Documentation from the Arab Perspective (2/2)

The Qatar World Cup 2022 did not pass without reminding us that there are many differences between our pride in our values ​​and our Arab-Islamic affiliation, and the victory of others - despite their lack - of ideas that are not accepted by various cultures in the world.

The positions of some parties on false issues seemed to make us think, since the World Cup until now, about the need to present our identity and culture to the world from our perspective, and not from the perspective of those in whom the scourges of colonial thought remained perennial in their minds until our days.

That is why I was keen, during and after the World Cup, to call for documenting everything, because when we document, we do so with our perspective on life, our authentic culture, and our vision of our relationship with other cultures, while if others documented our present, they would undoubtedly give it a lot of their view and ideas.

We need to realize that documentation is not just a written or visual inventory of what happened, but rather the collection of all documents and presenting them from our angle, as we have to consider from our Arab history when the facts were presented from the angle of others, so our ancestors were oppressed, as well as our culture and civilization, and our image was distorted.

We must consider it from our Arab history when the facts were presented from the angle of others, so our ancestors were oppressed, as well as our culture and civilization, and our image was distorted (Al-Jazeera)

Let's look at that clever handling of the novelist Amin Maalouf in his book "The Crusades as the Arabs Saw It" when he returned to the documents of the Arab newsmen to confront with them the "facts" about the details of 200 years of conflict between the Franks and the Muslim Arabs, and what is surprising in the historical narrative that Maalouf created is his reference The first and confusing one is that the Arab newsmen did not use the term "Crusader wars", but rather used phrases such as "Frankish wars" or "invasions", but the West fabricated this term to turn the course of the relationship between the Arabs and him into a "religious" clash!

The West invented the term "Crusades" to turn the course of the relationship between the Arabs and them into a religious clash (Al-Jazeera)

Therefore, Maalouf clarifies his purpose for the book, saying: “The truth is that what we wanted to present is not another history book as much as it is, from a point of view that has been neglected until now, a “true account” about the Crusades and about these two turbulent centuries that made the West and the Arab world and still define it. To this day, their relationship.

And if Maalouf returned to extracting the documents of the ancients to correct history, today we will not wait for years and centuries to pass for our future generations to adopt our “present history” with the narration of others. Are we not the first to document our “narration” of our history?

This is the main goal of the bet on documentation. It is the demand of Arab generations who have lived for decades facing the image of our civilization from the angle of the West.

The book "The Crusades as the Arabs Saw It" by Amin Maalouf (Al-Jazeera)

I do not think that documenting an important historical event such as the World Cup is a Western matter, but it is a matter that concerns us before anyone else.

We document the facts based on what we lived through, and this basic principle of documentation is also a scientific starting point for what is called in historical studies the "history of the present time", as historians have returned to dealing with contemporary experience, including moving material and living memory, based on observing "witnesses". For what happened during a period when the past is close to the present, which is, in a nutshell, "the history of the recent past" to which we were part of the witnesses, before its expiration.

Qatar National Library has sought to carry out this historical and societal responsibility, since it has been working since its establishment to preserve the Arab-Islamic heritage as one of the most important pillars of its mission.

We stand in front of our current history as witnesses, so that we do not grasp awareness of it through others. Our Arab civilization has long been harmed by the Orientalist movement that documented and “achieved” our heritage. Other than the "upper hand" that has merit over the Arabs, and that the Orientalist movement is linked to colonialism on the one hand and to racism on the other.

A painting by Francois d'Orléans in the Orient in 1836 (Agencies)

The painting "A Street in Algeria" by the American orientalist Frederick Arthur Bridgman (communication sites)

The painting "The Gate of the Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus" by the German orientalist Gustav Bornfind (1848-1904) is one of the most famous paintings by foreign orientalists about Arabs and Muslims and was sold for approximately 2.5 million pounds sterling (communication sites)

Despite this, we cannot ignore the positive impact of the Orientalists, as they dusted off hundreds of manuscripts, did a bibliographical check of the Arabic manuscripts, issued catalogs of the most prominent Arabic manuscripts in the treasuries of European libraries, and studied the sources of Arab heritage, so they classified it, limited it, and documented it. The twelfth century AD deserves to be reviewed from our Arab perspective, just as we do not miss that these "oriental efforts" greatly benefited the religious, military and expansionist goals of Western countries, so we renew our statement of the seriousness of documentation, its objectives and the paths that sometimes control it.

