Towering Babels? Arabic and/as Other Languages

Two interesting posts about language(s) today, first from blogger Lameen Souag, who is studying translation at SOAS, and keeps the blog Jabal al-Lughat blog, where a fascinating discussion is flowing about "French among Algeria's elite" and the place of Arabic and Berber in Algerian culture, politics and literature. It's an informed debate around a complex issue, showing how language is tied up with all sorts of identities: national, ethnic, classed, generational, and political.

The Washington Times, on the other hand, boobs in its review of Rafik Schami's The Dark Side of Love, claiming that Anthea Bell translated the book "from the Syrian." The Literary Review and Three Percent are all over this mistaken claim, with Chad Post pointing out that - among other things - Bell is probably one of the best-known translators from German: the language in which the book was first published in 2004. Schami's novel does cover an epic sweep of Syrian history, but he moved to Germany in 1971.

World Literature/Literature and the World: Three Views

It's the beginning of literary festival season, and Chad Post at Three Percent has been travelling to many of them, including Montréal's Metropolis Bleu festival, which claims to be the world's first multilingual literary festival; in this rather breathless post he contemplates Canada's "two solitudes" and the implications for global publishing at large -- and gives a sense of the new transnationality of the publishing business.

Over at NewPages, Denise offers a post on the "conundrum" of world literature that picks up on two recent articles about the topic, including Pankaj Mishra's Author, Author column from last Saturday's Guardian Review, which offers a Marxist analysis of "world" literature as a globalised market. Her other pick is a Reuters article concerning the lack of circulation of contemporary Chinese writing. One of the article's sub-heads refers to the "Banned in China" brand, supported by a quote from Jo Lusby of Penguin:

Oftentimes 'banned in China' is the only selling point publishers can use to communicate what the book is about. I don't think it's surprising it's not necessarily the big literary tomes from China which are making it out, but it's the more racy, pacey books.

While censorship may help foreign rights sales, it still "hurts" writers' careers inside China, as Yan Geling comments in the article. The global market is not bringing freedom of expression to the country, in other words.

An article on the AFP about Arabic literature suggests that the fashion for translating banned or controversial books is an extension of Orientalism, whereby only works that conform to (and flatter) Western notions of oppression and liberation get picked up for translation. Lebanese author Jabbour Doueihy makes a sharp critique of the current boom in Arabic novels when he tells the AFP,

Individualism and the ego awoke in the Arab world through the novel, as though it were personal resistance against oppression.

Fakhri Salih, a former jury member for the award and current chairman of Jordan's association of literary critics added that the small upturn in translation, media attention and international funding for Arabic novels stems from a political motivation:

The Arab novel offers Westerners an 'anthropological' tool to understand the Arab world, which has been accused of terrorism since the September 11 attacks.

Yet this 'anthropological' depth of understanding is exactly what Reuters argue that translations from contemporary Chinese literature could offer to Western readers, rather than the equally 'anthropological' titillations of sexual explicitness. NewBooks is right: world literature is a conundrum. Where all the articles agree is that translation is of paramount importance for increasing access internationally, and that the motivations of literature's gatekeepers (both state and corporate) have to be scrutinised, as they have power over what we read and how.

Darwish Therapy in Athens Airport

A beautiful post about poetry in motion (and in everyday life, both lived and virtual) by Palestinian blogger Raising Yousuf.

__Updated__

Global Voices provides some context on Raising Yousuf blogger Laila El-Haddad's airport purgatory. El-Haddad offers up this thought as a larger context for her own recent experience of being refused entry into Gaza, her home:

“The quintessential Palestinian experience,” historian Rashid Khalidi has written, “takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified.”

Digital Democracy in the Arab World: The Good News

First up, a new project brought to my attention by Body on the Line: R-Shief (Arabic for archive): describes itself as

an initiative in the field of knowledge production that distinguishes a contemporary Arab transnational public as an emerging voice on the world stage deserving serious attention given this community’s role in current geopolitical, international, and transcultural agendas.

Part-library, part-journal, all online, R-Shief offers both speed and accessibility, and includes non-traditional research methods such as "digital video, personal narratives in the form of blogs, collaborative production models and other mixed media." Its current focus is on Gaza; you can contact initiator Laila Shereen to discuss adding or using material.

