I am proud to announce the first release of Nurani, Meedan’s platform for cross-language scriptural discussion for Muslim and Christian scholars managed by the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme at the University of Cambridge, a programme of the Faculty of Divinity.

Nurani is a cross-language open source platform for inter-religious dialogue developed by Meedan. The goal is to facilitate improved understanding between different faith communities and between speakers of Arabic and English.

Nurani achieves this by enabling users to share and discuss scriptural and commentary texts from their faith traditions in two languages – Arabic and English – and annotate important terms and concepts from these texts and dialogues into a cross-language glossary. Test dialogues are already taking place behind the scenes, and there are exciting plans afoot for a forthcoming series of  dialogues that is public.

The platform, which is powered by open source technology developed by Meedan, was designed primarily for scholars taking part in an established practice of inter-faith dialogue developed by the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme over the past ten years called Scriptural Reasoning. The goal of Scriptural Reasoning is not to reach consensus, but rather to explore how we read texts and so better understand each other.

At Meedan, we paid close attention to Scriptural Reasoning in developing the site and talking extensively to prospective users about what they needed from it.  As part of this, I was lucky to observe a three-day academic Scriptural Reasoning forum in Cambridge and a civic Scriptural Reasoning group attended by 80 participants in the city. We also held test dialogues – synchronous and asynchronous, annotative and threaded – using a variety of existing software.

From these experiences, many of the key features of Nurani were developed:

• the discussion page, for example, features a palette of text passages gathered by a moderator at the top of the page, imitating the Scriptural Reasoning text packs used in face-to-face settings;
• the prominent attention to profile images is designed to help build trust and give users the sense they are seated around a table;
• the Nurani glossary was designed to encourage discussions around the precise meanings of important terms, and their differences in different languages and faiths, as observed in live Scriptural Reasoning;
• discussions are facilitated by a moderator who invites users and puts a time limit on the discussion, as in Scriptural Reasoning workshops and symposia.

We are also grateful to the many people in the field who we consulted about their motivations for using a site like this, including Grand Mufti of Egypt, Cairo Sheikh Ali Gomaa, Sheikhs Amr Wardani and Mahmoud Shabieb at Dar al-Iftaa, Cairo, internationally recognised translator Tarek Ghanem, Director of the  Woolf Institute for Muslim-Jewish Understanding Yousef Meri, AUD scholar and Tafsir translator Feras Hamza, University of Toronto and Al-Azhar trained scholar of fiqh Ahmed Saleh, and Tarek Elgawhary, former adviser to Ali Gomaa and Director of the Coexist Foundation’s US office.

Nurani was initially conceived of as a platform for dialogue around the A Common Word initiative (hence the colour scheme of the brand) and so supports bi-lateral Muslim-Christian discussion.  However, given CIP’s focus on the three Abrahamic faiths more broadly, we expect to develop other instances of the platform under different branding for different configurations of language and faith communities. For example,  we expect to replicate the technology under the branding of ScripturalReasoning.org for three-faith Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogue, particularly civic dialogue, in the near future. Because the technology is modular, it can accommodate  many different configurations of discussions flexibly.

The long term goal is a federated system of discussion fora (Nurani, ScripturalReasoning.org and others run by new partners) drawing upon a common textual resource (the library).  The next phase in this vision is to be funded over 18 months by a UK Research Council Digital Economy Grant with two new developer positions to be hired at Cambridge with project management, design and strategy provided by Meedan.

Under this grant, we aim to develop the world’s first inter-faith library with available translations, including scriptures, commentary texts and other primary religious literature. Not only should users of Nurani and other fora built from the Meedan stack be able to draw seamlessly on this library for citations and translations, but visitors to the library itself should be able to see published discussion content alongside the appropriate passage. Additionally, glossary terms should provide dynamic concordance of references and linkages across the faith traditions for comparison and exploration. We think it’s a powerful vision for taking our users on a new journey of discovery and learning. To learn more about this please contact gweyman [at] meedan.net.

We hope you will soon have the chance to explore Nurani discussions and take part yourself. If you would like to be considered for a future dialogue series on Nurani or ScripturalReasoning.org send an email to cip@divinity.cam.ac.uk.

We are grateful to all the hard work and commitment of Kairm Ratib, Chris Blow, Zeinab Samir, and Andrea Burton in the development of Nurani.

A mockup of how the Nurani Library might look, developed by George Weyman and Chris Blow.

The Free Amina Hoax, discovered to be Thomas (Tom) J MacMaster.

Thanks in large part to the work of Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty, Andy Carvin, Liz Henry, and Jillian York, the Gay Girl in Damascus is no more.  But how do we move on?

