 2001
Issue No.532
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 3 - 9 May 2001 Issue No.532 |
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Web watch
One step forward
Commentators on recent developments in the field of information technology often speculate on its effects on traditional learning and scholarship. Will learning as we now know it cease? The new Web site Alwaraq (www.alwaraq.com) begs to differ.
Powered by a company in the United Arab Emirates, Alwaraq (literally, the paper man, or, the stationery man) boasts a million pages from the corpus of Arab Muslim heritage -- and for free. You can simply surf through major works in a wide array of subjects including Arabic literature, grammar, poetry, Qur'anic sciences, fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), tafsir (Qur'anic interpretation), Sufism, history, geography, biographies, philosophy, medicine and even the interpretation of dreams. Even more exciting is the site's search engine. Type a name, word or term and the browser will lead you to texts in which to find the search item. A side bar offering a list of contents allows you to simply click on the entry or chapter you're interested in. A researcher's dream come true, this site!
The main and home pages are readable with any browser, but to be able to read the texts themselves you need Windows with Arabic support. If you don't have Arabic on your computer, the site gives step-by-step instructions on how to download and install it. A note of warning: this may not be as simple as it seems, but once installed, you can browse many other sites in Arabic as well.
Alwaraq claims to continually add more works on the site. It is not clear what the factors behind choosing and prioritising texts are. There is obviously a desire to include the classics, such as Al-Asfahani's Al-Aghani, Al-Jahiz's Al-Bukhala' and Ibn Arabi's Al-Futuhat Al-Makiyya, for example. The site is also broad enough to include works such as Alf Layla wa Layla and Ibn Sirin's Tafsir Al-Ahlam. There is also an attempt to include titles that might not be readily available in printed format. Where an author is renowned for more than one work, however, it is not clear what criteria are used for choosing which texts to place online. So, for example, my current obsession, the Egyptian historian Al-Maqrizi, has only one work, Tarikh Al-A'imma, on the site, His other equally famous works Al-Khitat and Al-Suluk are skipped.
Unlike the printed versions of these titles, texts here are not edited, so the reader is denied the informative introductions, footnotes and glossaries that accompany standard editions of the classics. There is also no indication as to the source of the edition available online, much less the original manuscript it is based on. This makes it slightly difficult to check quotations against standard editions and, hence, to cite them.
Alwaraq is an example of how modern Internet technology can enhance traditional scholarship, but prior knowledge of classic texts and the fundamentals of scholarship is necessary to be able to make use of it.
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