And revisiting a story from the early days of this blog: the case of Magdy elShafee's graphic novel Metro is coming to trial in Egypt. Global Voices (who published excerpts from Metro in translation) published an open letter from AlShafee asking for support -- and this is what makes it good news, despite the prosecution -- from the global blogosphere, which has taken up the case. AlShafee writes:

Next Saturday April 4th, A court session scheduled for the trial of Magdy El Shafie and Mohammed El Sharkawy (Malameh Publishing House) for distributing, publishing and selling the graphic novel “Metro”,

Your NO for confiscation

Is YES for our freedom

Is YES for our solidarity

Is NOOOOO for the government prelude of harder stringing of freedom of the art and word, in the press, the satellites, the internet and now the independent publishing houses. We invite you to say: NO for metro confiscation and trial, Support freedom of arts and expression

Metro is considered the first graphic novel in Egypt. written and illustrated by Magdy El Shafee who won the UNESCO gratitude for best African comics 2006

Egyptian government officials said the book was “harmful to public manners” due to its alleged political and social commentary.

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (HRinfo) - a pan-Arabic network that promotes freedom of speech has rejected the confiscation of the novel and considers it a severe violation against the freedom of expression.

With the coming court session next saturday April 4th, HRinfo and 4 human rights organizations announced a new condemnation in March 30th entitled: [Egypt`s Farouk Hosny goes to UNESCO, and Magdy Elshafee goes to the court!! the auther of Egypt's graphic novel “metro” threatened with 2 years jail sentence.] ([in Arabic])

We look for your solidarity; on your blog. Add a comment here [in Arabic] and here [in Arabic] and on Facebook and here.

We lean on your being there in Abdeen court, down town Cairo 9 am Naguib metro station next saturday April 4th.

best regards.
–

Magdy ElShafee
comics artist

Add your voice -- here as well! -- to the outcry against this trial and the original confiscation.

Updated 3/4/09
Marwa Rakha has a comprehensive update on the online coverage of the trial and ElShafee's campaign in today's Global Voices.

“In Gaza, we are subject to news but cannot see TVs.”

That's how Ayesha Saldanha titles her round-up of Palestinian bloggers today on Global Voices (who also have fascinating and necessary round ups from Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, as well as round-ups focused on reactions to the Gaza bombings from Chile and Taiwan). Tel Aviv-based blogger Lisa Goldman is using her access to technology to gather voices, events and stories from the "other side," documenting protest marches in Israel, calling friends in Gaza and reporting their stories, and linking to blogs and video from across the web. Saldanha's moving pull-quote attests to two ways in which the internet can offer a space for alternative voices: first of all, it allows those who "cannot see TVs" (and are not often invited to speak on them) to see the news, and moreover to make it; second of all, it builds global community, where those who can see the TVs a) get an alternative perspective that may balance media bias; b) can offer support to those blogging (in various ways, for example Saldanha is posting SMS messages from her friend Hasan in Rafah who has no internet access); and c) can shift perspective from seeing certain populations or individuals as "subject to news" to seeing them as agents, and as full members of the human community.

Blogs, of course, extend what literature has been doing for millennia -- through narratives that touch on commonalities (whether it's the sense that "we're all bloggers -- I could be blogging from Rafah, what would that be like?" or details of daily life lived differently) that can encourage us to walk in another's shoes. Social networking, again like literature, can also be used as propaganda -- bloggers are alternately (cynically) impressed by and outraged at the Israeli government's use of Twitter to hold press conferences and dominate news cycles. Whatever the reaction, it's an example of governments recognising the power of the medium: Anthony Lowenstein of The Blogging Revolution has a great story today about the Iraqi Revolutionary Guards Corp setting up 10, 000 blogs to counter the perceived liberalism of the Iraqi blogosphere.

It's a truism but here goes: the internet moves faster than literature. That's its advantage -- for example, this Gaza care package campaign organised through Facebook -- and its disadvantage, as misinformation spreads wildly and the source with the fastest broadband (or any power and phone lines at all) wins. History has always been written by the victors, but now the victors can write it from their mobile phones in the midst of the battle, shaping global response as well as posterity. So blogs that emerge from communities that have less access to technology (and to power in both the political and electrical senses) stand as an important bulwark against the complete eradication of their side of the story. Sites like Global Voices and toot perform a critical function in gathering these voices into a shout, focused and centralised.

