>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Good afternoon and welcome to the Library of Congress.
I am John Von Oudenaren,
the director of the World Digital Library, which is a project
that the Library of Alexandria
and Dr. Sir Edgar Dean are both heavily involved.
I'm here to welcome you and to turn the floor over to our leader,
Dr. Billington, who will introduce our speaker.
[ Pause ]
>> It is a great honor and pleasure to second the welcome
and to particularly welcome our distinguished speaker.
He is a man of extraordinary accomplishment
and versatility and experience.
He was a graduate of the University of Cairo, doctorate of Harvard,
he's had a multiply interesting career as vice president of,
I think, in sustainable and environmental policy
at the World Bank, also special projects there.
He's been involved in agriculture of water development
on a global basis heading
out important international groups dealing with both of those.
But today, we are having-- he will talk in the evening again.
He's-- about the whole digital revolution, its implications.
He was the key note speaker at the first world Summit
of the Book articulated the values of the book culture very beautifully
in December here at the library and he's played a important role
in the World Digital Library and in the conceptualization
of what the new digital revolution is doing,
can do and he is helping us in a very central way
with this international project, which is also a municipal project.
Now today he's going to talk about that which has been--
he has been doing so to speak more recently in the 21st century along
with so many other things, and that is the rebirth of the Library
of Alexandria, which is of course the great universal library
of the classical antiquity in which he has made it quite dramatically.
There's been a book about the events, the relationship if you
like of the so called Arab Spring to and the special role here
and interesting one of the Library of Alexandria
because it's called hands around the library protecting agent's
treasured books.
And I'll just show you some of the pictures if you can see them.
I'm not giving the lecture, but I think it's worth--
when the protestors were coursing around the streets of Alexandria,
they were met by our speaker today, who is depicted here as the--
who is explaining to them that the new Library of Alexandria,
which is a beautiful building by the way, in which all kinds
of inventive things take place which he will I'm sure tell us about.
They were met by the director who did this.
Here he is.   They were protecting.
I think many of them weren't sure what they were protesting
but the head of the Library of Alexandria said,
you have no legitimate protect against what we're doing here,
but it's a glass building, it's very vulnerable and so forth.
So what happened?
Well, he joined hands with the young people of Alexandria,
explained to them that this isn't something they could possibly have
as a target for whatever their concerns and questions might be.
So here he is again joining hands and it was a very remarkable thing
because this very large building was surrounded by joined hands
of all these young people who were part of that whole event.
And so-- and there they are again.
It was an amazing phenomenon, joined hands, hands around the library.
So without my attempting to expatiate more but simply
to tell you that we're in the presence of someone who is--
if anyone has ever played a role in defending libraries,
articulating what they're all about and is good enough to come to us
through the false alarms of snow to be with us for this occasion,
ladies and gentlemen, hoping you will come back again this evening
to hear him talk about the digital revolution
which he explains [inaudible] part cooperatively with us
in this World Digital Library, but now to hear the story,
the library story, one of the great ones of our time and one
of the great leaders and innovators who bring such richness, 50 books,
many honorary degrees to the business of librarianship,
ladies and gentlemen, its director, its founder,
its reviver, Dr. Ismail Serageldin.   [ Applause ]
>> Thank you so much, Dr. Billington,
and thank you all for being here.
It's a great, great honor for me to be back in the greatest library
in the world today, the Library of Congress.
And my good friend, Jim Billington, and other colleagues whom I see here
and with whom I've had the pleasure of working
on a number of important projects.
I hope we have-- yes, I hope everybody can see the--
the slides because-- now, fasten your seatbelt.
I'm going to take you on a wild ride through over 2,300 years of history.
And I want to start first of all about what the ancient Library
of Alexandria was all about and because really it was not a library.
It was much more than that and how we're evolving and how we tried
to recapture that for the present.
And then I will tell you something about the revolution which have been
so nicely captured in the book for children by Susan Roth [phonetic]
and Karen [inaudible] and that Jim was kind enough to show you.
So to start our story, the ancient library,
and every time you will see a red slide like that, it's a new chapter
and you know I'm getting closer to the end so don't worry.
We'll keep going.
My story starts with Alexander the Great and just
to remind you how recent that is for Egypt, 2,300 years ago,
the distance in time between Alexander and the builders
of the great pyramid is greater than the distance in time
between Alexander and us.
So that's the depth that Egypt represents.
Alexander was not just the greatest conquer, he was also a student
of Aristotle, and I've always wondered what it would be
like to be personally mentored by Aristotle.
Can you imagine?   This guy was mentored by Aristotle.
Anyway, so he had an interest in a great cultural project
and that was his empire, that we all know,
and he brought together the various cultures of the world, the Greek
and the Egyptian and the Asian together.
After his death, his empire was divided and the part
that was Egypt became [inaudible] Egypt and Ptolemy [phonetic]
as a fellow student in the tutoring of Aristotle took over
and implemented the creation of the City of Alexander.
Because Alexander just came and selected the site, but actually,
the city was built later one.
And it was in that city that the story begins and it's all
about women, remarkable women.
Let me start out first of all that one was Queen [inaudible] the first,
who was the second wife of Ptolemy the first and she convinced him
to put her son as his successor and her son, Ptolemy the second,
would rule for 42 years and give an enormous push,
made the library his personal project after that.
So that was a good thing.
Everybody who came to Ancient Alexandria considered it a marvel.
There were two marvels, one was the Pharos, the lighthouse,
and the other was the library.   Now what was the library?
Well actually, it was not a library.   That's the first.
The library, we don't know exactly how it looks.
This was a reconstruction by Carl Sagan for Cosmos.
We know that it had columns, it had beams, it had scrolls,
there were living quarters, there was a botanical garden,
a zoological garden and the section room.
And the reason that it was so strange, this is another image
of the library reconstructed,
that was because a guy called [inaudible], convinced Polomy
that the way-- if you really want Alexandria to be great, marbles
and temples are fine, but you need to get the greatest minds
in the world and then give them nothing to do.
And he was not wrong.   In fact, that's what the Institute
of Advanced Studies at Princeton does.
You get the greatest minds in the world and let them do their thing.
They either teach or they study or they do what they do.
And they produced an explosion of knowledge unlike anything we know.
So we don't know what it looked like, but this is a celebratory coin
and take a look at the capital here because you will see it in a moment.
This is the guy, [inaudible] of Faleron [phonetic],
who had ruled Athens, as Tyrant of Athens.
Tyrant was a title.
Remember Archemedius worked for the Tyrant of Syracuse, was the title,
didn't have the connotation we had, but he had just been ousted
after ten years and he was kind of in between jobs so Ptolemy got him
as an advisor and he's the one who told him to create that
and they told, what are we going to do it.
