President’s word

Between Orient and Occident, the Arab world benefits since very ancient times from a strategic location. Surrounded by two oceans and four seas, cut by the Suez Canal, it is located at the very heart of the Old World and the Cradle of civilization: the ancient Mesopotamia and the ancient Egypt were even parts of today's Arab world.

 

At its Golden age, it was a tremendous cultural and commercial crossroads between Far occident and Far orient, and a real business center for spices, tissues, precious stones, gold, gathering ancient oriental and occidental scientific knowledge. In the Middle Age between the VIIIth and the XIIth centuries, according to the historian Michel Mollat du Jourdin, it is "the only one to be in a position of considering the world as a whole”. He adds: “By connecting Far orient and Far occident, Arabs have made more than any others for men's exchanges and for putting in common what they knew”.

The English scholar William Montgomery Watt wrote about the Arab contributions to the Occident and said: «Without the Arabs, European science and philosophy would not have developed the way it/they did. Arabs did not only transmit/ hand over Greek thoughts. They were its genuine continuators".  

 

The Arab world is characterized by an important cultural diversity and is full of invaluable treasuries, all accessible through two powerful vectors/elements: the Arab language and civilisation. In spite of its geographical proximity and its treasuries, the Arab world is unfortunately today misunderstood, and seems far-distant, only represented in the Medias through conflicts.

How can we make our European contemporaries familiar to it? How can make of Culture a tool for people’s reconciliation and for the promotion of peace and the pleasure of living together? How can we build the links necessary to the construction of a serene/peaceful common future and hold back the memories of an oppressive history?

Cultural differences generate questions and perplexity with the absence of dialogue and understanding. It is more than ever worth/time to get ourselves known, and to start meeting each other to get to know each other. The dialogue of cultures appears undeniably as an alternative to the too famous idea of “Clash of Civilizations” initiated by Samuel Huntington. It is maybe by unifying people in these cultural exchanges that we will learn to accept our differences and hence to accept each other, and take advantage of this rich human diversity in order to face the big global challenges of the future.

 

Abdelghani Sebatat, President of the Academy.