In doing so, they act like old-fashioned publishers, selecting and honing the voices that surround us. Novels and poetry, too, are an important bulwark, a record of diverse voices. Some would argue that they are more accessible (to writers) and influential (to readers) than the internet, as a poem can be passed from hand to hand, and mouth to mouth, a novel smuggled out in sections if it has to be. Books are seen as custoded, collected, polished: a longer-lasting, more penetrating, and more effective representation of a situation, narrative, identity, image. And yet the gatekeepers are many, not least the gatekeeper of translation which means that many voices who are celebrated in their own linguistic culture don't reach ears beyond it. For English-language readers, that makes the value of books such as I Saw Ramallah, The Butterfly's Burden, and the novels of Elias Khoury invaluable, along with the promotion and support offered by PEN's Writers in Translation programme and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature.

I Saw Ramallah, with its announcement of witnessing as direct action and reclaiming the narrative voice, directly addresses the panic and powerlessness captured in Saldanha's quotation from Professor Said Abdelwahed, as reported in the Moments in Gaza blog. But its author Mourid Barghouti has also recently joined Facebook, posting poems old and new (in Arabic) as well as more diary-like entries that amplify his poetry's connection to, and influence on, his readers.

Digital technology offers dizzying possibilities to move from subject to storyteller, for those who can access them. The waves of rage, love, hate, anguish, activism and emotion pouring forth in the blogosphere can't, and don't aim to, replace poetry, but they uphold the spirit of art: "KEEP MAKING THINGS WITH WHATEVER YOU HAVE."

Arabic as a Sacred Language

From BBC News:

The highest authority of Sunni Islam, al-Azhar University in Cairo, says it has approved the first interpretation of the Koran by a woman. Sheikh Ali Abdelbaqi Mitwali told the daily al-Masri al-Youm that al-Azhar has approved the interpretation (tafseer) submitted by Kariman Hamza, a former broadcaster. Books in Egypt dealing with the Koran or Islamic tradition have to secure the approval of al-Azhar before publication,

which is a pretty big publishing hurdle. Hamza, a religious broadcaster, has been subject to criticism from religious conservatives for her previous work Rifqan bil-Qawarir, a religious guide for women, as Fedwa Malti-Douglas discusses in "Female Body, Male Gaze" in her book Medicines of the Soul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a Transnational Islam. But she is also famous as one of the few -- and possibly the first -- veiled woman television presenter. Refreshingly (given the Pope's view of the fixity of binary gender)

Sheikh Mitwali said there was no such thing as a "male" or "female" reading of the holy book and that "what mattered for us was that the interpretation was in line with the text of the sacred Koran and that it did not contradict the rulings of Sharia".

Blogger Bint Battuta in Bahrain picks up a Pakistani blog from Global Voices that has an entertaining take on how Arabic's sacred status as the language of the Quran informs behaviour in Muslim communities outside the Arabic world. As S

ub Corollary of 4-II: Everything has an ‘Al’ behind it. It is ‘Al-Mc Donalds’ and ‘Al Basmati Rice’. If you want, you can call your children ‘Al-Children’ and you would be a better person for it.

demonstrates, this doesn't necessarily relate to fluency in Arabic or a deeper religious or cultural understanding...

So happy al-holidays (and good reading) to all PEN Atlas readers!

Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraqi National Library & Archives

Last week, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals made Saad Eskander, the Director of the Iraqi National Library and Archive since 2003, an Honorary Fellow in a moving ceremony at the British Library. The Chartered Institute of Librarians and Information Professionals usually awards its Honorary Fellowships in October, but Dr. Eskander could not attend – and it seems appropriate that he received the award during the Taking Liberties exhibition at the BL, celebrating the 60th anniversary of UDHR. It was particularly appropriate that the ceremony took place at the BL.