In a brilliant and comprehensive post, Ethan Zuckerman rightly suggests that trust in citizen sources will be damaged, particularly those bloggers who hide their identities because they live in repressive regimes.  Those fighting hardest to get media out of countries like Syria will be badly hit. Regimes are able to once again portray citizen media as fabricated lies peddled by foreigners.  And activists promoting campaigns online will have to work doubly hard to win support.

But perhaps skepticism is a healthy thing. Perhaps we have needed a good dose of it for a while now.  What would be a positive outcome of increased skepticism about citizen media?

One thing that big media could do almost immediately is publish a nutritional guide to any article that relies substantially on citizen or unverified sources.  This could be published at the top of the article, and should contain two things: a statement of how confident the media outlet is of the source’s authenticity and the efforts that have been taken so far to establish that level of confidence.

This could take the form of a checklist that over time could evolve into a easily recognisable nutritional guide to news content, replete with little emblems or colour coding.

I imagine two checklists. First, the level of confidence:

1. We are working to verify this source but cannot assume it is authentic at this time
2. We have some reason to believe this source is authentic
3. We have strong reasons to believe this source is authentic
4. We have independently verified this source

Any source that is junk should be called out, but more importantly articles based on its output should be retracted or updated to remove the source.

Second, you need a checklist for steps taken to verify the citizen source:

1. Content Cross-referenced with other citizen media from same location and date
2. Email contact established with the source
3. Internet phone contact established with the source
4. Mobile phone contact established with the source
5. Video contact established with the source
6. Partner media outlet has met this source face-to-face
7. We have met this source face-to-face

Perhaps email contact or cross-referencing produces ‘We are working to verify this source but cannot assume it is authentic at this time’; perhaps a combination of email and internet phone contact produces ‘We have some reason to believe this source is authentic’; perhaps mobile or video contact produces ‘We have strong reasons to believe this source is authentic’; and face-to-face contact produces ‘We have independently verified this source’.

Often other news organisations provide some cover of credibility for a source. So when A Gay Girl in Damascus was covered by big media, it took off.   That’s why this nutritional check list should really evolve into a Media Sources Database, which the big media share (hence item 6. in the list above).

Imagine if all citizen sources appearing in articles published online by the top media outlets presented a link to a media sources database with all the key information regarding the authenticity of the source. For example, any description of communications sustained with that source by any of the big media.  This information could be made readily accessible in a javascript popup on the dynamic link to the source.

Taking steps to authenticate sources is as important as ever – perhaps more so now that sources can self-publish under so many different guises.  Big media could do more to represent to their audiences the level of confidence they have in that source and the steps taken to establish that level of confidence. Better still, they could share that information and make it readily available across multiple international audiences for the betterment of digital journalism.

Egyptian blogger Eman AbdelRahman aka LastoAdri. Courtesy of Oso on Flickr.

Why did the Mubarak regime turn the internet off?

That was the question I asked the attendees of a gathering recently at the Oxford Internet Institute looking at the role of the internet in the revolutions sweeping the Middle East. The question gives us, I suggested, a route into understanding the other side of the equation, ie. How authoritarian regimes maintain their power. It therefore connects us to a long standing debate that has encompassed media studies, cultural anthropology, political science and more.

My provisional response was to suggest that turning the internet off was more than anything a gesture of power that shed light on how an authoritarian regime perceived its ability to exercise control. Yes, turning off the internet was an attempt to stop activists using free publishing tools online to organise protests and share information. Yes, turning off the internet worked to prevent information reaching the outside world and so perhaps preserved for one more day alliances with powers who were not going to like the violence and repression that had to be meted out to protect regime interests. But perhaps more importantly, turning off the internet was a gesture of a power relation. We can do this. You cannot stop us. We are in power, you are not. Targeting the internet as a way of stating the existence of a relationship of power just goes to show how embedded the internet had become in Egyptian society, and that its long term role had been to help render the tools of authoritarianism far less effective. In a paradoxical way then, the Egyptian government’s decision was a statement of its powerlessness in the face of the long term impact of the internet.

A number of caveats are necessary. A revolution depends on many factors coming together at the same time: the fuel of long term economic grievances and repression, a cadre of young people willing to die, the fuse of a revolutionary setting – in this case that incredible moment broadcast on Al Jazeera and other satellite networks when President Ben Ali fled Tunisia in the face of the unstoppable force of public protests. Perhaps more importantly for this debate is the caveat that illiteracy and poverty exclude many millions of people from social media in Egypt. Despite these caveats, and without wanting to be trapped in the eddies of the causality debate, social media was influential enough for it to be worth discussing. According to statistics shared by the impressive Noha Atef – founder of a blog documenting torture and Twitter user extraordinaire – there are perhaps as many as 21 million internet subscriptions in Egypt, a figure that demonstrates how the internet has come to play an important role in the country. A middle class phenomenon perhaps, but powerful in its reach.

