International stories have always been a hard sell in American Libraries, but we run them anyway–selectively. I’d like to publish every article we receive from a librarian who has traveled to an exotic locale and fallen in love with international librarianship, but we just can’t. There’s not enough ink in our well. And reader surveys have always put “international” near the bottom of the priority list.

Construction of the Biblioteca Alexandrina in Egypt in 1998, from the April 2000 issue of American Libraries.

Case in point: the building of the great Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Because it was so many years in the planning and so many more in the actual opening, by the time it did open in 2002, it was reduced to four anticlimactic paragraphs. That is, however, four more paragraphs than many a splendid American library has received upon its opening. The ancient Library of Alexandria being rebuilt as a 21st-century international library and museum complex? Seemed like an important story to me.

This year, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the Bibliotheca’s official opening, I got an invitation from Chief Librarian Sohair Wastawy, formerly of the Illinois Institute of Technology, to visit the library and do a couple of talks with staff. So I decided to spend a week at the BA (as they call themselves) and to see for myself this modern incarnation of the ancient Library of Alexandria.

When I laid eyes on it, “magnificent” was a word that came to mind. “Spectacular” was another. In the middle of this chaotic, crowded, and rather poor city, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina complex contains six specialized libraries, including a booming children’s library, three museums, a planetarium, and seven research institutes.

A little background: In 2000, American Libraries published "Dream in the Desert: Alexandria's Library Rises Again" by Ron Chepesiuk. Construction of the new complex had been "essentially finished by the end of 1999 and officials were expected to be announced by November or December. The cornerstone had been laid in 1988 by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Dreaming and planning began some quarter of a century before. No announcement came; instead, the opening was then delayed in 2001 in favor of a six-week trial run." Director Ismail Serageldin said the facility needed at least four more months of construction work.

In April 2002, President Mubarak cancelled the scheduled official opening because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the library hosted "a gathering of international Friends" instead and called it an "unofficial opening." By the time the library did officially open—six months later, AL had reduced its coverage of the momentous event to four short paragraphs at the tail end of the news section.

The next time the Bibliotheca Alexandrina was mentioned in AL was when Sohair Wastawy left her job as dean of libraries at IIT and returned to her native Egypt to become director, a move she called "a distinctive and extraordinary opportunity."

Five years later, talking with Wastawy in Egypt about what the last three years have meant for her, she said it has been an amazing journey. "I took people off the street," she said, "and turned them into librarians." Her staff of 250 is composed primarily of the young and ambitious. As director of the library operation in this multi-facility library/museum/planetarium complex, Wastawy has spent three years working "nights, weekends, 18-hour days." The results have to be seen to be believed.

In a nation whose economy has slid distinctly downhill over the past 20 years, where 40% of the population is illiterate, and where an equal number of people live on one-to-two dollars a day, the library stands facing the Mediteranean Sea. Although details of its dates and demise are sketchy, it stood, scholars believe, very near the site of the new library.

I walked through the ruins of another ancient library on my visit. Wastawy called it a "daughter library" of the original Bibliotheca Alexandrina and joked that it was "the world's first extension service." I was reminded that the last news item we published about the Bibliotheca Alexandrina was in May when the BA signed an agreement with the Library of Congress to cooperate in building a World Digital Library.

Biblioteca Alexandrina Director Ismail Serageldin and Chief Librarian Sohair Wastawy in May 2007.

Speaking with BA Director Ismail Serageldin is speaking to a man inspired.He talked about his passion for books and his drive to make the Bibliotheca Alexandrina one of the top libraries in the world, observing that the library has in its new incarnation tried “to recreate almost on the same spot that wonderful adventure of the human mind and human spirit that the ancient Library of Alexandria was.” He believes that the mission is still the same: intercultural dialogue, the pursuit of knowledge, and the organization of universal knowledge, promoting rationality, pluralism, dialogue, and understanding.” Fulfilling the mission,” Serageldin said, “in a different world with different tools, is a major contribution that Egypt is trying to undertake with many friends from all over the world and in a time when, regretfully, obscurantism, fanaticism, and xenophobia are rampant in many parts of the world."

"Libraries and books both of them have a wonderful future ahead of them," Serageldin told me. "Libraries are going to be the portals through which people will go on that marvelous journey of discovery whether it be to imaginary lands to the historical past or to understand the marvels of cutting edge science it will all be organized by libraries but available online."