The British Library have been working with the Iraqi National Library and Archive since 2004 (when it seemed like stabilisation might occur quickly). They provided surrogate copies, from their own collections, of documents and books that had been destroyed, including India Office records for 1914-21, which covered the creation of the Iraqi state, and rare books and manuscripts of national significance. In 2007, the BL spearheaded an appeal for donations of university textbooks in social sciences, receiving an overwhelming response. Aided by the Department of Culture, Media and Sports, the BL has digitised 20,000 pages of India Office records and 300 maps of Iraq from its collection to add to the INLA’s digitisation project. The INLA’s digitisation work is so advanced that it has recently signed an agreement with the Library of Congress to participate in a global digitisation project.

In 2003, the INLA was the most damaged cultural institution in Iraq. Even before the invasion, its collections were 30 years out of date due to heavy censorship and a lack of an accession policy. During and just after the invasion, 60% of the archives, 25% of ordinary collections and almost all rare books were looted. In 2004, the library had re-opened its doors despite having few facilities and with the collections still in disarray. In 2006-07, it remained open under direct bombing, sniper fire and even occupation by the Iraqi army. Five library staff have been unlawfully killed since 2003, as have 69 of their relatives; four staff have been kidnapped, and they have faced over 120 threats of death and displacement. And yet the staff numbers have continued to grow, from 95 in 2003 up to 425, with increasing numbers of qualified staff, who have training opportunities within the library and with international partners. They are unionised within a democratised internal structure.

Saad Eskander, who implements these changes, was appointed director of the INLA in 2003. From November 2006 to July 2007, he wrote a blog about the reconstruction of the library and archive, and about providing access to the collections while under attack. Email, Dr. Eskander said, acted as a connection to the outside world, while the president of CILIP described the blogs as “powerful, independent and courageous witness.” For Dr. Eskander, he added work of the library is deeply involved in “the formation of national identity and civil society, and in the dissemination of democratic and humanistic values.”

Read more about the Archive's amazing survival in The Nation, about its collections in the Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy, about documents removed from Iraq in WITNESS Media Archive and in an essay by Dr. Eskander, and a full report on Iraqi libraries from the University of Chicago. And you can join the INLA's Facebook group for news updates.

Tomorrow: Dr. Eskander's speech at the British Library. Later in the week: a q&a with Dr. Eskander -- post your questions for him in the comments!

Freedom to Blog?

Siobhain Butterworth, the Guardian Readers' Editor, had a comment piece in the paper on Monday about the Free Speech and the Internet conference that took place at Cumberland Lodge last week. English PEN director Jonathan Heawood summed up his experience of the conference as part of the Guardian's multi-authored blog on on the issue. Heawood concludes that he:

came away from the conference convinced that we need to strengthen the international human rights framework if we are to realise the internet's capacity for freedom of speech. For this reason I believe we need an international treaty on the internet – not to encourage censorship, but to underwrite freedom of speech. One contributor to the conference suggested that the internet has "globalised the First Amendment".

Unfortunately, this simply isn't true for bloggers in Iran, Egypt, China and elsewhere who have been imprisoned for expressing their views or transmitting information online. Nor is it true for those of us whose searches are blocked, whose downloads are monitored, and whose postings are subject to "take-down" notices without any right of reply.

He points out that even in the UK and US, where democracy and freedom of speech are supposedly universal rights,

National legislators are struggling to keep up. Where they do create laws on the internet, they often do so badly, or without regard to the consequences. Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 creates an offence out of downloading material which might be useful to a terrorist. It led to the detention of a junior academic at Nottingham University who was legitimately researching terrorism.

The case brought home to (perhaps complacent) UK internet users the extent to which their web use (even on a personal computer, from home) is monitored, for political as well as commercial reasons.

It's a reality that bloggers in the Middle East and China face far more explicitly -- but the internet also gives them a way not only to speak out against censorship, blocking, take-downs, and arrests, but to be heard globally. Global Voices today has statistics on internet use in Egypt from Bloggers Times [Ar], showing (unbelievably) that

the number of internet users in Egypt increased from 650,000 users in 2000 to 9,170,000 users in 2008.

Marwa Rakha, who translates the blog, notes that

One in every three people in the sample [of 1,338 Egyptians 18-35] has a blog.

and that 89% of them are in favour of an internet censorship law, details unspecified.

