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.
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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, Næss
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, Rancière
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
Books, Western Canon, Arab, Islam, Al Qaeda, Project Kalima
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