Saudis Offer Arabs’ First Modern Encyclopedia

For the first time in the modern era, the Arab world has a large-scale encyclopedia that looks at the world from an Islamic perspective, yielding some definitions at odds with typical Western views.

The Global Arabic Encyclopedia, a lavishly printed, 30-volume set financed by a Saudi Arabian prince, was introduced at this year’s Cairo International Book Fair.

Its 16,000-plus pages contain more than 20,800 entries and some 18,000 photographs, maps and charts.

For all that, some subjects get short shrift.

Israel, for example, is dealt with in less than a page, while lengthy sections describe each Arab nation. And Israel’s founding comes off as less heroic than depicted in popular Western books and movies, such as Leon Uris’ “Exodus.”

The encyclopedia says Israel is “a state which was set up by the Zionists with support from international powers on the land of the Arab Palestinians on May 14, 1948, and its population are foreigners and aliens to the land of Palestine.”

The Saudi who supervised the work, Stanford-educated Ahmed Medhadi al-Shuwaikhat, said the encyclopedia is an attempt to meet the intellectual needs of Arabs, meaning it does not simply echo beliefs “which are alien to the Arab world.”

“Human knowledge follows a certain epistemological framework, and our aim was to make the entries suitable and interesting to our Arab readers,” he said in an interview.

Most entries are similar to those in any standard encyclopedia, although scientific sections give emphasis to Arab contributions, especially to early astronomy, medicine and mathematics.

Al-Shuwaikhat said the publishers bought rights to the World Book Encyclopedia, and 1,000 experts, translators and editors spent 6 1/2 years adapting and rewriting the work for Arabic publication.

As an example of cutting entries to fit Arab interests, al-Shuwaikhat said the Saudi version has six pages on the United States, not the 100 in the original. He said the Arabic work stresses that American Indians were pushed aside by European colonizers.

By contrast, the encyclopedia refers to the early Muslims who expanded their empire east and west as liberators, not conquerors. It points out that the Islamization of North Africa was accomplished largely by merchants and Islam’s mystical Sufis -- not by soldiers.

It’s surprising the encyclopedia financed by Prince Sultan ibn Abdel-Aziz al-Saud, the Saudi defense minister and a brother of King Fahd, is the first such modern-day Arabic work. The Arabs, after all, were legendary scholars and translators in ancient times.

The “House of Wisdom” was created in Iraq in A.D. 830 to translate Greek works. Arabic translations were what preserved Greek knowledge and philosophy during Europe’s Dark Ages.

In 950, an organization called the Brotherhood of Purity in Basra, Iraq, wrote 51 treatises that amounted to an encyclopedia of that era’s knowledge of theology, philosophy and natural sciences.

The A-to-Z encyclopedia common today came into being -- in both French and English -- only in the 18th century. Arabic Alef-to-Yaa works of the 19th century were not of the scope of the new Saudi set.

Not surprisingly, the Saudi encyclopedia dedicates vast space to Islam, its history and cultural impact, which the publishers believe have been ignored or distorted by Western publications.

In one area, the encyclopedia may disappoint many in the Muslim world.

Saudi Arabia’s rulers are Sunni Muslims, the largest Islamic sect, and Sunni beliefs and teachings are sprinkled throughout the many entries on Islam. But Shiites, the second largest sect, are given only one-half page.

The encyclopedia also ignores certain groups in defining terrorism. As examples, it mentions the Italian Red Brigades, the Irish Republican Army and Jewish groups like Irgun and the Stern Gang involved in Israel’s independence struggle.

Nothing is said, however, about Islamic radical groups, even those that twice in the past two years bombed American targets in the Saudi kingdom.

The encyclopedia, bound in Islamic green leather with gold titles, sells for $1,600. A computerized English edition is planned on CD-ROM.

Al-Shuwaikhat refused to say how much it cost to produce the encyclopedia, saying only that it was a “few million” dollars.