While Abu Dhabi pours $27 billion into building five museums, including a Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry and a Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel, another planned project will help expand Arabic libraries.
As part of efforts to transform the emirate into the cultural lodestone of the Middle East, the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, or Adach, has chosen 100 books to be translated into Arabic.
Among them are Alan Greenspan's memoir, "The Age of Turbulence," John Maynard Keynes' "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" and Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom." The goal is to translate 100 titles every year.
Adach has formed a nonprofit organization called Kalima (Arabic for "word") to undertake the translations and expand Arabic-language publishing in the United Arab Emirates.
About 10,000 books have been translated into Arabic in the past millennium, according to a 2003 study by the U.N. Development Program.
The demand has been small, partly owing to the historical tendency to focus most reading on religious texts and classical poetry. About 300 new translations appear each year, so Kalima's further 100 titles represents a substantial addition.
Kalima will buy rights, pay translators and enlist established Arabic-language publishers in the Persian Gulf region and North Africa to print and distribute the books.
Karim Nagy, Kalima's chief executive, acknowledges the hurdles. The Arabic-speaking world comprises about 300 million people in more than 20 countries. Censorship laws vary, and often there is no strong bookselling community or distribution channel.
"First, we will worry about getting the books translated," Nagy says. "Then we will work to optimize their distribution."
The typical print run for a book in the Arab world is often no more than 2,000 copies; Kalima plans to fund a minimum of 5,000 copies for each of its titles, with some earmarked for donation to schools and libraries.
Jumaa Abdulla Alqubaisi, director of the Abu Dhabi National Library and an adviser to Kalima, suggests that ultimately the project is as pragmatic as it is idealistic.
"Good books are like penicillin," he says. "They fight against hate, segregation and misunderstanding."
