WATANI International
8 August 2010
Two events at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina stress…
Nobel Laureate Ahmed Zuwail, who was guest of honour at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) for the recent official opening ceremony of the Science Age Association (SAS), stressed that there was no contradiction between science and religion. “It is not proper to use religion as a means to block the mind,” Dr Zuwail said as he delivered a lecture on “The Age of Science and the Future”.
The gathering was chaired by Essam Sharaf, head of the board of the new organisation, who is also professor of highway engineering at Cairo University and a former minister of transport. The event was attended by Hani Hilal, minister of higher education and scientific research; Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League; and an élite company of scientists, researchers, students and media figures.
Dr Zuweil, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1999, is honorary president of the SAS. He told the audience that he would shortly be publishing his scientific research on scanning cells by means of 4-D technology using an advanced electronic microscope. The new technology, Dr Zuwail said, would open a new scientific field which in turn would lead to a total change in medical procedures within 10 or 20 years.
Dr Sharaf said the non-profit society aims to introduce science and vital scientific knowledge, facilitating necessary interaction between Egyptian scientists at home and abroad and encouraging distinguished young scientists to conduct research.
Dr Zuwail is one of the three distinguished American scientists nominated by President Barack Obama as envoys to the Muslim world.
The Thousand and One Nights
Another recent gathering held at the BA welcomed Ahmed Megahed, president of the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces, Zakariya Anani, chair of the Alexandrian Writers’ Union, and the writer Mounir Otieba.
Dr Megahed used the seminar to demand that people do not assign themselves as supervisors over others in the name of religion. He stressed that the case taken to court by some lawyers against the reprinting of Alf Leila wa Leila (The Thousand and One Nights) was mainly political and not literary, and applauded the court resolution in favour of reprinting the book. He also said he was happy with the attitude of the public, which he described as positively in favour of the book, and claimed was a good sign.
The seminar discussed the impact of the case on Arab and world literature and the wave of criticism and censorship it unleashed.
The Nights, as the book is fondly termed in Arabic, is held to be one of the most illustrious of heritage Arabic texts in existence. The first Arabic edition printed in Egypt of these oral tales (known as the Boulaq or Cairo edition) was revised by an Azhari scholar and issued in 1835. A hundred and sixty years later, in 1985, Dr Megahed said, it was ruled that the book be banned, but this ruling was overturned on appeal and since then none of the contents have been treated to the blue pencil.
“We are working according to the agenda of the Egyptian people, not upon some religious streams,” Dr Megahed noted.
Heritage
The Thousand and One Nights is a collection of tales from the Middle East and South Asia and was compiled in Arabic during the Golden Age of Islam. It is often known in English as The Arabian Nights, from the first English language edition in 1706 which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights## Entertainment.
The work as we have it today was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars across the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. The roots of the tales themselves can be traced back to ancient and mediaeval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature.
Some of the best-known stories of in the Nights, are “Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”. Genuine Middle-Eastern folk tales, were almost certainly not part of the Nights in Arabic versions, but were interpolated into the collection by Antoine Galland and other European translators.
The first European version (1704 – 1717) was translated into French by Antoine Galland from an Arabic text of the Syrian recension, or compilation version, and other sources. This 12-volume book, Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français (The Thousand and One Nights, Arab stories translated into French), included stories that were not in the original Arabic manuscript.