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For Mousa Ghubash growing up in
the UAE in the 1970s meant having to get her books
shipped from Lebanon or Egypt as there were no
bookstores in her home country at that time. Learning
about the history of her homeland, a subject she was
passionate about from a young age, usually required a
trip to the Indian Library in London, where historical
information about the Arabian Peninsula was kept.
“Back then
all historical accounts about this region were written
by Indian or British scholars,” remembers Dr.Ghubash,
who, some two decades later, holds a sociology degree,
has several books under her name and manages a women’s
cultural centre.
Things have
changed dramatically since the 1970s, as the country has
witnessed a rapid surge of wealth and economic growth,
which, in turn, has given a boost to the development of
culture and sciences.
The times
seem just right for the country’s scholars to start
recording their land’s history and culture themselves.
The desire to produce scientific studies of the UAE from
a local perspective is what has motivated Dr.Ghubash to
embark on a daring project – writing the country’s first
ever encyclopaedia.
“All
European countries have their own encyclopaedia, in Iran
work on the Persian encyclopaedia has finished last
year,” says Dr.Ghubash, explaining just why producing a
UAE encyclopaedia is task of national significance. The
encyclopaedia will be a vital source for information for
individual readers as well as for people doing
scientific research on the region.
Once
completed, the encyclopaedia will be a source of
information on more that 70 different fields, including
history, politics, economics, natural sciences and the
environment. It will also have information about each
family in the UAE. This means, the elders of every UAE
family will be interviewed so that their wisdom and
knowledge is preserved for posterity.
“I have
noticed that many UAE families have published books
about their history, how about if all these stories were
gathered in one single book like the encyclopaedia,” Dr.
Ghubash says.
Work on the
encyclopaedia has started already and has been financed
by the Ousha bint Hussain Cultural Centre, which
Dr.Ghubash founded in 1992. Preliminary studies into the
projects at a cost of Dhs500,000 were launched last
year. Apart from sourcing researchers and experts, the
preliminary stage of the project also included
consulting foreign experts in the field to get advice on
how to best set up the project.
While the
project is still to be approved from the government,
which Dr.Ghubash hopes will bear some of the estimated
Dhs40 million cost of the project, work has started on
preparing the contents of the encyclopaedia. Some 1,000
researchers and 45 experts are currently examining old
records and documents about the UAE, produced by
scholars from all over the world. When ready in about
five years from now, the encyclopaedia will be bilingual
(in English and Arabic) and will even be accessible
online.
“The idea
is so big, we cannot go through with this project by
ourselves,” says Dr. Ghubash, adding: “We need the
cooperation of many other cultural centres in other
emirates, from Abu Dhabi to Fujairah.”
Monetary
support will also be needed for the project and Dr.
Ghubash hopes donors from all nationalities join in the
project. Says she: “There are many big European and
Indian companies which have been based in this country
for decades; these companies are now a part of the
country and it will be great if they can contribute
alongside prominent UAE entrepreneurs.”
While
producing the country’s first ever encyclopaedia is a
paramount task, it is not the only activity managed by
the Ousha bint Hussain Cultural Centre. Established
in1992, the centre is a tribute to Dr.Ghubash’s mother,
a very learned woman, who installed in her daughter a
love of books and a keen interest in other peoples and
cultures, which later lead her to a career in sociology.
The centre
is dedicated to promoting the role of motherhood in the
country, a task which Dr.Ghubash sees as vital at this
point in the UAE’s history. “There are fast cultural and
economic changes sweeping the UAE, so there is a strong
need to build and re-build your traditions, our culture
and our Arabic language,” says Dr.Ghubash, who quit the
American University in Washington for Cairo University
after realising she was more interested in staying
closer to home and exploring her native culture and
history.
Ever since
then, Dr.Ghubash has produced more than 40 research
papers as well as seven books about the Emirates. She
founded the Ousha bint Hussain Cultural Centre after 13
years as a sociology professor at UAE University.
In the
begging, the centre focused on teaching women the Holy
Quran and then expanded into publishing books and
conducting research. At present, the centre attracts a
large number of women with a variety of interests –
there are students and researchers gathering information
for their projects at the public library as well as
women attending foreign languages or computer literacy
classes. The Ousha bint Hussain Cultural Centre also
organises monthly public lectures covering a huge range
of subjects from politics and economics, to religion,
history, and poetry. Each year, hundreds of mothers
compete in the centre’s “Ideal Mother” competition,
which is a tribute to the role that women have in
helping preserve their country’s culture and
values.
Most important of
all, the centre appears to be a place for women where
they can gather and interact with other women. “I have
one class of old women and for 12 years they have all
been coming regularly,” Dr.Ghubash says, adding: “They
are illiterate and they have learned the Quran just by
listening.”
DO YOU NEED TO KNOW MORE?
Here are some facts about how the modern-day
encyclopedias came into being:
An
encyclopedia is
a work that contains information on all branches of
human knowledge or treats comprehensively a particular
branch of knowledge usually in articles arranged
alphabetically by subject.
Encyclopedias have been around for more than 2,000
years. The Greek scholars Aristotle and Plato are
considered to be the fathers of the encyclopedia. The
first ancient Greek record of an encyclopedia that has
reached modern-day scientists was written by Plato’s
nephew, Speusippus. The volume covered areas such as
natural history, mathematics and philosophy.
The
early encyclopedias written by Arab scholars were two
kinds – one catered to members of the general public who
wanted to expand their knowledge, while the second kind
served official administrators as Arabs expanded their
political influence in Africa and Europe.
One
of the world’s most widely-read encyclopedia is The
Encyclopedia Britannica. It was the brainchild of
printer Colin
Macfarquhar
and engraver Andrew Bell, who hired a young scholar
William Smellie to edit it. The
first edition of the encyclopedia came out in three
volumes, published from 1768 until 1771. The first
edition was a great success and the publisher issued a
second edition, spreading to ten volumes, while the
fourth edition, completed in 1809 was double the size.
At present Encyclopedia Britannica is the oldest
continuously published reference work in the English
language.
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