And they said, a temple to the muses and it was known
as the Muzeon [phonetic] in Latin or Greek or the museum in Latin,
museum, not in the modern connotation.
And it had all those things attached plus a library
and the library grew and grew and grew.
And the name of the library came to encompass everything.
So this whole complex, which was part academy,
part research institute, part library and part teaching facility,
were in fact under the ages of Ptolemy the II,
which thanks to his mother succeeded Ptolemy the first, he had a big push
and there was also an enormous collection
of all the universal knowledge.   Now what sets this library apart?
There were libraries in Ancient Greece, there were libraries
in Ancient Egypt older than that, but they focused on Greek knowledge
and on Egyptian knowledge.
This was the first library whose ambition was universal knowledge
and the ability to integrate all
of that universal knowledge in a new way.
And they reached an amazing score.
They have 700,000 scrolls, we sometimes refer to them as volumes,
but they were really more scrolls.
And they were teaching at that place and girl students,
girls students were very prominent.
So not only prominent women in our story,
but also prominent girls studying this is a statute
from about 200 B.C. So that was the other marvel that people came
to visit here and pretty soon the library grew
so beyond the original museum, they built another library next
to the water and it has a big story with a fire of the library
so that's why I mention, and then later on continue to grow
and there was a special temple created to a god called Serapis
and the temple was at Seraphim in which they put the daughter library,
further expansions of the library.
Now, Ptolemies were, as I said, universal cultures.
So they wrote in Greek and in hieroglyphics
and this is the foundation of the Serapians [phonetic] inscription
and it's important for us that they used these multiple languages
because otherwise, we would not have had the Rosetta Stone,
which dates from Ptolemy the Fifth,
and thanks to which we have been able
to rediscover the ancient Egyptian language and the very large part
of our ancient history we wouldn't have known otherwise.
Now Serapis is an interesting character.
He was the only god I know of who was created by committee.
And they did have a committee of Egyptian priests and Greek priests.
And they said, very wisely, they wanted a [inaudible] for Alexandria
that would be acceptable to both communities.
So they created this guy, part Zeus, part Dionysus.
Dionysus because after all, this was the military
and people want [inaudible].
They like certain [inaudible] so they had Dionysus there
and they had Cyrus and Apis.
And for 700 years, he would be the God of Alexandria
and his temple would be here near the area of Aquites [phonetic]
and the daughter library was added there.
>> And the story goes on that Ptolemies go on for about 300 years
until the last of the pharos and the last of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra.
Now, Cleopatra was very unusual lady and I'll say more about her
because she plays a big role in this part.
But let me tell you about what happened in that period.
For one thing, a great poet, one of those minds that were brought
to the ancient library, by the name of Callimahos,
the greatest holistic poet of his period, was told by my predecessor,
the third director of the library, Aristophanes,
that doing [inaudible] poetry is something
that you do on your own time.
Let's be-- do something useful and write a catalog for the library.
And he did in 120 volumes, or 120 scrolls,
called the Pinakas [phonetic].
And that was the first time that universal knowledge was organized
by subject and by author within subject
and then alphabetically by author.
So Callimahos became either father of library science,
but at very least, father of bibliographies, which--
because that's how we still do it today.
So it was also a place
where Aristophanes was the first human being to say
that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around,
about a full 1800 years before Copernicus and Aristophanes was able
to calculate the circumference of the earth
to within 98.25 percent accuracy
of modern estimates, 98 percent accuracy.
At the time, later one people still thought about the flat earth.
Hepatus, his colleague, calculated the length of the solar year,
365 days and a quarter, to within 6 and a half minutes.
Now when you think of the tools they had,
you realize just how awesome these scientific achievements are,
and that is why the National Academy
of Sciences still considers the Ancient Library of Alexandria
to be the first precursor knowledge institution.
So they established the calendar and with 365 days and a quarter,
and the leap year every fourth year, to which we added the day,
and Julius Caesar, when he came, was so enamored with them
that he imposed on the Roman empire in 4445 BC
and it became the basis for the Julian calendar.
And our most famous employee in the ancient library, Euclid,
who wrote the only scientific text that is still taught, unchanged,
for 2200 years, and the elements of geometry.
Even the more recent events are defined as non-Euclidean geometry,
geometry of [inaudible] and others.
Archimedes came as a visiting scholar.
He stayed for two and a half years, went back, should have stayed.
He ended up being murdered by the Roman soldier back in Syracuse,
but what he did while he was there, he was studying levers
and hydrostatics, but [inaudible] he gave the Egyptians the Archimedean
scroll to help them raise the water of the Nile for irrigation.
And as you can see, 2200 years later, it is still in use,
exactly the way Archimedean did it 2200 years ago
because it's very efficient.
Herophilos identified different parts of the body
and give us functional anatomy.
Minato organized the history of the Pharaohs.
When we talk about Pharaohs being in the 18th dynasty
or the 23rd dynasty, these are the classifications that Minato wrote
in the Ancient Library of Alexandria.
And the first ever translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew
into Greek, The Septuagint was done
in the Ancient Library of Alexandria.
So it was really a beacon of global knowledge.
And then, Saint Mark brought Christianity to Alexandria
and from Alexandria to all of Africa
and the early church fathers had a good relationship with the library
and with the philosophers and Clement of Alexandria and origin
of others were trying to bring together the great marriage
of philosophy and theology
that would engage great thinkers throughout time.
But there's sad story attached to the enormous persecution
of the Christians by the Romans in a moment.
And the girls continue to be taught at the ancient library,
including one who will become very famous in a while.
Now of all of that, all
of that greatness [inaudible] remains physically,
but it still inspires people.   When was it destroyed?
Well, the story about this being destroyed
by the invading Arabs is not true.   It was destroyed centuries before.
And in fact, this was destroyed in stages.
Now you remember, we had three stages here.
Now let me go back to Cleopatra because I really have
to defend Cleopatra everywhere I go and I'll tell you why in a minute.
Julius Caesar arrives in Egypt pursuing Pompeii in 48 BC
and Cleopatra had just been ousted by her brother and so,
and that part of it is true, she has herself rolled in a carpet
and brought into Caesar's camp and they unroll the carpet,
which they think is a gift for Caesar
and there's the young Cleopatra.
Now, she was not very beautiful contrary to Hollywood versions
and contrary to Shakespeare, but she was very charismatic, very educated.
She spoke five languages, she did poetry, she wrote poetry
and she did mathematics, which for a young princess
in her age, an enormous education.
She had a lot of charisma and personality.
And you have to remember that both Caesar
and Anthony were masters of the world.
So if it was just physical, they had the choice of the best,
most beautiful slave girls anywhere in the world at that time.
Now there was something about her personality that attracted them.
And Caesar decided to stay with her and against her brother
and in the war that became the Alexandrian War,
he burnt both [inaudible].