We cannot ignore the positive impact of the orientalists, as they dusted off hundreds of manuscripts, but these contributions deserve to be reviewed (communication sites)

In view of the huge legacy of the manuscript heritage achieved by the orientalists, we have to pay attention to a very important issue, which is related to the methods of investigation. Therefore, there were many critical approaches to it without taking into account the fundamentals of notation among the Arabs, and a lot of ink was spilled about the processes of criticism, doubt and distortion of traditional sources, and that concern was transmitted to a number of Arab researchers and writers due to the impact of the Orientalist movement, and it became necessary to get rid of the Orientalist view of our heritage By developing an original curriculum that draws from the standards of Arab codification and documentation.

Painting "Eastern Harem Scene" by the Austrian orientalist Stefan Sedlicek (communication sites)

There is no doubt that interest in manuscripts and their preservation is part of the documentary awareness. In this context, the Qatar National Library has sought to carry out this historical and societal responsibility, because since its establishment it has been working to preserve the Arab-Islamic heritage as one of the most important pillars of its mission. The efforts of believers in this message have contributed to Providing the library with rare manuscripts and sources was the basic nucleus of the heritage collection, which included thousands of Arabic-Islamic manuscripts.

Qatar National Library (Qatar Library)

Sheikh Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, the founder of the state, took care of manuscripts and spent on printing them to provide them to students of knowledge in various Arab countries, and his son, Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, followed his approach when he endowed some manuscripts, as well as Sheikh Ali bin Abdullah Al Thani, who was known for his passion for science and books. He endowed his books in the Qatari Book House and in the Qatar Library in Al-Ahsa.

This cultural orientation created a suitable environment for Qatari intellectuals to take care of manuscripts. Most of the private libraries are rich in manuscripts, and they sought to acquire and benefit from them, so that they would be the talk of their councils and the nucleus of much of their knowledge.

A manuscript of the Holy Qur’an from China dating back to the last century (Qatar National Library)

It is not strange for the Qatar National Library to assume this responsibility and play its role in preserving manuscripts in a modern way, as the Heritage Library is full of manuscripts, documents, maps and rare photographs.

In order to provide a greater stock of manuscripts for the benefit of readers and researchers alike, Qatar National Library established a bridge to communicate with libraries, archives and international institutions to obtain digital copies of documents and manuscripts, and display them in the digital portal, which is the result of extended and solid partnerships in time with the British Library and Qatar Foundation.

The digitization project included nearly a million historical documents from the British archives related to the history of the region, and how much these documents facilitated our understanding of the Middle East region, which is a rich material for study that may convey to us the perspective of the other, but if we are aware of our culture and history, we study it from our angle and the approaches that nourish our vision and do not make us Unaware of realizing the facts in it.

And if we know that the huge archive known as the Records of the India Office erases nearly 9 miles of shelf space of the British Library, then we realize the importance nations attach to documents.

The huge archive known as the India Office Records erases nearly 9 miles of the British Library's shelves (networking sites)

We need documentation and we need to build a wide archive as well, because historical memory requires the existence of this archive, through which the individual as well as institutions can transform memory into an active force in the present. I have noticed in all my travels the extent to which the culture of documentation has spread in the countries of the world, especially Western countries. Where they train children from an early age to document their personal histories through photo albums, write notes about their trips, and record the simplest daily things, similar to what institutions do in archiving their history.

Documentation helps us, individuals and societies, from memory loss, and makes our recent past, after being classified in “heritage,” a material that belongs to us by various criteria. For all segments of society in a way that enhances their national memory. Therefore, documentation is part of a national work whose value is no less than building the means of progress in society. People cannot live without memory.

During my practical career, I made sure that my books are a kind of documentation of my life’s journey, as every book is a kind of documentation of a stage in my life.

I was often concerned with the literature of travels because of its documentary value, and I considered a person’s life more like a journey, and he only has to leave a mark on it and record what he deems fit for documentation for its benefit to himself and people, and I considered that the Arabs’ quest to document their travels helped us a lot from the uniqueness of Western narratives about our countries and peoples other.