In taking the longer term view, rather than focusing on the immediate examples of how social media were used in the protests, we can look at the role of social media in helping to undermine the tools of authoritarianism. Three areas are of particular interest: 1) the ways in which authoritarian states obstruct the Freedom of to assemble, 2) the way in which authoritarian regimes control public space with propaganda, objects of fear and the cult of personality, and 3) the ways in which repressive regimes attempt to block critical thinking and freedom of expression.

Freedom of Assembly

Many of the protest movements sweeping the Middle East have gathered pace in towns outside the capital. Sidi Bouzid, Suez, Daraa, Benghazi. But in each case, the protest movement needs to also take hold in the capital, and more specifically in a symbolic location and central gathering place. Only that way could the protest take on the regime in a national sense – a blow to the heart. The best example of this was Tahrir Square which became effectively proto-liberated space for the protesters. It represented what you might describe as ‘sacred national space’ where peace and fraternity reigned amongst those committed to the revolution and both Muslims and Christians could pray alongside one another. A junction at the heart of the capital city, Tahrir became the beating heart of the revolution, so much so that Al Jazeera and other news networks had to broadcast the scene there almost continuously to all corners of the country and beyond. By reclaiming Tahrir Square and fighting every regime attempt to clear it, the Egyptian protesters reclaimed the heart of Egypt for themselves.

Facebook pages and Twitter hashtags provided similar gathering places. These were assembly points that attracted the focus of the many (in the case of Twitter the focus of the most active activists and international networks). On Facebook Kulina Khaled Said and the April 6 Youth Movement were prominent throughout. So too was the January Revolution Day against Torture Poverty Corruption and Unemployment. On Twitter, the hashtag that gathered most attention was #jan25. To be prominent, hashtags and Facebook pages necessarily required wide community participation – just as holding Tahrir required a big number of dedicated protesters in it for the long haul. The impact and attention of these gathering places forced the regime to acknowledge the protesters. Unlike regime media that could largely ignore the protests at the start, to interrupt these gathering points either required using them – thereby acknowledging them – to spread the regime line, or removing access to them altogether (by blocking the service or turning the internet off).

The focus here on date and time is particularly interesting. Why use a date for a revolutionary hashtag? Many other protest movements have used a date on Twitter too – Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Syria. So the trend is deeply rooted. A date is important because it suggests rupture. Although – as Noha Atef pointed out – the revolution began many years before in the gradual activism of a new cohort of web-savvy young people, the symbolic date of rupture was January 25 in Egypt. Before this date, Mubarak reigned supreme. After this date he was effectively ruined. The date announced the rebirth of the nation, the narrative moment in which Egyptians took history into their own hands, purging themselves of the past ills imposed on them by a corrupt regime. This date of rebirth was in many ways more significant than the date on which Hosni Mubarak stepped down – as the continued use of the hashtag attests.

Dates, landmarks and national narratives are deeply interrelated in Egypt, inscribed as they are into the history books and the geography of Cairo. Many of the bridges and major thoroughfares are named after important historical dates (October 6, May 15, July 26). The hashtag had a similar connection to Tahrir. It was both a space, a landmark and a new national narrative, written by the community outside of the control of the regime. In using it, Egyptians broke through the atomization enforced on them through years of Emergency Law preventing them from freely assembling to demand their rights and influence policy. Just as the community collectively broke through the barrier of fear by taking to the streets in such numbers on 25 January, numbers so large that individually the Egyptian protesters faced a greatly reduced risk of reprisal from the regime, so Egyptians took courage in collectively joining Facebook pages and contributing to the #jan25 hashtag on mass.

Propaganda and the Cult of Personality

Authoritarian regimes flourished in the days of old media in large part because the one-to-many paradigm of radio, television and print favoured central control on the distribution of information and ideas. Just as public space could be cluttered with the paraphernalia of the ruler (statues, portraits, banners, insignia on cars), so public media could be cluttered with the propaganda of the regime. This helped to spread fear and furnish the idea that everyone else was wildly supportive of the ruling regime (a process in sharp focus in Bashar Al-Assad’s speech to parliament on 30 March 2011). Some scholars have suggested that the effectiveness of this propaganda quickly wears thin with the people; it is not so much then that Egyptians believed everything Mubarak said or Al Ahram told them, rather they had no power to prevent this propaganda intermediating between their lives and the lives of their fellow citizens. Rather, propaganda acted as a code for describing acceptable behaviour and denied the viability of alternatives to regime rule. As political parties, syndicates and other public bodies are quickly co-opted by the regime, so ‘independent’ mass media are co-opted to distribute regime messages and sideline challenges. Public debate largely ceases to exist or is marginalised, so there is little opportunity to take part in public debate. The regime flourishes in this environment.

