Issue No. 609
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24 - 30 October 2002 Issue No. 609 Home news |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Long road to success
Presidents and royalty gathered last Wednesday as Egypt inaugurated the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the end result of more than a quarter century of planning and hard work by its champions. Dahlia Hammouda reports
It was a proud moment for Egyptians. As 3,000 dignitaries from all over the world flocked in to Alexandria to attend the reopening ceremonials of one of the world's first and most celebrated centres of learning -- the Library of Alexandria -- the city's inhabitants were dancing in the streets near the library with jubilation.
Click to view captionphoto: Sherif Sonbol President Hosni Mubarak, Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, French President Jacques Chirac, Queen Sofia of Spain, Queen Rania of Jordan, Greek President Costis Stephanopoulos and Italian President Carlo Ciampi, attended the lavish ceremony held in the Great Reading Hall of the new library to mark the facility's formal opening on 16 October. Designed to succeed one of the ancient world's great intellectual marvels, it took almost three decades and $225 million dollars to bring the Bibliotheca Alexandrina back to life.
A massive accomplishment by all measures, the project -- which drew financial and logistical support from around the world -- was planned for, overseen and pushed forward by Mrs Mubarak, its prime advocate. She received an award at the opening to honour her for being the driving force behind the project and for charting the course for its continuing development.
It was a long journey that brought the library to its completion. The brainchild of Alexandria University, the idea of reviving the ancient library was launched in the early 1980s. The university allocated the land and established the conference centre at a distinguished site near El-Silsilah, believed by scholars to be the same site where the ancient library once stood. In 1987, UNESCO issued an appeal to the international community to support the library and the Norwegian company, Snohetta, won the architectural competition to design it.
The real spark for the beginning of the project was the day when royalty, heads of state and other dignitaries met in Aswan at the invitation of President Mubarak, and the Aswan Declaration was signed in February 1990. The declaration called on governments, institutions and individuals to support the project and created an international committee, chaired by Mrs Mubarak, to oversee its completion. From then on, the international community's response was overwhelming.
Arab countries took the initiative of financially supporting the project, and foreign nations soon followed suit. In May 1995, the construction of the main library building began and was executed by the Arab Contractors, with the participation of Italian and British construction companies.
To implement Mrs Mubarak's ambitious vision for the library -- that it should be "a beacon for science and knowledge, a centre for dialogue between peoples and nations, a centre of excellence in research and documentation and a source of pride for Egypt and the entire world -- a unique legislative framework had to be created for the library to operate under. Law No 1 for 2001 made the library an autonomous entity under the direct jurisdiction of the president. A presidential decree created two bodies responsible for the library: a council of patrons, chaired by the president himself, and a board of trustees, chaired by Mrs Mubarak; that is in addition to the position of director, which Ismail Serageddin was appointed to.
The council of patrons includes several heads of state and a number of eminent personalities, among who are President Chirac and Queen Sofia. The board of trustees is composed of a group of renowned persons from throughout the world, in addition to five official members -- the ministers of higher education, foreign affairs, culture, the governor of Alexandria and the president of Alexandria University. With Mrs Mubarak at its head, the board of trustees is the decision-making power on the matters of the library and is responsible for defining its general policies, for the administration and planning of its activities and for the establishment of its administrative and financial regulations.
The opening of the library could not have been better timed. Amid a general feeling in the Arab world that it is under siege by the West, the institution's mission, as stated by its director, to be a place of dialogue, rationality and freedom for all the cultures of the world shows Egypt's openness to the West and contribution to world culture.
At the event marking the library's "soft opening" last October, Mrs Mubarak stressed the need for such institutions in these difficult times -- institutions that can bring people together in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding and encourage cultures to meet and connect, rather than remaining distant or meeting in conflict. "The library will be Egypt's window on the world and the world's window on Egypt," she said. "It is an openness that we desperately need at this time, especially after the tragic events the world has recently witnessed."
Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 and is a member of the library's board of trustees, sent a message read out at the opening saying that as conflicts increase every day, the new library has "a noble human message of peace that is more important than the message of the ancient one".
The day after the opening, Mrs Mubarak accompanied her foreign guests, including Queen Sofia, on a long tour of the various spaces and exhibitions housed in the 11-storey, 85,405 square-metre cultural complex. The remarkable, space-age edifice, shaped like a circle tilted towards the sea, representing a perpetually rising sun shedding the rays of enlightenment upon the world, houses a vast conference centre, museum space and a planetarium. Mrs Mubarak and her guests visited the children's library, the young people's library, the planetarium, Demetrius' statue, the calligraphy museum, the science museum, the archaeological museum and the digital archive that includes 10 billion Web pages dating back to 1996.
The library -- which has a capacity for four million books -- now houses some 240,000 volumes and is relying on developments in information technology to build up a collection from scratch to rival the world's major libraries. Many of the books and valuables at the library have been donated by individuals and companies working with the Friends of the Alexandria Library societies, which number 19 worldwide.
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