El-feki Chairs Open Dialogue on "Al-Tahtawy, 21st Century" at Library of Alexandria

Dr. Mostafa El-Feki, Director of the Library of Alexandria, chaired an open dialogue entitled “Al-Tahtawy and the Twenty-First Century at the Library’s headquarters.

A constellation university professors including of Dr. Emad Abu Ghazi, former Minister of Culture and Professor of Arabic Documents at the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, Dr. Ahmed Zakaria Al-Shalak, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, full-time at the Faculty of Arts, Dr. Anwar Moghith, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at Helwan University, Dr. Amal Al-Sabban, Professor of French at the Faculty of Al-Alsun at Ain Shams University, and Dr. Mervat Asaad Atallah, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Faculty of Education, Alexandria University. participated in that dialogue.

The agenda of the dialogue revolved around the glorious enlightening message carried by Rafa’ Al-Tahtawi, one sheikhs of AlAzhar in the 19th century, who was depicted as the nation’s teacher and pioneer in the process of renewal and enlightenment in modern Egyptian thought.

Egypt is a comprehensive renaissance project in which building a new awareness of her distinguished personality which represents her goal and aspiration.

Egypt's renaissance includes scientific, cognitive, and cultural advancement that become the foundation and pillar.

The dialogue sheds light on the great translation movement that Al-Tahtawi launched his first spark during his school years in Paris when he was an imam and a member of the first educational mission sent by Governor Muhammad Ali Pasha outside the country in the mid-19th century.

And upon his return to the homeland, he established the prestigious Al-Alsun School in 1835 to learn students to use one or more foreign languages in order to build bridges of civilizational communication and knowledge dialogue between Egypt and Europe in a way that would achieve for the nation at that time a renewed start on the paths of development and modernization.

The dialogue dealt with the rich path of Tahtawy, a thinker, author, educator, and journalist, as well as his success in forming the first generation of pioneers of the modern knowledge renaissance who set themselves the path of enlightenment and renewal.

Those pioneers passed on the torch of knowledge generation after generation, whose brilliance we are still fascinated with as we cross the threshold of the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Translated by Ahmed Moamar