Books For Burqas!
Wheat & Weeds - A Great Books Program To Get Excited About
I am a liberal arts major, so don’t get me wrong, but something about “Great Books” just makes me snooze. I think it’s inhuman to only read and talk about the great ideas. At a certain point one also has to take sides in these debates –or else you fall into the ultimate arrogance of the agnostic. It’s one thing to be unsure of the right answer because you admit ignorance (”I don’t know who’s right.”) But if you read two geniuses and try to sit out the debate as some kind of impartial observer on the ground you can see both of their points, what you’re really saying is that you –being a greater genius than either– have found a way to harmonize what the finest minds that have ever lived could not harmonize. And I say you’re not that smart. But I digress.
What I wanted to point out is this wonderful Jonathan Rauch piece in National Journal about a project to translate the classics of liberal thought into Arabic for the internet.
No, I didn’t need to include that whole first part, but damnit it made me laugh. Read the rest of hers for the article, but the website itself is this (and this should get one or two of my commenters excited):
The Lamp of Liberty hopes to create a dialogue between individuals in the Middle East and the rest of the world on the ideas that underpin a free society and the universal aspiration for freedom. It will publish opinion articles in Arabic newspapers, present policy reports, and translate important works by Frederick Bastiat, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Leonard E. Read, Hernando de Soto, Fareed Zakaria, Julio H. Cole, Mario Vargas Llosa, David Hume, Voltaire, and Ibn Khaldun, among others. Topics include classical liberalism, the rule of law, civil liberties, property rights, economic freedom, religious toleration, free trade and globalization, the division of labor, individual rights, limited government, challenges of democratization, and the role of institutions in economic and social development.
Yippee! I only wish I knew Arabic so I could help. I have one or two romance novels lying around featuring feisty, independent, strong-willed women… I’d leave the Voltaire to the smart people, obviously. Btw, this factoid (back at W&W):
Intellectual isolation is a widespread Arab phenomenon, not just an Iraqi one. Some of the statistics are startling. According to the United Nations’ 2003 “Arab Human Development Report,” five times more books are translated annually into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic. “No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium,” says the U.N., “equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year.”
Was featured here over a month ago! Take that, Mr National Journal Smarty Pants!
March 8th, 2006 at 11:00 pm
Good point. “romance novels featuring feisty, independent, strong-willed women” would probably, bang for buck, be the most effective books for the Arab world. Surely Arabic isn’t that hard?
March 9th, 2006 at 12:45 am
We could call it the Chador-ripper genre.
March 9th, 2006 at 3:58 am
If you free (”empower”?) the women you transform Third World societies. “Come with me to the Casbah…”
March 9th, 2006 at 9:23 am
And here I thought I was being flippant. Who knew I was such a genius?
March 9th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Out of the mouths of Babes.
March 9th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Who’s a babe. These ladies are much too feisty to be babes.
March 9th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
I wasn’t talking about the characters in the novels. Babes can be feisty! Maybe you are thinking of bimbos? (This is going down hill, fast).
March 9th, 2006 at 8:30 pm
What babes? What?
Babes aren’t feisty, they’re eye-candy. They are neither intelligent nor dumb. Bimbos are by definition dumb.
March 9th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
What about Protest Babes? They’re feisty, and they’re eye-candy. A whole new category!
March 9th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
But they’re first and foremost Protest Babes. You’d never call them just babes.
Just babes get cast in office appliance commercials. Bimbos in shampoo commercials. Protest Babes have more important things to do than appear in commercials of any sort.
March 10th, 2006 at 2:02 am
I googled “protest babes” and got this: http://www.publiuspundit.com/index.php?cat=19
Oooh aah. I’m on her side. Which side is she on?
March 10th, 2006 at 2:16 am
Mighty fine googling there Rueful.
Have you been to the Czech Republic? It’s a babe-fest.
March 10th, 2006 at 3:13 am
Ah, looking at her again I see she’s Czech. Houdova thought it? I didn’t get that far the first time.
I’d love to go to Prague, though I’m told it’s overrun with stag parties from Essex there for the cheap beer. The city figured prominently in my European history course, the Czechs - you probably know this but what the heck - had this engaging habit of prefacing any unpleasantness with the Empire by throwing the Imperial legates from the first floor of the town hall - the Defenestration of Prague. The Hussites did it first, and in 1618 it signalled the start of the Thirty Years War. It’d make a great movie title - “Gone with the Window”.
March 10th, 2006 at 3:14 am
PS If it’s such a babe-fest, perhaps we could persuade ninme to locate her literary salon there instead of Paris?
March 10th, 2006 at 3:50 am
The Czech babes are way better looking than French girls. For a start, “no fat chicks” is written into the constitution. Really pretty also.
For the cheap beer, cheap hotels, cheap women… I had the missfortune of sharing a train compartment with the tour organiser of one of the “Essex groups”, on his way to meet the lads in Prague. Yob is the word we use; copied from the English?
March 10th, 2006 at 4:25 am
We invented them, so it must be. It’s really fascinating seeing a civilisation at first fray at the edges a bit, and then unravel. We’re unravelling quite swiftly at the moment.
What’s the Czech babe position on middle-aged blokes with glasses, I wonder. And a beer habit. No cricket or rugby, though, so they ain’t got everything.
March 10th, 2006 at 9:49 am
I feel like now would be a very good time to mention that I’m as much Czech as I am Scottish. More so, actually, since a lot of the Scottish had a few years to muddle up in Kentucky.
I’m still twice as French as I am either of those, though, but for the sake of my gentlemen members, I’ll be happy to relocate to Prague.
However, I should mention that besides the stag parties from Essex, it is also apparently a European Disneyland for Americans. “Look, maw! An old building!” “Golly, Doc-boy! Ain’t it old!” But that’s okay. Soon they’ll get back to where they should be, and they’ll kick both groups out, not needing them anymore. Beer prices will go up, though, but the babes will remain.
March 10th, 2006 at 10:03 am
Czech? Ooh er that might explain a lot. The Czechs were always at odds with their more stupid but alas more numerous neighbours. Hmm. One of the best things that’s happened though is that people have stopped talking about Prague being in Eastern Europe and now talk of it as being in Central Europe, which is much better.
I’m sure your gentleman readers will be grateful for your kind gesture.
October 1st, 2006 at 10:31 am
Hahahhaha. I thinker. Maybe not.
On reflection. No.