the light that will banish darkness

After centuries of being cut off from the greatest works of Western thought—and from standard works of Western thought as well—Arabic-speaking people will soon—finally!—be able to have access to translations of some of the books that changed the world:

It’s been 375 years since Galileo published his earth-shaking Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 336 since John Milton wrote Paradise Regained and nearly 40 since James D. Watson had an apparent international bestseller with The Double Helix, about the discovery of the structure of DNA. Amazingly, however, none of these books, and thousands of classics like them, has ever been translated into Arabic, the first tongue of more than 300 hundred million persons worldwide.

Now this situation is being rectified by the sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven Muslim United Arab Emirates, which last month officially revealed its plans to translate 100 epochal foreign-language texts into Arabic by the end of next year.

Karim Nagy, the entrepreneur who is the force behind this effort, which is being funded by Abu Dhabi, says that money is no object:

Nagy said “funding is the least of our concerns. It’s the quality of the translation that counts.” Indeed, Abu Dhabi is the wealthiest of all the emirates and Abu Dhabi city is ranked as the richest in the world. Nagy said Kalima is striving to find a balance between wanting the Arab world to “catch up” with the classics, most of which are in the public domain, and “keeping up” with recent and current literature, which requires copyright clearance.

Also: Nagy has no political or religious agenda:

Nagy insists Kalima has “no political or religious agenda,” and points to its decision to publish John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom alongside such Marxist tomes as Reading Capital by Louis Althusser and Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Also on tap is the Yiddish-to-Arabic translation of The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ethic s by the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

Being a passionate devotee of books, I say it is this kind of effort—and not war—that will change the world most profoundly. The question is how long it will take to bring enlightenment to people who have been kept in darkness for so long.

But the desire is there, as Doris Lessing wrote in her Nobel acceptance speech:

The school in the blowing dust of northwest Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at those mildly expectant faces and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without text books, or an atlas, or even a map pinned up on a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only eighteen or nineteen themselves, they beg for books. … Everybody, everyone begs for books: “Please send us books”.

Yes, let us send books—the very best of ourselves.