What Comes Next After the ‘Alexandria Document?"
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In an article for the Egyptian newspaper Al- Ahram, Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, wrote about the “Alexandria Document,” issued at the Library, following the “Civil Society Conference on Critical Reforms in the Arab World,” 12-14 March 2004. In his article “What Comes Next After the ‘Alexandria Document?,’” Dr. Serageldin wrote about aspirations of reform in the Arab World and the role of civil societies in carrying out those reforms.
In his article, Dr. Serageldin writes that the document “puts forth a vision of comprehensive Arab reform, with its political, economic, social and cultural dimensions, rising from the perspective that reforming the deteriorating state of affairs in the Arab world has become a matter of destiny.”
In his article, Dr. Serageldin points out the need for reform in Arab countries, and discusses how it should be carried out to meet the needs of people and accomplish their aspirations. “There is no survival for an immobile society in a world that is quickly moving and changing,” he writes. “Those who do not join with and participate in the scientific revolution and global knowledge and reject the new, give in to a slow suicide.” He further said that Arab participation in global progress will not be complete unless it is carried out under a democratic system characterized by freedom, justice and reason.
To describe the discourse that resulted in the “Alexandria Document,” Dr. Serageldin wrote that it “expresses the assumption of a comprehensive tendency for reforming thought, nurtured by a group of opinionated intellectuals working in the civil societies of Arab countries. [They] worked collectively to put together their reformative visions, based on an emphasis on identity, the consideration of the privacy of the Arab region and related to solving its problems.”