Syrian writer Khalil Sweileh received this year’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for his novel “Warrak Al-Hub” (The Scribe of Love) in an awards ceremony at the American University in Cairo in the presence of the jury, AUC Press President Mark Linz, the AUC Provost and an audience of journalists, writers and artists.
For the full story, see http://www.thedailynewsegypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=26438
[The Virtual Iraq Museum has been initiated with the cooperation of Google and YouTube, consisting of 14,000 photos with text in Arabic, English, and French. It will be officially inaugurated in early 2010.]
http://www.virtualmuseumiraq.cnr.it/homeENG.htm
تم افتتاح موقع متحف العراق الوطني السمعي المرئي
هذا مشروع ضخم تم اطلاقه بالتعاون مع شركة قوقل واليوتيوب لانشاء موقع الكتروني كامل تستطيع زيارة متحف العراق الوطني ..وشارك في دعم هذا المشروع وزارة الخارجية الامريكية التي قامت بطرح هذه الفكرة بعد زيارتهم للعراق في ابريل الماضي
يحتوي الموقع على 14 الف صورة رقمية لمحتويات المتحف …وقام بتصويرها وتصميم المشروع شركة قوقل واليوتيوب وسوف يتم التعديل عليه الى ان يطلق بشكل رسمي في بداية 2010
الموقع مصمم بالعربي والانجليزي والفرنسي والان فقط الانجليزي يعمل والباقي تحت التجربة
shared on MELANET-L by
Aseel Nasir Dyck
A Benedictine monk, the Rev. Columba Stewart of St. John’s Abbey and University (Collegeville, Minn.)–executive director of the abbey’s Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, and a historian of the early monastic period–leads the museum’s ambitious and longstanding effort to find and digitize manuscripts held in monastic communities in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. “Our primary focus is Christian traditions, because that’s our expertise,” Father Stewart says.
The work began in the 1960s, when a monk at St. John’s decided to microfilm manuscripts fading away in Austrian monasteries.
The project is currently active at more than 20 sites, but most of the museum’s current activity focuses in and around the Middle East, including Lebanon, Malta, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. The museum also does intermittent work in Ethiopia.
slightly abridged & edited from the full article by Jennifer Howard
appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education
29 November 2009
Leila Lalami writes about one of her favorite bookstores in Rabat, with a nice photo of what real bookstores used to look like – and some still do: http://lailalalami.com/2009/support-your-bookstore/
Also check out Lalami’s timely review of Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, in the Dec. 14, 2009, issue of The Nation, available online at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091214/lalami/single
Andras Riedlmayer
Harvard University
A team of archaeologists from UCLA, USC, Israel and Palestinian territories has developed the first map detailing Israeli archaeological activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem – much of it never publicly disclosed.
“The fully searchable online map, which serves as a window into thousands of years worth of archaeological sites in the Holy Lands, has won the 2009 Open Archaeology Prize from American Schools of Oriental Research, the main organization for archaeologists working in the Middle East.”