And in that, inadvertently the building next to the water burned
down and that was the first great fire.
Depending on who you read, 40,000 and 100,000,
400,000 scrolls were destroyed, we don't know.
But what we do know is important because right after the death
of Caesar, in comes Mark Anthony, friends, Romans and countrymen,
lend me your ears, et cetera, et cetera, and he falled head
over heels in love with Cleopatra.   Now, what is the way to her heart?
That is very [inaudible].
What gift does Mark Anthony think of giving her?
Now mind you, this is Anthony Hollywood version, Anthony real.
This is Cleopatra Hollywood version, and this is Cleopatra real.
But what was the way to her heart?
And the way to her heart was to give her the 200,000 scrolls
of [inaudible] library to the Library of Alexandria.
So I ask you, what kind of a woman is it whose way
to her heart is a massive book donation to the national library?
My kind of woman.
That's why I feel I always have to defend Cleopatra for all times.
She deserves it.   She deserves it.
So anyway, the scrolls arrived and it's true
that they had a fabulous love affair and that has been written
about poetically from Shakespeare to [inaudible] Egypt.
Together, of course, they confronted Octavian,
the Battle of Acton [phonetic], the decisive [phonetic] naval battle
where they lost, ended up with the suicide of both Anthony
and Cleopatra and Octavian then becomes the undisputed ruler
of the world, first Roman emperor under the name of Augustus,
and Egypt becomes a Roman province [inaudible] BC.
And now the emergence of Christianity,
it resulted in enormous persecution of the Christians in Egypt
by the Romans to the point where the calendar
of the Egyptian [inaudible] today does not start
in synchronicity with the common era.
It starts from 293 AD, which is called the Year of the martyrs,
there were so many persecutions going on.
And there was riots and civil strikes and so on,
and things were really bad until another great woman comes along.
This time, it's Queen Zenobia of Palmyra in Syria,
and she conquers Alexandria where she is welcomed as a savior
and she rules Alexandria.
It's called Myra [inaudible] the remnants of Myra in Syria,
it's called Tadmor [phonetic] in Arabic.
And she rules it for a year and a half
or two before Orion [phonetic] comes back, Emperor Orion, to put order.
And I don't tell you what Roman emperors did
to put orders in rebellious provinces.
Actually, they destroyed everything in the royal district and according
to the scholars, he left no stone on top of the other
in the entire royal district, including the original museum
of the Library of Alexandria, the original building
of the Library of Alexandria.
>> And also, for those of you who have Indiana Jones inclinations,
when you come to visit Alexandria,
as a result of that 272 AD destruction,
now the first part was destroyed earlier on, the second part 272 AD
and this entire area was destroyed.
He left us the biggest question in archeology.
Where is the tomb of Alexander the Great?
We know it was there somewhere.
We know that Caesar went to visit it, Octavian went to visit it
when he was in Egypt, it's somewhere.
You know, we talk to people say, oh, [inaudible] this building.
If we destroy this building we'll find it there.
But somebody else, no, no, no.   It's that building.
Here, if you destroy it, you'll find it there.
But who knows, you know, if you go into the catacombs,
which you can visit in Alexandria, maybe you'll press a wall
like Indiana Jones and discover the tomb of Alexander.
It's all so-- the ancient library was completely destroyed,
the palaces of [inaudible] was destroyed.
All of that was-- and the only thing
that remained was the daughter library in the temple to Serapis.
Now contrary to general impressions, Constantine the Great,
when he embraced Christianity, did not ban other religions.
Seven years later, Emperor Theodosius issues an edict in 391 AD
that forbids all religions other
than Christianity in the Roman Empire.
And then, [inaudible] in Alexandria goes
and burns the Pagan Temple to Serapis in 391 AD.
So old Serapis had a run for almost 400--
700 years as the culture [phonetic] god,
not bad for a committee creation.
And this is a manuscript that shows Theodosius standing
on the burning of the Serapeum.   It's in Vienna right now.
And what survived then was just the personal collections
of a few scholars who are the remnants of the ancient library,
what was left of it, in their possession.
And another great women, see, I keep telling you stories all filled
with great women, and that is Hypatia.
She is the first person, first woman whose name appears in the scrolls
of mathematics and astronomy.
She was [inaudible] philosopher, very beautiful, great speaker
and a very prominent person.
She was however murdered by the mob in 415 AD and was cut to pieces
and the flesh scraped from the bone and they lit fire to the remains.
It was a horrible, horrible incident and beyond that,
everybody disappears, all the scholars disappear.
She was the daughter of Tione [phonetic] the last recorded scholar
and director of the library who was also one
of the great commentators on [inaudible].
The story of Hypatia is the first market to science because after all,
Socrates was really killed for his political views rather
than his science views, but she was the end
of that great intellectual adventure of the ancient library.
The schools that remained after that were totally under the thumb
of the church and it was the beginning of the dark ages.
I mean, we're talking fifth century, from the fifth
to the 15th century are generally referred to as the dark ages
in Europe as well as starting here.   Films have been made about it.
Agora is a film there, little bit of poetic license.
They collapsed the structure of the Serapeum with the--
with the murder of Hypatia, but they are 25 years apart in history.
But nevertheless, poetic license allows that film to take place.
There is Hypatia and Tione in agora, the real Hypatia,
that's the [inaudible] and that is the end except that the scientists
of the world leading from the United States recognize her
by naming a crater on the moon after her,
and I think that's a nice recognition of her role in science.
So if you look at this, you will see
that the ancient library did not have a single fire,
but actually at least three major distractive events
with the gradual decline over almost 450 years of gradual decline.
And the old library gives us nothing except for one thing,
which I'm sure Jim Billington and the--
and the president [inaudible] will sympathize with,
I have the oldest record of complaints against funding research.
From timeline of Prius in the second century AD--
BC, is talking about the spending on the library and the scholarship
and says that surely the kings of Egypt have more useful ways
of spending their money than to bring a bunch of bookworms
and scribblers to gab and talk in the courtyard of the muses,
which was the temple of the muses where they used to meet.
I have gone to my minister of finance and said to him,
history has shown that of all the investments made, that was the one
that has continued to be the biggest return on investment.
It didn't impress him.   But [inaudible].
So what's left of that?
Fragments of the past, that is the [inaudible] which you can visit
in the catacombs there where you can go and discover other things,
Roman theatres, this fort, which is built with the rubble
of the ancient lighthouse and under the water the remnants
of ancient Alexandria, including that capital.
Now doesn't that look like the one
on the coin I showed you at the beginning?
Maybe it's the very same one, who knows.
But what I do know is this.
We did fish out Ptolemy the first and I said
to the antiquities department, bring him home.
Bring him home and here he is standing at the gate
of the new library of Alexandria where it deserves to be,
founder of the ancient library and now guardian of the new library.