There's a contrasting view from blogger Khalid in Bahrain, who writes (in Amira Al-Husseini's translation) hopefully that in the blogosphere:

Writing has become without limits, or outside the scope of being limited

. Like Heawood, he believes that

writing today needs a code of conduct, and what is this code? Who will write it? Who will approve it? The government, or the people, or the writers, or the intellectuals, or the clergymen? There will continue to be writings, and these writings will remain outside the restrictions.

Freedom of Expression: Covering All the Angles

Egyptian novelist and blogger Marwa Rakha has posted an English translation of fellow Egyptian blogger Hanan El Sherif's discussion of blog censorship and online community at Global Voices. It's a fascinating angle, from the blogger community, on the rights and responsibilities being discussed by policy-makers, editors, lawyers and journalists at PEN's conference this week.

The online community, particularly in Iran and throughout the Middle East and North Africa, is very reflective and supportive, with bloggers openly discussing government censorship and persecution of other bloggers, with an emphasis on "strength in numbers" speaking up and campaigning for the release of bloggers, for freedom of speech. Bloggers are quick to draw attention to the censorship or blocking of particular sites. It acts as a powerful argument for online *community* and that community's ability to set its own boundaries (distinguishing, for example, defamation from valid comment) and to defend its members.

Journalists have faced this kind of censorship and intimidation for years, and have developed a number of organisations such as Reporters Without Borders and International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) to collect information, such as the number of reporters killed on the job (up 244% between 2002-2007), to make headlines and provide a unified front.

Perhaps bloggers need a grassroots-generated focal point for drawing up online behaviour charters and for rallying to bloggers' defense -- something along the lines of OnlinePEN, or a union (something freelance writers in North America have been working towards for decades) or CARA, the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics, which has just announced its 2008 conference. Between 3rd and 5th December, attendees will learn about CARA's history, present and future, and about current issues affecting refugee academics finding work and publishing.

They are currently focusing on the plight of Iraqi academics, and are fundraising for two dedicated fellowship schemes via an emergency appeal for Iraqi academics, shadowed by a chilling list of Iraqi academics assassinated in the five years since the invasion.

Alive! Blogging and the Resurrection of the Author

Susannah Tarbush reviews Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road to Damascus, and draws on the author's 'qunfuz' blog - and specifically a recent post about his wife's decision to wear the hijab - to draw parallels between the author and his main character. The article appeared in an edited version in Observer Woman magazine (and on the Guardian website) on November 02, 2008.

It's a small detail, perhaps -- a reviewer linking a perhaps common thought about a book (that it's timely, contemporary, that the author knows whereof he speaks) to a piece of the author's non-fiction autobiographical writing. But it's also a giant leap: a return to the idea of the living author, whose bodily, historical presence and experience might just have something to do with his or her writing. It's a thought that hardly comes as a shock to most readers -- after all, there are author bios on the flap of every book (and sometimes extended interviews and reading guides, often with biographical information, included at the end of the book), many authors also practice a lucrative sideline in op-ed or cultural journalism, and some are even gossiped-about celebrities (and some celebrities have become authors).

But the academy pronounced the author dead in the 1960s -- a profoundly liberating move for critical reading, releasing the critic from the burden of deciphering (the only possible) meaning as intended by the author. But as many feminist theorists have pointed out, that revelation happened at exactly the moment that people were starting to look critically at exactly who got to be an author, and realising that it was mainly white, upper- and middle-class, middle-aged men. As the end of colonialism, the spread of education, and new technological revolutions in publishing made the act of writing more available to the silent majority, untold stories both global and local began to translate -- for the first time -- into print, often closely hewn from the author's experience of a life that had not been described in fiction.

The internet has made publishing and storytelling even more immediate, with the proliferation of blogs (check out toot for a bewildering and wonderful range of Arabic blogging voices, and Anthony Loewenstein's excellent book The Blogging Revolution for an introduction to further voices, and a serious consideration of what this explosion in communications means for goverment, media and global culture). As well as increasing the number of voices, the internet increases the speed with which they can speak up, and with which readers can access them. In the past, readers might have waited much longer for a memoiristic piece by Yassin-Kassab that allowed them to make an incidental, but profound, connection between the events of his life while he was writing and the events of the novel he wrote.

