Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Kaplan in Slate on Global Americana
Many, many thanks to Fred Kaplan for his write-up in Slate of the Global Americana Institute project to translate American political thought and history into Arabic.
Also
Props to Michael Berube for having my back on the giant slug that's pursuing me. Salt is a good idea.
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/28/2006 08:00:00 AM
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Winner, October 5, 2007, Scott Nearing Award for Courageous Scholarship (Awarded by the Graduate Students of the Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania).
Winner, 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Hunter College.
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4 Comments:
Dear Profesor Cole
I read Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat" on the plane going someplace.
Just at the moment I think it is the most important book of the 21st century so far.
If I can get it translated into arabic without copyright problems, you are welcome to add it to your collection.
Ciao
You'll be happy to know that Friedman's book has been translated and is widely available in Beirut bookstores in Arabic.
It is Thomsas Jefferson and Martin Luther King that they can't get.
Well, we have to start somewhere. Arabic is spoken by many more people than Persian, and publishing in Beirut and Cairo is relatively free.
If someone gives us enough money, we can do Persian, too. I'm not sure how easy it would be to pull off the project in Tehran these days, but maybe Kabul. If you know any rich people, chat it up to them.
One thing I'd love to do is get a good recent book on the Holocaust into Arabic and Persian, to shut Ahmadinejad up. (Note the former President Mohammad Khatami lived many years in Germany and has written on Habermas, and has rebuked Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial).
Someone else on the Internet gave me a pointer to this project. It certainly is a laudable goal to translate the mainstays of American political thought and culture into Arabic. However, it seems that the Arabic Wikipedia site is far ahead of you on the curve. Instead of filing with the IRS and making elaborate hypothetical plans, those folks just jumped in and started translating Wikipedia pages. And not just Wikipedia, but Wikisource too. Wikisource seems exactly in keeping with what you want; the English version, at least, does have a lot of the writings of Jefferson and others.
So why not just join the Arabic Wikipedia project yourself, and have everyone that you might pay join as well? Indeed it would only be natural for you to lead by doing. On the one hand, even though Arabic Wikipedia has already achieved a great deal, it only has a third as many pages as, for example, Hebrew Wikipedia.
Arabic Wikipedia doesn't even have pages for Martin Luther King or the United States Constitution. (Hebrew Wikipedia as both.) Arabic Wikipedia also has no page for Susan B. Anthony, nor for that matter Juan Cole. Surely as a first step, you could translate your own biographical Wikipedia page into Arabic!
I also understand that most Arabs do not have Internet access and might benefit from the printed word. However, once you have the content on the Internet, you can always still distribute it on paper. Indeed, paper distribution is increasingly an afterthought to the Internet. If "only" 2.5 million Arabs have Internet access, that is still a very large and growing number. Who knows who you would reach even without printing anything.
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