But what happens when you have publishing tools that provide for dense inter-connected networks? Egyptian use of Twitter is the perfect example of this. Twitter is the fruition of trends in the web that emphasize networked inter-linked information where everything is social. Everything is linked: users are hyperlinks, topics (hashtags) are hyperlinks, tweets are hyperlinks, replies are connected hyperlinks. Moreover, Twitter is a gateway to other content through traded links. So tools like Discus allow you to see all the users gathering around a particular url on Twitter. Retweets and suggested links broaden and enrich the connections users are willing to take part in between one another. Egyptian activists took this opportunity to build their own web of people and information which was integrated over time into the global link economy.

The point here is not to eulogize the brilliance of Twitter, but to show that its functions – which are the result of evolving trends in the social web – and the breadth of its global community provide for a dense network of people and information which is a direct threat to the stability of regime propaganda through old media. In their own way, Wordpress, Facebook, YouTube and all the other popular web services do a similar thing. In a multi-polar networked paradigm that crosses barriers of location, culture and ideology it is much harder for any one set of interests to take full control. The atomizing effect of regime propaganda is sorely undermined. Simply put, social tools escape the authoritarian suppression of sociability (unless you turn the internet off).

Governments can’t be ‘social’ – only people in communities can. The US Defence Department is surely learning this. So the Mubarak regime’s efforts to insert itself into the evolving online network was doomed to failure. Just as it could not stir enough people onto the streets to counter the revolutionary demonstrations, so it could not tackle the weight of community action online when the floodgates truly opened (#jan25). The regime’s decision to send threatening text messages through the Vodafone network are a case in point. They did not stem the tide of the Egyptian Revolution. Similarly, Mubarak’s televised addresses had the feeling of watching history, literally. This is how the regime treated Egyptians for so long. It was captivating for western audiences to see a dictator in the act of dictating. The content of those speeches could never have met protester expectations precisely because protesters called for Mubarak to go, and in the absence of any meaningful progressive political platform from the regime (was there ever one?), the televised addresses were surely designed simply to show who was in power. But they actually worked the other way. They provided fuel for the community to enervate its critiques and lampoon a dictator. The addresses enhanced the sense of the clumsy powerlessness of the regime, its crass ineptitude, its emptiness. The display demonstrated that the regime’s power had long since evaporated. Suddenly the idea of ruling a country for 30 years looked something incredible and unlikely.

Freedom of Speech

When I was living in Egypt in 2006, I came to know two middle class female bloggers (muhagabat) in their early twenties who blogged anonymously. My interest in their blog stemmed from the fact that they were not tackling overtly ‘political’ topics, but nevertheless their blog was deeply political. They used the blog as a critique of their family life, and particularly to vent against their parents and wider social norms. Why can’t we live in a place of our own outside the family home? Why are we expected to get married and have children? Why won’t my dad let me come back to the house when I want? Around this agenda gathered a community of peer bloggers who offered support and self-affirmation. This small community worked to take on bloggers with opposing world views who stumbled across the blog from the wider public.

The interesting point here was that by blogging and gathering anonymously in this way, the group began to formulate and disseminate a social critique that previously could not have been propagated in public space. So the blog acted for them as a node of critique. This kind of interaction was being repeated among the young educated Egyptian middle class right across Egypt, creating new avenues for free expression and debate, though largely ignored by the media pundits interested more in activists fighting torture. The long term repercussions of this evolution in the Egyptian public sphere cannot be underestimated. Though gradual in terms of the life span of social media, this change is rapid and profound in the broader social history of the Middle East, and surely its impacts will be felt for a long time to come.

Conclusion

We cannot boil revolutions down to a simple equation such as [social media + young people + grievances = revolution]. But then nor can we ignore social media use as an important and growing trend that has direct implications for the way in which authoritarian regimes exercise power. We should be cautious about many aspects of social media – linguistic hegemony, increased status competition, the erosion of privacy protections. Nevertheless, we should celebrate the long term impact of social media use that has created a more networked, community-led, editable public sphere.

Egyptians celebrate their march to freedom in front of the crumbling vestige of 50 years of failed authoritarian rule - the Mugamma. Picture courtesy of Kodak Agfa on Flickr.

Hosni Mubarak appears to be on his way out as Egyptian President.

This is a huge moment in the modern history of the Middle East – and it is an astonishing achievement by the Egyptian people. Who can say in their lifetime that they took part in the overthrow of a dictatorship?

The Egyptian people have been incredible throughout the last two weeks, just incredible – full of huge courage, energy, and joy. They have been peaceful in the face of all the terrible violence the regime threw at them. This is a moment for the Egyptian people.