On her blog the tanjara, starbush (who also reports on lots of author events where living, breathing authors meet their readers) is recognising what readers have always known: the author is palpably alive in the text. That doesn't mean we have to read the book as the writer wants us to, or read only for the things the writer tells us about him- or herself -- but it allows us to connect the book -- politically, emotionally, culturally -- to the moment in which we, too, are alive. It personalises the process of creating fiction, drawing us to look at our world, to think differently about aspects we may take for granted -- to think *inventively* about them, about their stories -- and that's part of the excitement (as well as political value and social justice, according to a recent University of Manchester/LSE study that showed novels can best communicate global dilemmas such as poverty) of reading fiction.

No Frontiers? Free Speech and the Internet conference

Describing itself as

A conference for bloggers, policy makers, human rights activists, internet moguls, educationalists, and parents

, this three-day event (no horse-riding, though) kicks off tomorrow at Cumberland Lodge conference centre in Surrey, UK. It's presented in association with the 21st Century Trust and English PEN and has a sterling line-up of speakers, including pioneering online journalist Isobel Hilton, Index on Censorship editor Jo Glanville, and Guardian Readers' Editor Siobhan Butterworth. As well as discussions and presentations, there are opportunities for in-depth conversations at meals -- or while walking in Windsor Great Park.

Salt's Cyclone Blows in Author Blog Tours

Salt Publishing have come up with an eco-friendly, credit-non-crunching promotion scheme: Book Tours 2.0. Called Cyclone, it's a wily (and top secret 'til right now) project to create 'virtual book tours' that allow authors to reach out online to the phenomenal litblogging community, and brings Salt readers into that community. Authors Charles Lambert and Tania Hershman will be the first to take part in blog tours, dropping in on litbloggers for interviews, guest posts, and reader Q&As. Each writer will tour to specifically selected blogs, so Cyclone itself becomes a kind of aggregator, showcasing litblogs.

The Cyclone virtual tour offers writers an opportunity to connect with readers globally without air travel, a great model for smaller independent publishers looking to get their books and writers circulating internationally. It remains to be seen how Salt will solve the problem of book signing, a crucial component of any author meeting -- perhaps adopting Margaret Atwood's long-distance signing method, the LongPen?

And more campaigning writers... [Updated]

A link forwarded by Susan Schultz, poet, publisher, professor and Red Sox fan -- PoetryPolitic, a 50-day election run-up blog in poems by the Wave Books community of US poets, including the late Hayden Carruth (d. October 6, 2008).

Here are your "big dialogue" American writers, Mr. Engdahl (and commentators who focus on the Roth/Updike canon) -- non-parochial, experimental, resonant, collaborative, political, lyrical, outspoken. And tech-savvy: embedded and downloadable MP3s available for all the poems, and videos for some.

[Updated 13/10]

And, from the UK, 42 writers campaigning against the government's planned 42-day pre-charge detention, as part of Liberty's "Charge or Release" campaign. Organisers Hari Kunzru, Simon Prosser and Anya Serota comment:

It is a measure of the unpopularity of the proposed legislation that not a single writer declined to contribute on the grounds that they in fact supported it. Whereas 42 of the best novelists, essayists, memoirists, poets and journalists around sent us the uniquely powerful contributions you will read on this site.

We Are All Laila Day: October 19

Amira al Husseini at Global Voices reports on the development of a unique blogging community in Egypt. We Are All Laila [Ar] started in September 2006 as an online conversation between a few women who identified themselves as (and with) Laila, the protagonist of Latifa al-Zayyat's groundbreaking novel The Open Door. al-Zayyat, a leftwing campaigner and distinguished professor of literary studies at Ain-Shams University, wrote The Open Door (al-Bab al-Maftuh) in 1960. As Amal Amireh at al-Jadid notes, like the author's,

Layla’s psychological, social, and political growth takes place in the context of the years from 1946 to 1956 — years that witnessed the revolt against the British and the Palace, the Free Officer’s Revolution of 1952, Jamal Abdul Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, and the Israeli-British-French attack that followed.