Now when we came about I quit all my jobs here to go back to do this,
to revive the ancient library of Alexandria.
What a beautiful project in the 21st century.
And to do that, we have to capture the spirit of the ancient library
and that description is important
because the library was not just a library.
It was a lot of other things, research, academy of teaching,
a lot of things together.
Art, I mean, after all [inaudible] was a poet even though he produced
the catalog for the library, he was a poet.
So the library has evolved.
The great library is depositories of books
with vast reading rooms were rapidly changing.
Knowledge was past in individual volumes.
I have a lot more to say about this tonight.
The books themselves, as a book lover, what can I tell you,
are extremely valuable as objects as well as content.
And the modern version of the library largely followed
that same classical mode for a while until we started seeing
that [inaudible] for computers began emerging, old card catalogs gave way
to modern searching tools and pictures were being classified
in ways that you couldn't think of before,
students working today were very different from students working
in the past although many of us still hope
that books are here to stay.
I think they will be there to stay in that content, but not necessarily
in that format because that's the way things are now.
People who look at the youngsters and say,
how can they possibly read that way?
I imagine people holding scrolls looking at the first [inaudible]
and saying, how can he possibly read that way?
After all, all these great classics, home of Euripides, et ceteras,
usually were written on scrolls and read on scrolls for centuries.
It was only the fourth or the fifth century AD
that gradually the [inaudible] a group of leaves bound on one side,
we called a spine with a slightly heavier cover,
became the dominant form because it was so convenient.
And so, today there are new forms that will be more convenient.
And so, we already see this which breaks my heart.
I must tell you.
I'm incurable romantic when it comes to love of books.
This is the first bookless library Engineering School of University
of Texas in Antonio in October 2010 announced abbolution of all books
from their shelves and everything digital,
18,000 journals and 425,000 books.
And there are more profound issues ahead.
I'm not going to get into these because I'll discuss them later,
but that's for another discussion.
But it's that spirit that was in our mind when I said we have
to recreate the ancient library.
And so the new library of Alexandria is more than a library
in the conventional sense.
It has a lot of things, starting with the very beautiful building,
the high level of activities, multiple institutions, libraries,
museums, galleries, et cetera.
I'll tell you about them in a moment.
>> But when people said to me,
Egypt at the time was the richest country in the world.
Today Egypt is a very poor country.
How can you possibly aspire to recreate the ancient library?
I said, wait and see and her we are.
So first of all, we were lucky to start
with a very beautiful building and that is a building.
It was an award winning building.
This is the campus of the university and the sea is over here,
and this is a planetarium, that was an existing conference center
and all of that is connected underground,
multiple floors so it's a huge complex.
The building is very beautiful, as you can see.
And on the wall of granite it has letters from all the alphabets
of the world without the complete word.
It just opens to all [inaudible].
And the plaza that connects these buildings is wide open
and there's no walls, no gates, no nothing.
This is where you go down to the planetarium and that is--
actually, later on I had to--
I'll tell you, I had to escape from one of those windows.
That's another story.   I'll tell you about it.
And this is a very beautiful building.
So if you were to lift that cover off the building,
you would see that it is divided like that.
On this side we have administration and research centers
and on this side, the formal library,
and that's our reading room, very beautiful space
and the architecture is really spectacular.
Conference center, our auditorium, 1700 seats, and on the plaza,
very appropriate I think, we have this statue that you see here
of Prometheus bringing fire to humanity,
donated by this Greek sculptor.
Everything in the library is donated because we have no money,
so I have to convince people.
As people said, well, what do you have?
I'm basically laughing all people involved
in cultural institutions spend a very large part
of their time raising money.
So you have to-- that's all you have.
So what do we have?
We created a huge hive of activities.
I created the staff.
We had about 50 staff when I started.
We have 2,400 right now working in the library in less than ten years
and we have all of these complexes.
We receive a huge number of visitors.
Just before the revolution we had reached 1.4 million visitors.
In the first year of the revolution, it dropped around 800,000.
This year I expect to be back up to one million,
but we'll be getting back there again.
I reach out to children and have been reaching
out to children for ten years.
So children who are six or seven then are 16 and 17
and they've been used to the library.
We have special programs for them and we receive
over 3.3 million hits a day.
So it's about 1.2 billion hits on our website
and 600,000 reader visits a year, and we hold 700 cultural events
in terms of conferences and exhibitions and the like
and we organize art school.
Remember girls being educated in ancient library?
Well, we're educating them in art as well as in sciences right now.
We organized our own classical orchestra.
We hold concerts, also concerts on outside, and ballet, and singing
and many of these events keep going in the library.
We hold international gatherings, an annual book fair.
So all of these activities,
part of what the libraries outreach programs are like
and the institutions themselves, we provide the secretariat for a lot
of these institutions and we have some commitments to the arts.
This is from the late [inaudible],
the great Egyptian artist and to the sciences.
Now our libraries per se, we start with a hybrid library,
our library from the beginning, we didn't have enough resources
to create the proper foundation in books,
but everywhere we have computers and these are the old computers,
now they're all flat screens.   And we have specialized libraries.
So the [inaudible] library for the visually impaired,
children's library 5-11, young people's library 11-16,
multimedia audio/visual libraries, rare books, microforms, map library
and the internet archive.
We're the only place outside of San Francisco
that has a copy of the internet archive.
That's Brewster Kale [phonetic], who created it,
and we go from 1996 to 2007.
After that, it became too big so we specialize in the Arabic part
and we're continuing our work on that.
Now this internet archive is the equivalent
of the ancient library trying to get all the written product of humanity
because soon enough everything will be digital.
Then we were able to convince the French to give us a huge donation.
>> And actually, they did.
They gave us 500,000 books, biggest donation in history.
And that made us the fourth largest Franko Foreign library.
We had only 40,000 books so we have 540 outside of France.
And I was telling the Frenchman in question that, you know,
this is the biggest book donation
since Anthony gave Cleopatra the 200,000 scrolls.
And he said to me, well, I hope I don't end up like Anthony.
And I said, wait a minute.   What's wrong with that?
And-- I mean after all, the guy rules half the world,
he had a magnificent love story with Cleopatra
that people are still talking about today, and 2,000 years later
when Hollywood wanted to represent him,
they got the young Marlon Brando and Richard Burton to do the role.
Who's going to be representing you 2,000 years from now?
He said, you know, when you put it that way, except for that last part,
being Anthony wasn't so bad.
And I said yeah, well, you know, its got its-- its compensation.
So this shows us where we rank now among Franko Foreign libraries
because of that gift, plus we have ongoing streams
of gifts from many others.
The one came from a group of American friends, 22,000 volumes,
but the book was [inaudible], the former secretary general
of the U.N. gave us complete copy that he owned
of the Stephson de Les Jipt [phonetic] and so on.
