Project Kalima - This Can't Be Making Al-Qaeda Happy

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

The Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage has announced a major project to translate major foreign intellectual works into Arabic. Since many of the works will be drawn from the Western Canon which is where many of the ideas of modern western democracy are derived from I just can't believe this is going to make Al-Qaeda happy.

Wouldn't it be cool if it lead to an Islamic Reformation and an Arabic Enlightenment?

 

The Abu Dhabi-based project, Kalima ("word" in Arabic), aims to publish 100 books in its first year and 500 titles a year by 2010, it announced yesterday.

The first 100 are from 16 languages, including Greek, Japanese, Swedish, Czech, Russian, Chinese, Yiddish, Italian, Norwegian, Latin and ancient Greek. Half the candidate titles are English.

Four years ago the UN's Arab human development report identified a lack of translated foreign works as an issue restricting Arab intellectual life. The UN report noted that Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1,000 years.

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"The rest of the world enjoys a wealth of domestic and translated writing, why should the Arab world be any different?" Karim Nagy, Kalima's Egyptian chief executive, said as the first titles were announced. "We can start putting Arabic readers back in touch with great works of world literature and academia, and begin filling the gaps in the Arabic library."

The selection process is designed to strike a balance between different genres, juxtaposing the works of classic authors with contemporary writers. Academic, business and educational material is also being translated.

Project Kalima Homepage

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"The choices reflect what we consider are the real gaps in the Arab library," said Karim Nagy, the founder and chief executive of the project, which was launched yesterday in Abu Dhabi. "We shy away as far as possible from best-sellers."

The initial list does include Khaled Hosseini's blockbuster about Taliban-era in Afghanistan, The Kite Runner. But far more typical of its scope and focus are canonical classics such as George Eliot's Middlemarch and Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, or influential modern texts like Eric Hobsbawm's The Age Of Extremes and JM Keynes's General Theory Of Employment. There are also scientific masterpieces from the likes of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Richard Feynman. Recent books on the launch list include Lawrence Wright's history of al-Qa'ida and "the road to 9/11", The Looming Tower, and the memoirs of the retired US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan.

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Kalima is endorsed by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, and backed financially by the emirate's authority for culture and heritage. The authority's director-general, Mohammed Khalaf al Mazrouei, said the Crown Prince saw the UN figures and "commissioned us to work to revive translation".

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However, as Mr Nagy admits, Kalima has deep-rooted obstacles to overcome. During the "golden age" of medieval Islamic civilisation, Moorish cities such as Córdoba and Toledo in Spain hosted an Arabic-based culture of exchange and translation that played a crucial part in preserving the Greek legacy of science and thought for western Europe. Following the Renaissance, which Arabic learning did so much to foment, colonial conflict and a breakdown of relations led to a sense of exclusion and estrangement from the West which fuelled Arab nationalism in the modern era.

With the help of literary figures from Isaac Newton to Albert Camus, Thomas Hobbes to Umberto Eco, Kalima aims to bridge this historical gap. Mr Nagy said he wanted to balance "catching up" with classics as yet unreadable in Arabic and "keeping up" with current trends and movements – 70 per cent of the inaugural list consists of books published since 1945.

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The Kalima project's first translations

The Acharnians/The Knights, Aristophanes

The Aeneid, Virgil

A Briefer History of Time, Hawking

The Complete Odes and Epodes, Horace

Greek Anthology, Archilochus, Alcaeus, Anacreon, and Simonides

Helen/Cyclops, Euripides

Poems, Du Fu (Tu Fu)

The Progeny, Sophocles

Galeni Opera Omnia/Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, Galen

Palimpsest, Archimedes

Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragment at Diels, Various

Film Form, Eisenstein

In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno, Horkheimer

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes

Canzoniere, Petrarch

The Complete Essays of Montaigne Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Montaigne

Kokoro, Natsume Soseki

Middlemarch, George Eliot

The New Life, Dante Alighieri

Paradise Regained, Milton

Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke

Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer

Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton

Sidereus Nuncius; Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems; Two New Sciences, Galileo Galilei

The Ethics Of Spinoza: The Road to Inner Freedom, Spinoza

Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Bruno

Leviathan, Hobbes

Logic, Hegel

Logical Investigations, Husserl

Art History: vol. 1, Stokstad

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Lewis

Inside Music, Haas

Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier

A History of Architectural Theory, Kruft

Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, Nęss

The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, Penrose

Godel, Escher, Bach (20th Anniversary Ed), Hofstader

The Age of Extremes, Hobsbawm

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, Greenspan

The Birth of Europe, Le Goff

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, Watson

The Films in My Life, Truffaut

Freud: A Life for Our Times, Gay

Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, Saliba

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Wright

The Struggle for Master of Europe, A J P Taylor

The Anatomy of Revolution, Brinton

Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Friedman

Competitive Strategy, Porter

Kafka on the Shore, Murakami

The Executive in Action: Managing for Results, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Effective Executive, Drucker

The Halo Effect and Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers, Rosenzweig

Making Globalization Work, Stiglitz

The Middle East (Sociology of Developing Societies), Asad

Reading Capital, Althusser, Rancičre

Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, Von Neumann, Morgenstern

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Hoffer

What is Globalization, Beck

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: vol. 1, M T Anderson

The Case for Literature, Gao Xingjian

Collected Stories, Singer

The First Man, Camus

The Higher Power of Lucky, Patron

The Inheritance of Loss, Desai

The Kite Runner, Hosseini

The Pickup, Gordimer

Pipi Longstocking, Lindgren

Selected Poems, Milosz

Something to Answer For, P H Newby

The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner

Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein

The Western Canon, Bloom

The Word, The Text, and The Critic, Edward Said

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Kurzweil

Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature; Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Physics, Niels Bohr

Cellular Automata and Complexity, Wolfram

The Chemical Bond: Structure and Dynamics, Zewail

Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA, Davies

Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature, Weinberg

The Eighth Day of Creation, Judson

Engines of Creation, Drexler

Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, Buss

The Feynman Lectures on Physics including Feynman's Tips on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition, Feynman

In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, Gribbin

On the Meaning of Relativity, Einstein

Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory, Planck

Punctuated Equilibrium, Gould

Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory, Heisenberg

The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Dirac

The Scientist as Rebel, Dyson

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 25th Anniversary Edition, Wilson

Uncertainty: Uncertainty, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science, Lindley

Difference and Repetition, Deleuze

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan

The Future of Human Nature, Habermas

Il Segno, Eco

Margins of Philosophy, Derrida

Charlemagne and Mohammed: The Arab Roots of Capitalism, Heck

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