Rising from ashes

The director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina touched down in Los Angeles long enough to urge support for Egypt’s ambitious new library complex, near the vanished intellectual hub of the ancient world.

Ismail Serageldin, a Cairo-born polymath and former World Bank vice president, had flown into town last week from Bozeman, Mont., and such distant cities as Sydney, Australia. After showing slides of the old and new Alexandrian libraries at the J. Paul Getty Center, he planned to catch a red-eye to Washington, D.C., where his is a respected voice on global science policy, poverty eradication and biotechnology, then fly back to Egypt.

For all its hypermodern architecture, computers with Internet access and stunning aspiration, the new library can only suffer in comparison with the old.

The futuristic-looking complex on the edge of the Mediterranean was dedicated Oct. 16, 2002, with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak welcoming heads of state, 14 Nobel Prize winners and Sinead O’Connor singing St. Francis of Assisi’s “Make me an instrument of your peace.”

But the ancient Alexandrian museum, whose legendary library burned almost 2,000 years ago, was a singular achievement -- in Serageldin’s words, perhaps “the greatest adventure of the human spirit in human history.”

As comfortable lecturing on history as quoting Shakespeare or talking international water policy, Serageldin recounted how the first museum and library at Alexandria had been born in a moment of inspiration around 288 BC. Ptolemy I, one of the trio who divided up the empire after the untimely death of Alexander the Great, wondered how to make Alexandria the greatest city in the world.

In Serageldin’s retelling, Ptolemy decided to “invite the greatest minds in the world and let them do their own thing -- no assignments.” Ptolemy, who like Alexander had been a student of Aristotle, thus established what has been called the world’s first think tank with 100 of antiquity’s most visionary thinkers. It lasted almost 600 years.

Alexandria all but gave birth to scientific thinking, Serageldin said. In its unique community of scholars, Callimachus developed a way to catalog and, thus, access the library’s 700,000 scrolls. Euclid wrote his “Elements of Geometry,” the only textbook still in use more than 2,000 years later. And don’t forget Eratosthenes, a Serageldin favorite. The third director of the ancient library, Eratosthenes also proved the Earth was spherical, calculated its circumference and determined that the year was 365.25 days long.

Ancient Alexandria married Egyptian and Greek culture, included Buddhist texts in its collection and encouraged the translation of the Torah from Hebrew into Greek. A cosmopolite, with an appointment at a Dutch university and key roles on high-powered international groups, Serageldin seems to take a patriot’s delight in his country’s past and what its new library could achieve, especially for Egypt and the Middle East. Just as it was in ancient Alexandria, science is the key, he says.

Much of the library’s initial $200-million-plus price was paid by Arab states. Deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein famously contributed $21 million just before the Persian Gulf War ate into his discretionary spending. The Norwegian firm Snohetta designed the complex, and the French and Italian governments have actively supported it, as has UNESCO.

Serageldin knew going in that it would be a demanding job. “I share your vision,” he told Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, the project’s driving force. But he cautioned that it would succeed only if its independence was written into law. After 10 votes, the library received unique status, subject to Egyptian law but effectively governed by a board that is two-thirds distinguished non-Egyptians.

Ptolemy and his successors got scrolls the old-fashioned way. They searched every ship that came into the harbor for books, confiscated and copied them and then returned the copies, not the originals, according to many historians. Many critics gibe that the new library has fewer volumes than the average American college -- some 300,000 -- many of them undistinguished European discards.

Serageldin admits he doesn’t have the money to build a world-class library book by book, so he has focused his spending on special collections. And he and international partners have launched an Alexandria Library Scholars Collective that hopes to create a worldwide digital library accessible to even the world’s poorest students.

The new library has weathered its first crises. Last year, a curator decided to display the first Arabic translation of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious anti-Semitic forgery. The action was widely condemned by anti-hate groups, including L.A.’s Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Serageldin pulled the book from public view and issued a statement acknowledging that the display “showed bad judgment and insensitivity.” A committee for exhibits was formed to make future stumbles less likely.

But in Egypt, Serageldin said, he faced a firestorm of criticism from the Islamic right, which accused him of being a “Zionist tool.” He went on TV to describe those who defend “The Protocols” as “stupid, ignorant or both.” And when asked by Islamic critics why he claimed it was insensitive to display the forgery, he answered that the library also has a copy of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” widely condemned by fundamentalist Muslim clerics. “If I put that on display, people would ask me, ‘Out of the 300,000 books you have, you couldn’t find another book to put on exhibit?’ ”

Subsequently, many intellectuals, including Islamic moderates, signed a petition praising the library: “It has become a rallying point for progressive opinion,” Serageldin said. “For the first time, these people were not intimidated by fundamentalist and extremist currents.”

Last year’s other crisis was brief but horrifying. A fire broke out in one of the offices.

The Great Library probably burned in stages. Julius Caesar is thought to have accidentally set a seaside annex on fire in 48 BC, in the course of torching enemy ships. The surviving remnant of the glorious library was burned by the local bishop in AD 391 as part of Emperor Theodosius’ war on non-Christians.

“That room burned to a crisp,” Serageldin said of last year’s fire. But the library’s protective systems kicked in, and the fire was quickly contained. Even the paper calendar on a nearby office wall was unscathed.