Now museums and galleries, we have 19 museums
and permanent art galleries.
These are the four museums, one is dedicated to President Sadat,
who was a great hero of peace, a martyr of peace, as you know.
One is a manuscript museum.
We have 6,600 manuscripts that were donated to us
from the Municipal Library of Alexandria, and there it is.
And we have an antiquities museum which is a nice museum
with donations from all the museums of Egypt.
So the Coptic Museum, the Faronic Museum, the Rec Room Museum
and the Islamic Museum are all making donations to our museum
and these are parts of it.
And we have a science museum, which was done with the Frenchman as well.
This is a part history of science, but you also have--
it's linked with the planetarium and with an Exploratorium,
so where the children can actually play around and do hands on science.
So they can see movies in the planetarium, they visit the history
of science museum to know what their forefathers in ancient Egypt,
ancient Library of Alexandria and medieval period presented
and then they go and have hands on experience and we encourage them
to challenge and think, what if, what if, what if.
And this is a special outreach youth.
This is a program during an eclipse
and we have our science festival annually and we have 20,000 people,
as you can see, for the science festival
where the kids were presenting their ideas and their experiments
and this, to me, is one of the great pictures
because the kids are having fun and science is all about convincing kids
that it's the joy of discover,
that's the journey of being in science.
It's not about learning, you know, Boyle's Law
and Avogadro's number and all of that.
We have 15 permanent exhibitions and art galleries,
including Challium Salam, including these.
These are all donated by the artist in question,
some of whom passed away, some of whom are still alive today
and everywhere you go, you have this mixture of books,
digital, art all together.
This is the folkloric art collection and we have ten more of these,
four galleries for temporary exhibitions that rotate and change
in time, and we have ten research institutes,
one deals with manuscripts, fairly obvious,
but where the digitize the manuscripts and make them available.
Scholars can take a digital copy of every page of the manuscript
with good picture quality and study it there as well
as we hold conferences and the like.
We have a special center for the study of history
of writing and calligraphy.
We have special studies that is a virtual center
that links Egyptian scientists with other scientists working
around the world and it holds the biannual biovision conference,
which is hold every alternating year in Leon and in Alexandria.
And the proceedings of these conferences include Nobel Loritz
and so on, are very distinguished [inaudible].
We have a center for documentation of heritage, which is located
in Cairo, and it has created the first ever Culturama,
which we patented.
And we patent it simply to show that we were the first in doing it,
not for commercial reasons.   And soon we'll be making it in 3-D.
We have a center of informatics, which has been collaborating
with the Library of Congress.
and we'll say more about that in a moment,
where a lot of high level informatics is being done.
We did the digital curated Stephen de Les Gipt and other works as well.
We have an art center that created the first classical orchestra
in Alexandria.   There wasn't one.
And where we invite all these activities we mentioned before.
A center dedicated to the study of Alexandria and the Mediterranean,
not just the ancient but the modern city as well.
And the Center for Hellenistic studies because that is the period
of the ancient library and we are co-jointly with the University
of Alexandria offering masters in PhD programs in that.
It's the only degree granting program we have.
We have a center for the study of democracy and social peace,
which came from the previous dialog forum where we talked about the need
for reform, what later on became the Arab Spring.
And we have a center for development studies as well.
So all the centers hold events, produce publications and the like,
and all of that together, I think, is part of this complex of trying
to recapture the spirit of the ancient library in the new.
But it is an institution that was born digital
and that's somewhat different.
We are committed to access to all information
for all people at all times.
We link up and cooperate with others and add
to the available digital material.
But today, we really can put at the fingertips
of people all the information in the world and global knowledge.
We ourselves in adding to our content have digitized
over 200,000 books and we tried to honor the past,
celebrate the present and embrace the future.
So how do we honor the past?
Well, there's obviously the first one, is manuscripts.
And on that, as I mentioned, we do this kind of work
and we provide it for free to visitors.
[Inaudible] center has created an archeological map of Egypt
where you can go and you can click on a site and then choose a part
of a site and then you get this tomb and you can navigate inside the tomb
and go to a wall and you get a text
and the text is translated into English.
And then we do the same for the architecture or heritage of cities,
the important listed monuments, by building, by street, by architect,
the Wildlife Preserves and the intangible heritage,
music and photographic memory, old photographs are being kept
and the documentation of folklore before it disappears in that screen,
and all of that you can visit on eternalegypt.org and we continue.
Alex Smith [phonetic] does the--
oops, sorry, does recreations of the ancient past and works
with other centers to-- this is the mapping of what's under water,
the pieces that are under water, which I showed you earlier on.
These are some of them.
And this is of course the fort that was created
with the rubble of the ancient pharaohs.
In the history of modern Egypt has been created and in
that sense it's kind of a mini world digital library, one language
and not seven languages going on 14, right.
And we have the Stephenson de Les Gipt, which is digitized
and so on, and created archives.
We created archives of President Nasser, President Sadat,
and of Boutros Ghali and the other eminent people
and we took institutional coverage as well.
So the Swiss Canal Documents, we have 2.5 million documents of these,
is the history of El Helal and so on.
And we celebrate the presence partly by our digital book collection
and by digitizing maps, pictures, videos and all of that.
And we provide a special course called Science Super Course,
170,000 PowerPoint lectures for free
and people can either take a whole lecture and use it to teach
or can take individual slides and compose their own lectures,
whatever they want, and it's been successful
in reaching a lot of people.
All important lectures in the BA webcast.
And we embrace the future most by asking in the past period for reform
and in the current period for defending certain basic values
and by embracing the cause of children.
So the reform program is to--
we believe and abide by a civil society during the
authoritarian period.
We drafted this declaration of Alexandria in March 2004,
which talked about political, social,
economic and cultural reforms.
And we defended these values, especially of freedom of expression,
and I was very proud of the fact that our colleagues in Norway,
from the National Library of Norway, created that program,
Beacon for Freedom, dedicated to the new library of Alexandria
because they value what we do.
>> And we created ICT formats for the NGOs to link up on and we worked
with children on providing science on open source systems,
and the science outreach with mass media,
we created our own TV studio, our own FM station.
This is our TV van.
And enormous-- and I think it'll work,
which is presented in Vandiver [phonetic].
We don't do bio-robotics but they get regularly presented
at the Library of Alexandria.   And this little guy is really cute.
His name is Now and he's very popular.
When he goes on stage everybody applauds.
We have a virtual reality chamber.   We have our own super computer.
And so in many ways, digital future is there
and we do have the technology to do this.
But we have outreach to the universities, to children,
this is book mobile goes to al the schools around Elden [phonetic].
We have art programs, I mentioned to you, and the massive expansion
of our science clubs and science fairs and the science competitions
and even a science TV series, which we did in our own studios.
