Call For Malaysia To Build Most Comprehensive Library In The World

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 19 (Bernama) -- Malaysia should build the most comprehensive library in the world in order to become the international hub for education and also to be the foundation of world studies, suggested a speaker at the International Conference on Global Movement of Moderates, Wednesday. Dr Syed Ali Tawfik Al-Attas, advisor to the Al-Bukhary Foundation, said such a library that holds resources from all around the world will not only benefit Malaysia in terms of policy making, research and so on, but will also benefit the whole world, especially the Muslim world. "Southeast Asia does not possess a library comparable to those found in the West. We do not possess mass resources in terms of manuscripts, neither do we have facilities for such," he said when presenting his paper on “The Role of Education in Nurturing Moderation." In making the library the most comprehensive, he said, it should have a museum, information technology (IT) facility and also a translation centre in all languages from manuscripts and valuable works collected from all over the world. To make it a reality, cooperation between government and private bodies is crucial, he said. He said the library is crucial for the rise of the Muslim world, saying that the Muslim world seems to be failing in terms of learning culture. "The Muslim world spends 0.3 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on Education, while the West spends about six per cent on research and development. "Clearly, we are failing somewhere. We are not encouraging knowledge and innovation ... because we do not appear to possess what we call the culture of learning," he said. -- BERNAMA