And Tahrir Square is still in their hands!  Egypt’s first democracy.

What is the relationship between translation and intellectual production? It is not obvious, you might think. Translation, by necessity, does not provide new insights but rather makes existing knowledge available in another language. If everyone spoke English it would not really be an issue.

Picture courtesy Hishaam Siddiqi on Flickr under CC license Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivativeWorks

At Meedan we do think there is a deep link. Let me try to explain why with some tidbits from the recent Arab Thought Foundation annual conference, FIKR9, that we were lucky to attend.

For many at FIKR9, the idea of making intellectual production available in Arabic was a matter of pride. Arabic is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world, containing within its breadth a vast resource of human scholarship and innovation through the ages. Arabic is a language so intimately connected with the intellectual history of Islam and the modern sense of shared cultural affinity within what Prince Khalid Al Faisal, President of the Arab Thought Foundation, refers to as Al Umma Al Arabiya (the Arab Nation).

There was real concern from many quarters about the dearth of intellectual production on the web in Arabic, not least Jordanian social entrepreneur Maher Kaddoura. Google estimates that less than one percent of all web content is in the language – a widely quoted figure at the conference. ICANN’s Middle East officer
recently predicted that the next twenty million web users in the region will speak little or no English – a warning perhaps that Arabic speaking users risk being trapped in a tiny corner of the web, unable to contribute to global intellectual production. When you factor in the wide disparity in cheap access to good internet, the web will have contributed to global knowledge gaps, rather than helping to alleviate them.

So this is the first point – translation is a pressing duty of those interested in increasing access to knowledge around the world. Societies are not going to learn English en masse at a rate capable of checking these growing knowledge imbalances. Instead, we need methods for scaling translation.

The other issue is to do with the value of translation itself. It would be a reasonable premise to suggest that in periods of high intellectual activity, societies invest in translation. Why? There is evidence to suggest that access to diverse perspectives enables better intellectual outputs. To quote Clay Shirky, it’s not how many people you know but how many kinds of people you know. He cites Ronald Burt’s research into the way in which a major US electronics firm was able to generate new ideas. When the company piloted a scheme to harvest ideas from across the company, the managers in charge were more impressed by ideas generated by people whose social networks included employees from outside their department. In other words, access to diverse networks and forms of knowledge improves our ability to innovate.

Ed Bice suggests this is the critical question of the digital age: the extent to which the internet will ‘increase the network diversity of information exchange or whether, given free choice to create our own channels and refine our information networks, we will evolve distribution structures that narrow our networks, and subsequently, narrow our thinking.’

Translation increases network diversity and it reduces knowledge divides. All of this also increases the likelihood of Arabic users contributing more content in Arabic, for three reasons: first, there is more intellectual output to build upon; second, Arabic users know that their Arabic content can be translated into other languages; and third, Arabic-speaking users who see other Arabic-speaking users writing in Arabic are more likely to contribute in Arabic themselves. And the beautiful thing is we now have a model for doing it at scale without too much cost.

Translation today can be conducted cheaply and to high quality by a combination of machines and humans. Automated translation can provide a first draft which can be edited by one or many individual translators working together on small chunks of text – much like a Wikipedia page entry. Translation revisions show the lineage of the translation, and help alert moderators to problems or vandalism. And the fun part is that each translation contributes to the improvement of the automated translation – so you can continually translate more, and better. The humans focus increasingly on the really hard bits.

The list of organizations working on this model is wide, and Meedan is in the thick of it. If we want to make the web more polyglot, and increase the amount of Arabic content in the next ten years, we need to put energy into the tools to make scaled social translation a natural and intuitive publishing gesture on the web. This is not to suggest that professional translators are going to be out of a job any time soon – quite the reverse, the more we translate content the more demand there will be for the services of translators with real expertise for the most difficult translation problems. But respect for the translation profession should not be a straitjacket into which we put the vision of a polyglot web.

At FIKR9, Tom Trewinnard and I took part in a social media roundtable with some of the best thinkers in the region’s emerging social media landscape. We put these arguments to the group and suggested that to be effective, our number one priority was to enable intellectual production to circulate more freely. The nub of the challenge then is to enable scaled social translation; to make translation of small pieces of text a normative publishing gesture on the web for those who have the skills.

This really depends on our being able to make minimum interventions into existing social practices on the web, to build upon existing social behaviours for sharing content, and to create solutions to the problem that harness the incentives that have infused social services such as Twitter with global community activity – our collective desire for social recognition and our eagerness for human contact premised on cooperation.

This was originally posted on the Meedan blog.

What do the next ten years hold for creativity, innovation and intellectual production in the Middle East? Among the presentations to the Arab Thought Foundation’s ninth annual conference, FIKR9, were broadly two competing narratives for how the region should evolve.