But I think the most important thing before the revolution which resulted
in what Jim Billington mentioned about hands hold
around the library was defending values.
Starting with that March 2004, we opened in October 2002
so it's barely within 18 months
of the inauguration we issued this huge declaration
and we organized forums every year after that to discuss these values,
including youth forums from all over the Arab world, 600 in 2010 came
from all the Arab world [inaudible] structures.
So we have an institution that reaches out, that brings in,
that functions more like breathing in and out
and that has all these pieces and all the parts that are essential
and they reinforce each other and he whole is more than the sum
of the parts, which allows me, and this picture was taken
by an Australian friend who did this, to site the person I admire
so much, Borges, who said that I imagined paradise
to be some kind of library.   I agree with that.
Then came the revolution in Egypt.   There are moments like that,
in Europe in 1848 suddenly revolutions broke
out all over Europe.
Again in 1968, whether you were in the United States, in Paris,
or in London, or in Cairo, there were student revolts everywhere.
And in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and there was Eastern Europe,
in '91 in Russia as well and now in 2011, it's the Arab Spring and all
of these are explosions across the Arab world, which you can see.
It seemed there's an unstoppable tide had been released.
And sure enough, people in peaceful demonstrations, whether in Tunisia
or Egypt also brought down many tyrants
or many authoritarian figures.
This is the Tahrir Square in Egypt normally.
This is the Tahrir Square during the revolution and during the day time
and at night, and during prayer time,
and against the hated central police of that time.
And this was a very symbolic counter revolutionary effort called the
Battle of the Camel or Camels and the people with sticks
and swords came to attack the demonstrators who were mostly kids
with iPads and iPhones and Facebook.   And this cartoon summarizes it.
As you can see, there's the police and it says, Facebook
and Twitter are the weapons being carried by the youngsters.
And there was a rejection of the president and his son
and it was followed by the rest of the world
and I'm quite intrigued by Wisconsin actually.
Look at this picture.   It's a picture in Wisconsin.
So Egypt took 18 days.   What happens in Wisconsin?
Fight like an Egyptian.   I like this one best.
Egypt, help us.   Egypt supports Wisconsin.
So anyway, but what happened to the BA during the revolution?
That's what Jim mentioned.
Now remember, I mentioned to you this picture?
This is the campus and these two streets here, the red streets,
is where people-- massive demonstrations came.
Demonstrations were not only in Cairo.
They were all over Egypt.   But look, they held hands.
They are holding up a sign
against the president even though the library is directly attached
to the president, so.   But they're protecting the library.
And everybody obeyed.   See, it's peaceful.
They're just holding rolls of paper here.
And there's the demonstration going by
and when prayer time came, people are very orderly.
See, this is the library.
And nobody crossed the line of people holding hands.
And it wasn't just that.
Ten blocks away they totally destroyed government house
as you can see.   There's nothing left of it now.
They destroyed the [inaudible] headquarters,
they destroyed government house,
they destroyed the police headquarters.
So it was in the foregone conclusion that--
in fact, there are only two buildings that were so protected
by the revolutionaries, the Egyptian Museum, the Tahrir Square
in the library in Alexandria.
And then they created this huge flag and wrapped the flag
around the library, and here it is.
You can see they put the flag here and there were the children there,
and there's me with the revolutionaries and waving
to passing demonstrations at the time.
And this is on the side of the--
of the university campus, the other street.
And if you look here, you will see
that they are holding hands as well here.
See, this human chain?
There's nothing that prevents this demonstration from spilling
over into the library and they are big demonstrations.
Then these steps became like the favorite meeting place
for human rights demonstrations
and when we started having post the early post revolutionary problems
with the religious problems between Muslims and Christians,
Haitians would come there and those who demanded equality before the law
and so on were all there.
And eight years of hard work resulted
in that very powerful contrast.
Plus, the kids-- I mean, I don't know who these people are,
these kids who are here, but I also don't know
who painted this magnificent mural.
And it shows, it says the youth of the 25th of January, the revolution,
it says here, dedicated to those who died in the revolution,
and it shows the three pyramids and the fourth pyramid is the library
and out of it comes a church and a mosque together.
So, the kids got the message right.   They got it right.
And that is the book that Jim was just showing you.
And I'm glad to see that [inaudible] is here, pass on our appreciation
to Susan and to Pat and Lega [phonetic] who did that.
But later on the revolution went into some other problems
that you know about, a wave of unrest.
No institution was immune.
The Academy of Sciences was burnt to the ground in 17th of December,
2011 and the vice president of the academy was rebuilt later on,
but at the time it was burnt.
He then moved on and despite the wonderful start,
the BA itself was not immune to troubles in the country and I got
into a number of problems with the students-- not with the students,
with some of the staff and some of the supporters outside.
And what we did then was just was--
this is at the moment when the troubles were most acute.
And later on they came at my office and I avoided conflicts.
I did not want to call in police or the--
anybody because I am [inaudible] violence, but I also believe
in rationality and ideas.
And thus with-- even though as I said, I left through the window
at one occasion to avoid these problems.
Rationality brought things back to normal very quickly
and the library functioned again.
It's only for a few days on a few weeks that we had this little blip.
And we're still one of the few institutions in Egypt
that is functioning normally today.   So everything returned to normal
and Prometheus still stands proudly in front of the library.
So what happens with the future?
Well, after an 18-month transition by the military,
we have our first elected civilian president and also the most educated
that we have had since he has a PhD in teaching from the United States.
But troubles continue and the stakes are high.
And why are the stakes so high?
Well, for various historic reasons, I think you'll agree with me
that it's important that develop a different understanding
between the West and the Muslim world, generally
and with the United States specifically.
Now he Arab world has a disproportionate influence
within the Muslim world.
For 340 million Arabs have a huge impact
on the 1.4 billion Muslims around the world.
And Egypt has a disproportionate impact and within the Arab world.
So a successful democratic transition
into a liberal pluralistic Egypt would have an enormous impact not
just on the Arab world, but from the Arab world
onto the whole Muslim world.
>> So the success of Egypt's democratic transition is very,
very important.   Where are we going?
Well, I have five reasons for being an optimist.
I'm always an optimist, but I have five reasons to be optimistic
about what's going on in Egypt despite everything you hear today.
And the first of these is non-violence.
Given the size of the demonstrations and the conflicts we're having
in Egypt, actually it's extremely non-violent.
These are the supporters of the president's last set of actions.
These are the opponents and these are demonstration
of opponents going towards the Tahrir Square.
You see the whole bridge is covered there.
So the size of all these people,
the number of casualties is very, very limited.
Secondly, there's an enormous adherence to the rule of law.
It reminds me a bit of the United States when people say,
our damn supreme court should be impeached and so on,
And Egypt's supreme institutional court forced the president
to abolish the past parliament and he obeyed.