Since the end of the ninth century AD, the Arab journeys with Al-Masoudi began to transmit geographical and historical facts, peoples' lifestyles, customs and traditions through experiences and observations.

And that is why we have come to the book “Meadows of Gold and Minerals of Essence”, which combines history, geography and politics, and the twelfth century AD was one of the most recorded centuries of travels. It contains a comprehensive picture of the Islamic world in the eighth century AH.

The book "Meadows of Gold and Minerals of Essence", which combined history, geography and politics (Al-Jazeera)

Ibn Jubair Al-Andalusi (communication sites)

The traveler Abu Abdullah Muhammad bin Abdullah, nicknamed Ibn Battuta (communication sites)

Journeys continued to our present era, passing through the era of the "Arab renaissance". Who can ignore the journey of Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, whose details he recorded in his book "Takhlees al-Abriz fi Telkhis Baris", showing the progress reached by the West at the end of the nineteenth century, and the impact of what he recorded on the movement of thought. And literature in the Arab generations.

We cannot deny the great role played by travel literature in transferring our Arab-Islamic perspective to the other and in showing the nature of our thinking and our reception of human civilization in different historical times.

The book Tahlis al-Ibriz in the Parisian summary of the thinker Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (Al-Jazeera)

Egyptian thinker Rifaa Rafi al-Tahtawi (communication sites)

I was aware early on of all these deep dimensions of travel literature and the importance of documentation wherever I went. My diplomatic responsibilities when I served as ambassador for my country in more than one country allowed me to learn about the cultures of peoples and to document what I wrote about the major issues that preoccupied me and preoccupied Arab culture. And Settlements: The First Gulf War and the Security Council" is to some extent a documentation of the issue that preoccupied me with my fellow ambassadors of the Arab Gulf states during my work as a delegate for my country at the United Nations in New York on the Security Council's dealings with the Iran-Iraq war.

The book "Controversial Battles and Settlements: The First Gulf War and the Security Council" is a documentation of the issue of the Security Council's dealings with the Iran-Iraq war (Al-Jazeera)

In my book “On the Destiny of the People of Determination” I documented my work as Minister of Information and then of Culture, Heritage and the Arts, and this is not evidence of what I intended to document about the “Doha Capital of Arab Culture in 2010” event, the event that transformed Doha into an Arab cultural center. Culture in the Arab world, in which I lived, including Cairo and Beirut, and recorded my observations about the museums that I knew, including the "Louvre", "Metropolitan Museum", "Museum of Islamic Art", and "National Museum of Qatar", which are documented works accompanied by my opinions and my intellectual positions.

Signing the book "On the Destiny of the People of Determination" by the President of Qatar National Library, Dr. Hamad Al-Kuwari (Al-Jazeera)

As for my books “The Injustice of the Kinsmen” and “Bridges Not Walls”, they are accurate documentation of my candidacy and my path towards the presidency of UNESCO and the challenges I faced during this journey. There is no doubt that the documentary data in them will contribute to presenting that experience from the angle of the Arabs and not from the angle of “ Western media”, I hastened to document it so that time would not pass on its details and some of them would be forgotten. The need for memory is inevitable, and how much we need to record our own experiences that are directly related to the homeland and the issues experienced by Arab societies. I was in those days A voice for Arab intellectuals who have long suffered from the exclusion of those who rant about human rights, cultural diversity, and equality between peoples.

Dr. Hamad Al-Kuwari: The book "Injustice of Relatives" contains accurate documentation of my journey towards the presidency of UNESCO and the challenges I faced during this journey (Al-Jazeera)

And my documentary work continued in my book “Musafir Zadeh Al-Jamal”, in which I recorded what Al-Qariha said in inspiring moments and was documented by technology. Everything is documented by text and image to remain a trace for generations, and I urge event makers to personally document their contributions for the benefit of their communities.

The book "A Traveler Made Beautiful" by Dr. Hamad Al-Kuwari, Head of the Qatar National Library, was published in an elegant edition, presenting the outcome of travel between many cities and capitals in the world (Al-Jazeera)