Amireh continues:

The same novel is now “an impossibility,” al-Zayyat said a few years ago [in the mid 1990s]. When she wrote it she shared with her audience a common language and a common vision. But things have changed. According to her, “roads to salvation are blocked; the common ground of shared values seem to break down into multiple different sets of values according to the varied social strata; the common sensibility and its language is no more; people lacking national unity are divided and subdivided until each is turned into an insular island.” One Egyptian critic recently wrote that his female students don’t see themselves in the heroine of The Open Door. They no longer believe that what Layla achieves by the end of the book is possible for them.

Yet We Are All Laila demonstrates that, ten years later, Laila is once again a role model who offers shared values to a group of Egyptian women connected by the internet, which offers the opportunity for the reclamation and mobilisation of a "common language and a common vision."

On October 19 2008, the bloggers at We Are All Laila will be:

asking specific questions, carefully selected by a few friends, which concern the status of Egyptian girls and women, in particular, and Egyptians, in general. The objective is to develop a dialogue stemming from the responses to better understand ourselves and those around us.

Laila was the writer's dream: a character larger than her novel, who embodies the hopes and thoughts of a generation -- and now she is taking life and shape again from a new generation.

Publishing is Dead. Long Live Publishing.

As John Walsh wrote this weekend in the Independent:

A transatlantic debate is currently raging about whether a decade of staring at computer screens, sending emails and text messages, and having our research needs serviced instantly by Google and Wikipedia, has taken a terrible toll on our attention, until our brains have been reconfigurated and can no longer adjust the tempo of our mental word-processing to let us read a book all the way through.

Over at Booksquare, blogger Kassia Krozer has a pointed analysis of the New York Magazine article that caused the internet vs. reading debate to blow up:

What is really meant by this, and what is really meant by this article is that a certain segment of the publishing industry is in jeopardy: literary (with a capital L) fiction. More specifically, literary fiction from New York publishers. Look at who is doing the hand-wringing, who is doing the worrying. If this is the end (and it’s not), then what, exactly, is ending?

This is where the New York Magazine piece misses the boat. It sees publishing through the eyes of the literary crowd, not the reading, writing, publishing crowd.

Reader-oriented news and review blogs like Booksquare, Bookninja, Bookslut, and lit-blogging metablog My Friend Amy… are becoming increasingly influential in readers' and publishers' decision-making -- the LibraryThing blog gets sent hundreds of pre-release books every month for the site's users to review.

As the publishing industry negotiates digital publishing and readership, with all its technical and copyright issues, it remains to be seen whether book blogs, the Kindle, Salt's revitalisation through an online store and digital magazine, and other innovations represent an accommodation between an older form that is struggling to retain its identity, or an emerging, shifting hybrid through which book publishing and the internet will change each other. Who could have predicted that Amazon, which started out as an online bookstore, would come to define online (and, for booksellers, offline) retail?

Walsh's article begins with the image of a reader at a café table making notes on the Hemingway novel that he is reading. Perhaps the Internet catches readers' attention most when it expands this function: Amazon reviews, virtual book groups, unlimited essay space courtesy of blogging software -- and an attentive community with which to share, hone and exchange insights. In a sense, the PEN Atlas acts like a Facebook for books -- or more specifically an OurSpace for readers, writers, publishers, bloggers, translators and browsers.

Welcome to the Blogging Revolution

Following the publication of a number of influential blooks from the Middle East, including those by Salam Pax and Riverbend, Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein has collected together interviews with bloggers based in repressive regimes in his book The Blogging Revolution, which he's been talking about on SBS Radio Arabic and in today's Guardian. He asserts that citizen journalism and new media publishing can literally change the world, by providing freedom of information from within countries where media is closely state-controlled, and can allow internet users around the world to make connections with one another.

With the Online World Atlas, PEN hopes to become part of that revolution -- not least because good-news stories like Loewenstein's are balanced by increasingly frequent site closures and arrests of bloggers such as Moroccan Mohammed Erraji. The blogging revolution - like all change - needs _you_: send us links to news stories, new publications, great blogs, good books and interesting discussions.

As Loewenstein points out, "Allowing people to speak and write for themselves without a western filter is one of the triumphs of blogging. The online culture, disorganised and disjointed in its aims, is unlike that of any previous social movement." Like international blog collector sites Global Voices and The Literary Saloon, or Syrian aggregator al-mudawen, the World Atlas blog collects some of the new voices being heard in this fertile landscape -- and we want you to add yours.