The third reason, and the other thing about the rule
of law is I want to say, I mean, can you imagine?
I mean, in Egypt people fight by filing briefs
in the supreme constitutional court
and the supreme onmissive [phonetic] court.
I mean, can you imagine in Syria somebody trying to file a brief
against Oshuter Asador [phonetic]?
I mean, it's just not-- not even conceivable, right?
So the election, we have had seven elections which were just beautiful
and shows that the Egyptians can settle their difference
with ballots and not with bullets.
Women participate, and what's interesting
in this picture is you see the enormous difference in age,
in outlook, in political perspective,
but everybody's proud to have voted.
We do these finger things, the ink, so that you can't come back again.
And a very orderly process.
You can see queues very organized, self-organizing.
There's no problem and the ballots have not been contested.
I mean, I think it's-- everything is very good.
The fourth reason I'm optimistic is contrary to most people.
I think the fact that the country is deeply divided is very good
because I think the real fear for me, would have been
if either Mr. Morsi or Mr. Shafik was his opponent,
but they got about 50/50 percent of the vote,
had gotten 75 percent of the vote.
Because then the tendency to crush the remaining 25 percent
and impose your view would have been unstoppable.
But it was a very narrow victory.   It was 51/48, something.
And so what's wrong with a deeply divided country?
You've had them before and you're reunited since
and you've had them again.
And who remembers the hanging chads, right?
So a deeply divided country can be rallied together.
The problem is that each side right now dreams of completely knocking
out the other, but it's not going to happen because they are more
or less balanced and then as a result, exhausted by their efforts.
They're going to have to learn to compromise and that is the beginning
of pluralistic democratic politics.
So this deep divide incidentally preceded the revolution.
I want to be clear about this because people say,
look at the revolution crazy?   No, no, no, no.
We've had this divide before and there has been--
Muslim societies are just fundamentally split.
Look at this.   A picture is worth 1,000 words.
Different perspectives of society, right?
Look at these two couples, couple number one, couple number two.
These are old pictures.
This is in the harbor, but [inaudible] before the revolution.
These differences on perspective of what our society should look
like are profound and have existed before the revolution.
The revolution is simply allowing them to find political expression
and that is, because before they were suppressed.
They would occasionally break out.
This was a demonstration pro wearing the veil against the former minister
of culture of Egypt who had made derogatory comments about the veil
and these demonstrations were against him.
There were efforts to ban books for a long time in our societies.
It's not new.
Ad censorship contra means human rights, but is there?
And that's why we must fight for freedom of expression
and the battles must be fought again and again.
In 1926, one of our most eminent intellectuals, Hussein,
was accused of apostasy and blasphemy in 1926 and again,
70 years later, Nos Muhammad Busad was.
The difference was that the case was dismissed in 1926
and he was found guilty in 1996, not by the government but by Islamists
who so harassed him and his wife that he moved to the Netherlands.
Now I invited Nos to give a series of lecture
at the library and he came.
He passed away two years ago, but that was not the answer.
The point is that these differences existed and my young friends
who come, they have simpler way of presenting it.
They say censorship sucks.
Doctor, stop giving us all that stuff about why.
We know. It's just terrible.
So we must deal with these divides and accepting pluralism is part
of accepting these divides.   The last thing is an amazing miracle
of Egyptian revolution has been the public participation.
In fact, the whole revolution was about public participation
but if you asked me before that,
two years ago I would have told you apathy, apathy.
The Egyptians are too apathetic.
If you told them, ah, [inaudible] change the constitution.
[Inaudible] who cares.   But now everything's changed.
Bloggers and their readers are everywhere,
and these are more upscale bloggers.
These are down scale bloggers, but they are still bloggers.
And I thought this one was really cute.
That one I'll tweet, right?
Well, there are supporters for the president.
And this is the political landscape post revolution,
all these political parties.
Of course, these are just paper parties with small people
because we know that after the first election,
this is what it really looks like.
So between religious and secular, between left and right,
this is the Muslim brotherhood and this was the sellatic party,
which is now split in three.
But it shows you, I mean, these are the blocks that exist pretty much.
There was a rush to complete the draft constitution.
The presidential statements today are subjected
to intense scrutiny and debate.
The leaders of the opposition salvation front are very prominent
people, and these are people with the president,
these are people against the president.
I can hardly tell them apart.
If you-- if you didn't read the text,
you wouldn't know which is which.   These are against the president.
The women's groups are protesting about certain articles
in the constitution and they are participating, that's wonderful.
And this was a creative YouTube protest that was anti-constitution
and says, even the fish vote against the constitution,
but the ballot box prevails and that's essential.
The constitution is in place,
everything has been amended even though we disagree with it,
but likely American Constitution, when Madison promised
that there would be a Bill of Rights,
let's just agree on that constitution.
Say okay, let's agree on the constitution.
We're going to amend it now.   So they're trying to amend it.
So we're preparing for the next elections now, and that's the basis
for optimism in our second republic, three to five years from now.
From zero to three years we have a little bit of turbulence ahead.
What is the short term turbulence?
Well, if you were to look at stability and institutions,
things are improving, then we go through a period like that
and then it stabilizes, and now we are here.
We are in this turbulent part, but it's no reason
to lose sight of where we're going.   We will have a bumpy road.
Why? Well, partly because this come from patience between the two sides,
until they reach compromise and understand that they have
to co-exist and therefore compromise is part of the bumpiness.
The economic crisis we're going through is going to create a lot
of bumpiness, and it takes time to develop a culture or pluralism,
a culture that recognizes differences of views.
And I believe in the power of ideas and I bring my expert witness.
The guy should know, right?
You know, that's actually what he said to Napoleon Bonaparte.
Do you know what astonished me most in the world?
The inability of force to create anything.
In the long run, the sword is always beaten by the mind.
Now this guy of course created the civil code in France
as well as used the sword a lot.   Now that's his conclusion.
So in our case, we must emphasize human rights, freedom of expression,
demand the amendments where they need to be done and we dare to dream
and we dare to invent the future in building the new Egypt.
And I'm working with powerful forces in society,
like the current Sheikh Al Adha,
who really is promoting a tolerant view of liberal Islam.
That's-- you see me with him here and giving talks in Adha,
produced the Al Adha declaration.   We are reissuing the classics
of Islamic humanism for the last 200 years.
>> And to all who agree or differ with me,
I say like Alba Kamu [phonetic], don't walk behind me.
I may not lead.   Don't walk in front of me.
I may not follow.
Just walk beside me and be my friend.
That's what we need.   That's what pluralism is all about.
Now there's so much more to do and as I said,
we have a difficult moment, but it's a moment where we should also dare
to dream and I believe that our library is proud to be--
to join these artisans of a better future.
