Understanding between civilizations

Eratóstenes gained fame in century 3 B.C. for having calculated the perimeter of the Land using only one wood stick and reflecting over the angle of the shade when the Sun reached the zenith. This Greek born in Cirene, the current Lybia, was a shining geograph, but also mathematician, astronomer and poet. He was the most famous book guard of Alexandria, when this egiptian city used to host the famous library that made the envy of many and caused admiration in all the others. After more than two thousand years, there's a Library of Alexandria in the margins of the Mediterranean, created in 2003 as first local where all the cultures knowledge could be shared. As first responsable of the institution, that receives 800 a thousand visitors per year, Ismail Serageldin, a modern Eratóstenes: can talk in Arab, English and French, was formed in Engineering at Cairo and was studied in Harvard. She published books on subjects as the biotechnology and the supported development, but one that makes her prouder over all is the assay on the Modernity of Shakespeare. Critic of the theories of the shock of civilizations, condemns the extremistas that usurp the Islam for politician purposes and believes that the Muslim world is destinated to become a land of democracy. He said it in Lisbon, on a meeting invited by Jorge Sampaio, the high-representative of the ONU for the Alliance of the Civilizations.

In the first string of admirable assistance, four persons, almost chosen with the finger to hear the librarian of Alexandria: the ambassador of Cyprus, that has name the same as the admiral of Alexander's fleet, Nearchos; Adriano Moreira, academic whose white hair make him look like a Roman patrician; the ambassadress of the Pakistan, Muslim country that since Fatima Jinnah to Benazir Bhutto always had women in prominence; e the new ambassador of Iran, the highest figure, with air of Persian intellectual. In the presence of several guests, Serageldin presented her arguments as a proud Muslim, worried with the preconceptions, the politics of two weights and two measures of the Ocidente that cause resentment, with the ignorance of extremistas that are unaware of the origins of the islam but demand the return to century 7, with the media (and for the Al-Qaeda) transforming a nationalist conflict as the israel-palestinian into religious fight…

Talking outside this event, Serageldin told two revealing histories: 1. against the vision of the islam as retrograde, remembers the wisdom of calif Omar, who imposed to the judges the presume of innocence and declared null the illegal testifies (for example, to denounce the drunkness of somebody after entering secretely at house); 2. against who in the islam criticizes its defense of the democracy in the Middle East, accusing it to serve the American interests, always explaining, with irony, that “still Bush was trying to stop drinking whisky and] did not even dreameamed to arrive at the White House, he was already defending this position. More than a shock of civilizations, it was shock of dullnesses. But, sometimes, the Alliance of the Civilizations works. Example? The defense that one day the islam expert Bernard Lewis, a Jew, made of the Muslin against who insists on accusing them that they had been responsables for the destruction the old Library of Alexandria|

In Diario de Notícias by Leonídio Paulo Ferreira 28/07/2008