By Mahmoud Murad As if the pollution all around us wasn't enough, man has created so-called clean bombs. The new "clean" bomb can accomplish the same task of other radioactive bombs but without producing the same fallout. Uncle Sam, who invented this nicer weapon of mass destruction, has passed the technology to one country: Israel. Intellectuals and scholars have been promoting peace for years, hoping to protect human legacy from permanent destruction. One is entitled to ask: what would happen to collective memory in the case of nuclear war? Ismail Serageldin, director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, told me that copies of the vast shared human archive of memory and understanding will be kept in three locations outside the US. Egypt was selected as one location because of its stature and history. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is being prepared to host a full duplicate archive of the recorded and stored memory of humanity. The same will happen in Amsterdam and a site to be named in Asia. The Bibliotheca is now actively recording the history and achievements of Egypt and the Arabs. One of the websites to be launched soon will focus on the history of modern Egypt from the beginning of the 19th century up until now. The historic documentation will cover social and cultural aspects as well as politics and military history. The Bibliotheca has also prepared a website on Pharaonic history, as well as websites for presidents Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat. The website of the Bibliotheca receives nearly three million hits every month, 75 per cent of which from Egyptians. The Abdel-Nasser site alone receives around a million hits per month. Last year alone, the Bibliotheca received 80 million hits. Storing human memory in the Bibliotheca makes sense, for Egypt is where civilisation started. This week's Soapbox speaker is deputy editor- in- chief of Al-Ahram.
