If, as they say, the good die young, then the great may live long and then forever afterward in memory. For the memory of the righteous, as an ancient text tells us, is a blessing forever. And it was the cause of memory that the historian Mostafa El-Abbadi championed--for what is history but whole nations' and indeed whole civilizations' memory?
The news of Professor Abbadi's death in his beloved Alexandria took some of us back--specifically to 1972, when he delivered a lecture that was also a call to action. "It is sad to see the new University of Alexandria without a library," he noted on that occasion. "And if we want to justify our claim to be connected spiritually with the ancient tradition, we must follow the ancient example by starting a great universal library." Clio, the muse of history, who's seen it all by now and inspired much of it, must have looked down and beamed.
The professor's dream became a reality in 2002, when a great cylindrical pyramid arose like an old vision made new. The universal library of Alexandria, one of history's wonders, had risen again. "With the founding of the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina," the professor noted, "the ancient experiment has come full circle." But he wasn't invited to the dedication, which was attended by heads of state, royalty and assorted other such swiftly extinguished luminaries. For he'd dare point out that the builders had ignored the site's archaeological past. So he was ignored in turn as a political troublemaker. That much hadn't changed much since pharaonic times. Any more than court intrigues have radically altered in this Year One of the Trump dynasty.
Always an exception to the rule, Professor Abaddi would pile his wife, Azza Kararah, a professor of English literature at the University of Alexandria, and their two kids into their Volkswagen Beetle and set out to explore archaeological digs throughout Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. It was Professor Abbadi who raised doubts about the old story of the original library's having been burned down by a singular lunatic who sought to go down in history, legend and infamy. His book on the subject (Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria) remains a standard citation in books on the Greco-Roman past of Egypt, a viewpoint too often neglected in the fascination with only Egyptian sources. "We have a great name, fortunately," he once said of Alexandria's storied library. "The challenge is living up to it."
Lawence Durrell, author of the tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet, could have been speaking of Professor Abbadi when he wrote about a scholar who "seemed to hold whole civilizations in his head." To quote Roger Bagnail, professor of ancient history at NYU, "he was the port of call in Egypt." He was "without doubt the doyen of Alexandria," adds Dorothy Thompson, honorary president of the International Association of Papyrologists. "He made Alexandria known in the English-speaking world in the 20th century."
What's more, like the public intellectual he was, the professor kept making trouble and then, even worse, being borne out by subsequent events. Standing on the balcony of his apartment overlooking the sea, he filmed a video of construction equipment excavating historic materials and throwing them into the sea. It was an act of vandalism disguised as scholarship. To quote Max Rodenbeck in The Economist, "The ensuing scandal forced [the Egyptian government] to stop work and permit an emergency salvage archaeological dig." And then an old mosaic from the second century of the Common Era was found at the site. (It's now proudly displayed at the new library's attached museum. The professor was forever roaming through old archaeological sites and coming up with just that kind of find.)
The recent obituary of the professor in the New York Times offers further details, and further confirmation that the Times' obituaries remain the one good thing, if not the only good thing, about what used to be America's paper of record.
Compare his obits in this country to the papers in Egypt, when the library opened. Not one newspaper mentioned Professor Abaddi on that day at all.
As they say, prophets aren't welcome in their own country. Professor Abaddi is proof enough of that.
Editorial on 03/07/2017