Enthusiasm for the future: The young participants of FIKR9 Youth Program with HRH Prince Khalid Al Faisal in Beirut. Picture Courtesy of Hibr on Flickr, Licensed CC Attribution Share-Alike NonCommercial 3.0.

The dominant narrative suggests that the region can harness its ‘youth bulge’ to create a knowledge economy. This can happen from within the existing political structures, and will fuse Gulf oil wealth and investment expertise with the ever growing pool of human talent from across the region.

This narrative likes to focus on STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine). Educational achievement in these areas can create hi-tech industries and cutting edge research centres that will underpin innovation in areas such as renewable energy, petrochemicals, and nanotechnology.

You can see the mechanics of this strategy already taking root. Gulf money is being invested to build truly world-class research infrastructure, such as laboratories and libraries. Qatar’s Education City or the King Abdullah City for Science and Technology are two good examples. Foreign talent from outside the Arab world is being hired at a premium to train local talent, stimulate new research and foster a productive learning environment.

It is a strategy that gels well with the existing political institutions of the region, as the conference made clear. In his introductory notes, Arab Thought Foundation President HRH Prince Khalid Al Faisal, member of the Saudi royal family and governor of Makkah Province, said that the Arab world needed to lead global society toward a ‘sustainable future’ by ‘accelerating development in Science and Technology’.

With their immense resources and access to human capital from the wider Arab world and Asia, the Gulf states can build hi-tech industries and the talent pool needed to power them – a strategy that would replace oil and gas, and bring many wider infrastructure and economic benefits to society – without needing to change the way in which society works in any fundamental way.

That’s where the second narrative comes in, most prominently displayed here by Professor Burhan Ghalioun, Director of the Center for Contemporary Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne. The fact that he works from France is testament to the fact that his views are unpalatable in the Arab world. No one said it, but these views are also incompatible with the ‘knowledge economy’ thesis.

This narrative says that the notion of a knowledge economy is impossible without a fundamental change in the way in which Arab elites view critical thinking. For Ghalioun, critical thinking is inseparable from the notion of a knowledge economy. But for critical thinking to take root depends on elites relinquishing power. So the nub of it is that building a knowledge economy depends on building democracy.

Ghalioun’s thesis is not new – it notably draws on the ideas of Hisham Sharabi’s Neopatriarchy which was written in the 1980s – but it is still deeply challenging to hear the case being made so passionately at an elite Arab forum from within the Arab world. It is an ironic inversion of the very title of the event – Arab Thought Foundation. Ghalioun is saying, “Arab thought” is a contradiction in terms, and you the elites are the reason why this is so. He also poured scorn on the title of the event (Shaping the Future .. Arab’s role?), suggesting that the Arab world has no positive future to look forward to. But one thing is for sure, no non-Arab could make this case so boldly without being labeled an out-of-touch Orientalist. We certainly have to respect the Arab Thought Foundation for inviting him. It is not easy to welcome someone to a conference when you know his purpose for being there is to question the very forum you have established.

No other presentation elicited so much feedback from the audience, both positive and negative, so clearly Ghalioun’s words had hit a chord. Moreover, he spoke in high classical Arabic with a rhetorical eloquence that resonated with the audience, a further irony in a presentation that on face value to a western outsider might look like an unhelpful polemic rant. Let me quote from my notes:

In the Arab world we have a multifaceted crisis. No one is interested in the future, young people don’t have a future. All our policies are built on ignoring the future. Private interests trump public ones. We need many more jobs than we are creating. We have focused on closed nationalisms. We count on foreign protection for security. We are paying the price for nationalism rather than supporting each other. We need cooperation. We have feudal systems, we have princes. No one is asking the people. We have closed political regimes where political interests are linked to financial interests. We have great potential. But instead of asking people to think and criticize we have a system of tutorship. We have packaged people like sardines. This is why the Arab world has no more value than Hungary. The people are marginalized. A very small minority has control. We have deprived ninety percent from human resources. A small group has monopolized power. We need the blood of the Arab body to circulate, not just flow to one limb. Otherwise it will die.

Clearly, Ghalioun’s suggestion that Arab countries do not think about the future of their societies is wrong. Arab countries from Syria to Saudi Arabia think the future of the region is a knowledge economy, built from within the existing political structures. Much as China has built a powerful export economy from within the structures of the existing Communist regime, so the countries of the Middle East believe they must work from where they are, not a fantasy democracy land. The alternative to the current regimes they believe is the sectarian bloodshed of Iraq or the erratic theocracy of Iran.