And as Henley said, it matters not how straight the gate,
how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul.   And I think you.
[ Applause ]
>> As you mentioned, the Arabs did not burn down the library,
but that was a apocryphal story that the Arab leaders said
that if all this knowledge in the library,
if it's not in the Quran, then we don't need it.
I mean, if it's not in the Quran, we don't need it.
And if it's in the Quran, it's-- we already have it.
But you're saying that the-- are the Islamic fundamentalists today,
the extreme right, are they still opposed to knowledge per se
or what kinds of knowledge are they?
>> Well, I think that the-- first of all the story, the apocryphal story
that if all the books support what is in the Quran we don't need them,
and if they disagree, then we don't want them is an apocryphal story
and there's a beautiful essay by Bernard Lewis in which he says,
you know, where he proves that this whole story is nonsensical
because it appears only in the 12th century.
So we have 500 years of people writing chronicles of the invasion
of Egypt, none of which mention that story for 500 years.
And then all of the sudden,
in the 12th century it appears in a chronicle.
And the reason it does, most of us believe, is because Saladin,
the great Saladin at the time, sold things,
including the libraries of the documents.
He was funding his war effort in Palestine against the Crusaders
at the time and he did that.
And that was a story that sort of gave it [inaudible] by saying, well,
even the great Omar at the time decide that it was all right
to destroy the ancient library,
so why shouldn't the sultan sell the library.
That was why it appear around that time, and most of us think.
But the story is apocryphal.
I simply tell you the ultimate proof is very simple.
What did the Arabs do when they confronted the newly discovered
philosophy of the Greeks?
They didn't burn their books, they didn't declare them as atheists,
they translated them, they wrote the [inaudible] about them,
they called Plato and Aristotle [inaudible], the two wise men,
and they took what was convenient for them, they left what wasn't.
And later on in fact the recreation of the ancient library,
because nobody asked me that question,
but I should tell you that.
If we lost the ancient library, how come we have all these works,
or at least a large part of them?
We do because of El Moon [phonetic], who was the son of Haroon or Rashid,
I have to remember, Bagdad or the Arabian Knights.
The [inaudible] empires spreads from Morocco to India,
from Central Asia to Sudan.
And in Bagdad, he creates the House of Wisdom.
And he says that anybody who brings an old manuscript and translates it
into Arabic will receive its weight in gold.
And that very quickly does two things.
One, within 70 years, Arabic becomes the language of knowledge,
much as English is today,
and it stays that way for several centuries.
And many people rediscovered the ancient works
through the Arabic translations and copies made of them.
But the second thing it does, of course,
is that like a huge vacuum cleaner, it picks up all the remnants
of the ancient library, of copies and so
on that were in that vast empire.
If you're in Tunisia, or in Egypt and you had the manuscript,
you'd take it to Bagdad, have it translated into Arabic
and get its weight in gold.
And another [inaudible] to say to the ministers of finance,
his minister of finance told him, the scholars are cheating, sire.
They write in big letters on thick paper.
But El Moon says let them be for the gold we give them is
as nothing compared to what they give us.
Unfortunately, it's not the attitude of the office
of management and budget.
It's not the attitude of my own-- of my own minister of finance.
So people who behave that way, who held up the torch of tolerance
and knowledge, who tolerated-- I mean, the great Jewish scholar,
Maimonides [phonetic], was part of the court.
[Inaudible] great Christian scholars who helped
in the translations in Bagdad.
They were open to the knowledge that came from India.
They took the numerals from India, the zero,
and then gave them to the West.   So there was an enormous openness.
That behavior is totally incompatible
with that apocryphal story, which as I said,
appears only 500 years later.   >> [Inaudible]
>> Thank you.
Professor, thank you very much for a great lecture.
Just confident on women's position and a delegate
from Egypt [inaudible] that the position
of women has vastly deteriorated after the spring-- Arab Spring.
Would you agree with the assessment?
>> Well, not so much after the Arab Spring, after the latest series
of actions, including the current draft of the constitution
and that's why I showed you pictures of all the women demonstrating.
When I showed you the end part, I showed you for and against
and I said that people want to amend the constitution
because there are articles there that many of us think are wrong.
And there's-- but anyway, it was rushed and as I said,
there's a committee right now with the very prominent scholars
and I was a member of our board of trustees, Dr. Abu Mag [phonetic],
whose trying to find common ground on drafting some corrections
and amendments to that constitution.
So the answer is yes, but it was not at the immediacy of the--
of the revolution of the Arab Spring.
It was more recent in the last six month or so.
>> We have time for one last question quickly, as he used to say
in another part of the world where there was great trouble,
he has overfulfilled his norm already and he--
we will have an opportunity to return this evening
and hear him talk about the universal changes.
I think we should have someone from this--
keep it brief because we really-- we don't have much more time.
Thank you.
>> The question just is, after the recent upsetment in Mali
and the destruction of the libraries in Timbuktu, is there a role
for your institution to go out and gather
up these regional ancient sources of knowledge and protect them.
Would that be an appropriate role for the Biblio Tech at Alexandria?
>> Well, it would but of course Jim Billington and the Library
of Congress have already beaten everybody to this
because they've been helping Mali with some of their manuscripts,
and some of these manuscripts are now in digital form available
on the World Digital Library, okay,
because only the first big projects were done in that respect.
And yes, it does show us something which is, you know, my credo,
my belief, and why I will fight against it, I fight not physically
but with ideas and with passion, Zealotry is the enemy of knowledge
and rationality and humanism and whether it was the Christian zealots
who burnt the ancient library and killed Hypatia, or it is Buddhists
in other countries like in Mali [phonetic] or Hindu zealots
in Amitrodge [phonetic] or Taliban zealots killing girls in Pakistan
or destroying the banyan Buddha's, or Muslim zealots as well
as the Taliban being Muslim zealots as well destroying things in Mali
or elsewhere, zealotry is intolerant of pluralism.
Zealotry is based on the perception, I have the truth-- the truth.
And everybody else is wrong and anybody
who contradicts me is therefore my enemy and it is therefore all right
to destroy them and to destroy what they did.
And just as you know, I had a big debate at the time with some people.
I was still at the world bank when the--
in Afghanistan they destroyed the Banyan Buddha's,
these two big Buddha's.
And I said to somebody, you know, Muslims have been
in Afghanistan for over 1,000 years.
Nobody ever thought of destroying these Buddha's until now.
So what's wrong with that?
I mean, all these other guys were not Muslims?
And the answer was, yeah, but they didn't have the technology
to destroy it.   Now we do.
So, I mean, you know, that shows you how far gone some
of these people are, but there is, you know,
as I sited Napoleon Bonaparte, in the long run,
ideas will always win out, even if in the short term
by the sword they can impose some destruction.
The ideas will survive and that's what makes us human.
>> Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.