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Dubai: The openness to other faiths enriches Muslim identity, a top UAE diplomat and author said at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature (Emirates LitFest) in Dubai on Saturday. Omar Saif Ghobash, Assistant Minister for Culture and Public Diplomacy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the UAE Ambassador to the Holy See, was speaking at a session titled ‘Past, Present and Future of Islam’ along with Malaysian journalist, activist and author Marina Mahathir and Iranian-American religious scholar, author and Emmy and Peabody-nominated producer Reza Aslan.

The Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre’s 10-person scientific committee aims to present ideas that will ‘strengthen the presence of the Arabic language.’

BEIRUT, 20th September, 2021 (WAM) -- The UAE Embassy in Beirut has held a virtual seminar entitled, "The Importance of the Human Fraternity Document to Research and Academic Work." The seminar was attended by Prof. Roula Talhouk, Director of the Islamic Christian Research and Documentation Centre (CEDIFR), at the Saint Joseph University of Beirut; and Dr. Bilal Orfali, Sheikh Zayed Professor for Arabic and Islamic Studies at the American University of Beirut. During the event, they discussed the importance of the document, as well as its role in promoting openness and tolerance resulting from the UAE’s related efforts. In its statement, the embassy stressed that the UAE is keen to promote the principles of the document through education, as well as to launch many ambitious initiatives in this area, noting its approach consists of spreading the values of tolerance and international peace. Talhouk discussed several planned initiatives and projects that aim to promote the values and principles of the document and integrate them into all school and university curricula. Orfali explained the role of the Sheikh Zayed Chair in promoting the document, noting that the efforts of Arab and Muslim scholars are crucial as educational systems generate and spread ideas.

Arabic Papyri are highly neglected in international scholarship. The reason is that most of the objects are not accessible. They are stored in Egypt in the Islamic Museum, in the National Library or in individual American (Ann Arbor) or European Collections (Vienna, Berlin). The aim of this project was to contribute to the chances of future research on Arabic papyri worldwide. In this study, 100 papyri were digitalized and made available to the academic and general community for future research. With this tandem project, the Egyptologist and Papyrus expert Verena Lepper (Berlin) and the Arabic Philology Expert Bilal Orfali (Beirut) focused on accessing ancient Arabic papyri for future research. Papyrology is a wide field of studies, it comprises a large variety of scripts and languages used or spoken in Ancient Egypt, from Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Coptic, up to Arabic. Arabic is the youngest language to be written on papyri. The papyri are kept in a variety of institutions in Egypt, Europe and the US. The Papyrus Collection of the Egyptian Museum Berlin comprises 1000 Arabic Papyri, of which only a small part is deciphered and published. As a feasibility study, these papyri could bemade accessible to the academic and general world community through this project. In order to better understand the beginning of Islam in Egypt and the culture and history of the first centuries of Islamic Egypt. The field of Arabic Papyrology is very small. In March 2018, the International Arabic Papyrology Congress was hosted in Berlin at the Egyptian Museum, the Humboldt University, the Free University and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. As a result of this congress, it became clear that there is a strong need for the digitalization of Arabic papyri worldwide. Following this call, in collaboration with several partners, the Tandem-partners conducted this project for the digitization of the Berlin papyri. T he Tandam team sought cooperation with the Ministry of Antiquity in Egypt (Ahmed Kamal, head of Department of Arabic papyri) in order to discuss documentation standards. The international centers of Arabic Papyrology (Leiden, Munich and Paris) incl. Sebastian Metz were also involved. In addition, digitization has been made and shall be made a standard for all papyrus studies. Therefore, the expertise from the academic field of the Digital Humanities was therefore an important component of the project.

For some teens, classical Arabic literature has a stiff and forbidding reputation. The teen protagonist in Huda El Shuwa’s young-adult novel Dragon of Bethlehem dreads Arabic class, and particularly pre-modern Arabic poetry. But then he meets a witty dragon who gives him a new way of looking at these fifteen-hundred-year-old poems. Freed from their traditional classroom context, the poems become something new. With the new Young Readers series from the New York University Press’s Library of Arabic Literature (LAL), the scholars Enass Khansa and Bilal Orfali are crafting something like this secret dragon. The series, which is releasing its third classic book this month, reframes pre-modern texts so that they can take wing in the classroom and beyond. “Classical Arabic literature is associated with many things,” Khansa said over a Zoom interview. “But it’s not associated with being a space for creative and experimental thinking. I think the main idea, for both of us, is that this [book series] is experimental. That’s why we’re medievalists—because there is richness and potential.”

This new series of the Library of Arabic Literature, a project of NYU-AD Institute, targets the youth and general readers. It aims to illustrate Arabic classics, making them accessible to general readers. For how do we understand texts written more than 1000 years ago? How can we visually reformulate the aesthetic and performatives questions in such texts? The selected texts include capturing narratives, inquiring questions, rhetorical dialogues, imaginative geography. They offer a vital opportunity to experience classical heritage and incite creativeness at the personal and epistemological levels. In this new series we offer a rich piece of a glorious Arabic heritage, in hope it will remain part of our cultural memory and consciousness.