But the ‘knowledge economy’ thesis is also fraught with challenges. As Parag Khanna argued, the countries of the region have high barriers to mobility which limit trade and the free flow of talent. Daniel Warner, former the chief of human resources at Apple, argued cogently for greater mindshare and investment in entrepreneurship in the region as a strategy for building human capital. Jordanian social entrepreneur Maher Kaddoura asked how the region would make more intellectual production available to wider Arab publics online in light of the fact that many do not speak English. Privately friends noted that the unwillingness of some countries to grant citizenship impedes the long term development of scientific communities needed to build the knowledge economy. There were also calls at the conference for improved legal frameworks and training that could underpin a successful rejuvenation of trade and business growth in the region.

One thing we can be sure of though is that in any plan for building human capital and knowledge industries, critical thinking matters. This is as true for scientists as much as for researchers in the humanities. We may just find that the highly skilled science community the region seeks to build is the vanguard for other kinds of change we can scarcely begin to predict.

Earlier this year, I was invited to sit in on a theological gathering at Cambridge University.  With few expectations about what I was to experience, I turned up on the first morning armed with a pen and paper, and a cup of fresh coffee. Over three intense days, I watched scholars from as far afield as Asia, North America, the Middle East and Russia pour over passages of scripture in small mixed faith groups.  Although the academic surroundings were familiar to me, I was to be exposed to a form of shared study that I had never witnessed before.

The study group was taking part in a form of inter-faith discussion called Scriptural Reasoning (SR).  It involves members of different religious traditions meeting together in small groups to discuss extracts from their sacred or authoritative texts together.  Texts are selected by members of each faith, and questions are posed from right round the table as part of a shared effort to unravel meaning from these abundantly layered texts.  A moderator keeps the discussion on track and introduces new topics.

Ed Bice, Meedan CEO, talks with former Academic Director of CIP Dr Nick Adams and Prof Bob Gibbs, director of Jackman Humanities Institute during meetings in Cairo, May 2010.

As I was to learn, SR is a practice rich in possibilities.  SR done well allows participants to explore their authoritative texts in new ways, to learn to explain them, and to better understand the practices of reading those texts by which their judgments are shaped. The aim is not to convert your co-participants or show how one faith is superior, but to come away both a more learned, confident, and articulate member of your faith tradition and a citizen more aware of the lived traditions of other faiths. As Mike Higton, academic director of the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme, has argued, this is a practice with a potential for ‘transformational impact’ where religious commitment and commitment to shared public discourse are often assumed to be opposed.

In SR there are no pacts, no signed statements of consensus at the end of a meeting, in fact in the meeting I witnessed there was virtually no tangible outcome bar short meditations the participants wrote in a closing exercise. Rather there is more understanding and a sense of stronger friendship.   Through shared study, Scriptural Reasoners learn what Nick Adams has described as ‘collegiality’ – a kind of cooperative civility that can transform relationships and plausibly provide a bulwark against religious hostility.

Since 2009, Meedan has been working with the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme to explore ways to take these forms of scriptural study online so that the resulting dialogues can be more sustainable, more accessible and more polyglot.  We have done lots of hard work, conducting countless consultations and research interviews, designing tools and building partnerships. But most importantly here, I want to think about the ways in which the approaches of SR could provide a lesson for other kinds of cross-cultural interaction.

I want to ask the question, what are the ingredients of a successful cross-cultural encounter? In SR there is something on the table – scripture – and a shared acknowledgement that the participants have broadly similar relationships to their respective scriptures (ie. These scriptures are sacred and need to be treated sensitively – although it is worth pointing out that SR participants do not assume that the meaning and function of these scriptures are equivalent across the different faiths).  Everyone at the table also signs up to a broadly common approach to the discussion (ie. Scriptural Reasoning with a facilitator guiding the interaction).  Beyond that, there is a recognition that there will be disagreement (conducted in a civil way).

Could these approaches – civility, shared interest, and a common approach to shared study – be applied to other forms of dialogue entirely? Could you, for example, bring citizens with extracts from their respective constitutions into dialogue? Could you have a set of baseball enthusiasts sit down with a set of football enthusiasts, and study sections of their rulebooks?  Or what about exploring canonical histories of common events?

This brings me to news.meedan.net – Meedan’s attempt to re-think how we collaborate in ‘writing the first version of history’. If you have different linguistic and cultural communities sharing their narratives as events of common interest are happening, you can begin to build a tapestry of understanding. Searching for sources, annotating links and commentaries and engaging in conversations is a form of shared study that demands civility and sensitivity.  We may never end up with agreement, but we may end up with better quality disagreement, collegiality and a sense of common understanding.

As the sole London-based member of Meedan’s far flung team (we have developers in Damascus, Amman, San Francisco and Portland, not to mention our team of editors and translators across the Middle East), I was glad to have some company last week when some of my colleagues dropped in for a visit.