You can watch a short video about the Bibliotheca Alexandrina on American Libraries Focus.

Saad Eskander

Saad Eskander is the director of the National Library and Archives in Iraq. We talked for nearly an hour by telephone April 14. It’s hard to explain why, but after our conversation, during which I tried very hard to maintain a PBS-like composure, I sat at my desk at the American Library Association and cried. The gentle, brave voice of this man, coming to me from the other side of the world made me understand, as I never have in the nearly five years of this disgraceful war, how the conflict in Iraq, like every other murderous conflagration, is about the innocent people caught in its chaos.

Eskander is a librarian, with a wife and young child, who returned to Iraq from England to take the job at the National Library in 2003, hopeful that a reformed and democratic nation could somehow rise from disaster. He found the library in virtual ruin. He and his staff—now numbering 400—set about rebuilding the library into what they hope will be something better than it was before. It has already become a safe (relatively speaking) haven for intellectual activity, accessible to the public (although it occasionally closed due to shelling), with a state-of-the-art computer center.

Our interview began with Eskander thanking me for calling. It hit me immediately that in this age of instant communication and virtual meetings, none of us at American Libraries had ever actually picked up the phone and tried to call our colleagues in Iraq who are living the nightmare. Why not? We’d done reports, gathered information from secondary sources. When it did occur to me to call, Mary-Jane Deeb at the Library of Congress happily supplied his contact information. LC has actually been in touch with Eskander and brought him to Washington last year.

Our conversation started out great, his voice as clear as if he were in the next room, but after my first question, it suddenly became muffled and almost incomprehensible. I stopped the tape and asked him if there was anything he could do about it. He told me that he had begun the conversation with the window open, to take advantage of a nearby transmission tower. But then he added that it was unwise for him to stand at an open window (in his own home) and speak loudly in English.

We struggled through the conversation. I kept stopping the tape and asking him to speak up, but he clearly could not, and some of his replies because almost inaudible and I had to figure them out through repeated playings after the interview. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine this gentle man determinedly answering questions from a colleague he’d never met, while the threat of bullets and mortar shells hung over his home. “What have we done?” I kept asking myself. Five of his staff members have been killed and several others kidnapped, he told me.

Why would you leave a safe life in England and risk such danger for sake of the National Library, I asked. He said he wanted to play a role in the cultural revival of his native country and prevent “extreme values and extreme jealousies” from dominating “our cultural life here in Baghdad and the rest of the country.”

I asked him if he thought a U.S pullout would help or hinder his efforts. “Only the extremists will benefit from the withdrawal of foreign forces,” he asserted, his voice suddenly almost pleading for me to understand what an immediate withdrawal would unleash.

At the end of our conversation, I felt humbled by his conviction, his commitment to democracy, civility, freedom, and the preservation of the human record—all the things libraries represent. My professionalism softening, I said to Eskander that I hoped we would talk again. I visualized him (for I’d seen pictures), speaking to me from the other side of the world, huddled in his home, which he said must change every year “for security reasons.”

I wanted to invite Eskander to join me for dinner, to spend an evening in Chicago, where we could talk into the wee hours about all the things that connect us as librarians. Under the most awkward and artificial constraints, he spoke articulately, in beautiful English, and I was struck by the quiet urgency in his voice. He asked me to stay in touch and to let his colleagues in the United States know that it is their letters and e-mails that sustain him. He joked about my “American accent.”

Later that day, as I climbed back into my life, I wanted to call Eskander back and tell him to just leave, to just get out now, before the U.S. withdrawal, which seems inevitable and will no doubt lead to even more of a bloodbath than the invasion.

In this centennial year of American Libraries, we’ve been looking back at our coverage of war over 10 decades, and it becomes clear very quickly that our coverage of the conflict in Iraq has been pretty thin. We’ve dutifully reported on controversial ALA Council resolutions calling for an end to the war, and we reported on the destruction of the National Library in 2003, but there is no sense in our pages, as there was during World War II, that it is everyone’s role to help win this war. In fact, Americans have been asked to sacrifice little or nothing at home. In fact, on May 1, 2003, President Bush declared victory in Iraq: “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed, and now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” After my phone call to Baghdad, I don’t know what to make of any of it.

Read the transcript of the American Libraries interview on American Libraries Online. Listen to an interview with Eskander at www.pbs.org and read his diary at www.bl.uk.

—Leonard Kniffel, Editor in Chief, American Libraries