King's College, Cambridge courtesy of inkelv1122 on Flickr.

The occasion was a two-day gathering at the University of Cambridge with the academic partners behind our inter-faith project. We are working on a multi-year project with the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme to develop cross-language approaches to inter-faith study and discussion online.  It is a very exciting project which has the potential to provide new directions not just in models of inter-faith engagement, but in the digital humanities too.

A view of the inter-faith platform discussion page in English with model content provided by Mike Higton. Note this is work in progress.

We were joined at the meetings by members of CIP’s core staff, including the world renowned director of the programme, Professor David Ford, as well as scholars from a series of other key partners: Sohail Nakhooda, inter-faith research fellow at Kalam Research and Media; Director of the Jackman Humanities Institute, Professor Robert Gibbs; Professor in Foundations of Information at the University of Toronto, Brian Cantwell Smith; Director of Development for the Cambridge Abraham Project and former Head of Religion and Ethics at the BBC, Michael Wakelin; and former academic director at CIP, Dr Nicholas Adams.

The meetings provided us with an opportunity to show the platform development to date (due for a more formal release in early 2011), explore use cases and discuss the next phase of development of the tools. We paid particular attention to the cross-language tools we hope will set this platform apart in the field: the glossary, the discussion and annotation tools, and the text library.

The aim of this work is to bring texts to life through shared study.  Scholars will be able to explore and learn about practices of reasoning across different faiths in a collaborative environment.  If you would like to learn more or contribute suggestions, contact me on Twitter.

Taken from the Meedan blog.

On Wednesday 8 September, with the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks still three days away, Kabul police went on high alert for violent protests in the Afghan capital. The move was triggered not by the repercussions of a local conflict, but the actions of a little-known American church pastor thousands of miles away in Florida who was planning to burn copies of the Qur’an in a protest against what he called ‘radical Islam’.

The crisis, which elicited stark warnings from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan General David Petraeus, and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, followed weeks of intense debate in the United States about the viability of establishing a mosque and inter-faith center in the Manhattan district adjacent to Groud Zero. Detractors of the plan spoke in apocalyptic terms, referring variously to the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ as a plan to establish a ‘Muslim Caliphate on the ashes of Ground Zero’ and a ‘center for training terrorists’.

Just a week before Pastor Terry Jones’ controversial move, bottles, cans, stones and three smoke bombs were thrown in the northern English town of Bradford at a protest by the English Defence League (EDL), a far right group that aims to counter the ‘Jihad movement based in England’. The group has rallied in many British cities, each time bringing wide media attention to its actions. The reason broadcasters make sure to cover EDL events, even though protests are often small, is that they are almost guaranteed to result in pictures of violence. The EDL’s founder, Tommy Robinson, in turn admitted that his movement in part grew up in response to a tiny vociferous protest by some very extreme Muslims who greeted the homecoming of the 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment with banners reading “Butchers of Basra” and “Anglian soldiers go to hell”.

Picture courtesy Yannig Van de Wouwer under creative commons license.

In an interconnected world, mass media can lose sight of the boundaries between the local and obscure on the one hand, and the global on the other. A pastor’s tiny and inane protest becomes an issue of global significance. But really it shouldn’t be.

The BBC experiment connected web users across languages

The BBC appears to be thinking seriously about using translation to connect its global audience online.

On Thursday the World Service hosted a cross-language discussion between English, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Persian, Indonesian and Spanish speakers with Google’s Machine Translation service providing translations.

What ensued was a bizarre disjointed discussion about nothing much in particular, resembling a collection of spam attacks.

‘I would l like to use this opportunity to introduce you about Somaliland’ … ‘May we be healthy, live calm and help those who need us most’ … ‘Someone knows Bournemouth, UK? Is an interesting city to visit?’ … ‘I want to tell to the world that Jesus is coming. read Jhon 3:16 please look for in on the BIBLE’.

Full marks for the effort and the vision to think about using translation. But perhaps the BBC should be talking to some of the players in the field who could help them build a more useful cross-language debate with better translation.

They could have used the translation community from Global Voices Lingua for example, with the translation tools developed by Worldwide Lexicon which enable humans to edit and improve MT translations right there on the page, supplying data that is housed on an open source translation memory (WWL has just released a brilliant translation plugin for Wordpress I’ll be blogging about shortly).

It’s also worth comparing what the BBC did with Meedan. Our cross-language Arabic-English interface – which clearly shows the status of a comment translation, the original language it was posted in, the direction of translation, who is author of the comment and who translated it, and whether it is a human or automatic translation – is leaps and bounds ahead of this early BBC experiment.

Still, it’s great to see a major publisher on the internet thinking creatively about crossing languages, which does benefit to everyone in the space working to build the polyglot web.