Cornelis Hulsman and Sawsan Gabra Ayoub started in 1997 with the Religious News Service from the Arab World with (summary) translations of Arabic media in order to balance Western reporting on Egypt. The objective was to give Arabs a voice in the West.  This turned out to be too ambitions and it became giving Egyptians a voice in the West, in particular on Muslim-Christian relations.

From its start the selection of articles were subject related and not related to the political and/or religious views they were expressing. We aim to give a good insight in the various discussions taking place in Egypt without showing preference for any particular conviction. This is done in the belief that only an honest presentation of all views in society will contribute to dialogue, mutual understanding and development.

In 1998 our first own investigative report was published; on Muslim-Christian tensions in al-Kosheh and widespread misreporting in different media.

In 2003 the name Religious News Service from the Arab-World was changed into Arab-West Report, reflecting our aim to serve better Arab-West Relations and thus contributing to Egyptian development. Reporting on Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt remained important but it was no longer exclusively on Muslim-Christian relations.

Our website was launched by former Dutch Prime Minister Andreas van Agt in al-Sakia Cultural Wheel in Cairo in 2006.

In 2007-2008 we made our database bilingual, not only English but also Arabic. Many of our reports have been translated from English to Arabic which needed high quality translations related to the often sensitive nature of the subjects. Lengthy Arab-West Papers should ideally be translated. These costs, however, were beyond our financial means and we had to reduce the number of translations.

In 2008 HRH Prince el-Hassan of Jordan launched our Electronic Network for Arab-West Understanding (ENAWU) and praised Arab-West Report as “a vector for change.”

In the same year ideas developed to turn our database into an Electronic Documentation Center serving better Arab-West and Muslim-non-Muslim relations. An index with glossary and related tagging system was developed by Eng. Sawsan Gabra Ayoub Khalil but maintaining this turned to be too ambitious to be carried out without a database librarian which needs additional technical and financial support.

Index

The index follows a tree system similar to the Library of Congress and Dewey classification system. The purpose is to link the AWR index to both international indexation systems (Library of Congress and Dewey). Developing our own indexation system was needed because neither systems provide a comparable detailed split up in subject categories as the AWR index does.

Description and purposes of the categorization according to tags

Glossary

Our glossary aims to be non-normative. This means that the glossary will be directed toward explaining opinions on a subject, such as the hijāb, without focusing on the norms and values prominent in Egyptian society. We thus describe the opinion of qualified Islamic scholars but also other minority views that may exist in society. That is an added value that is only possible because AWR has been following discussions in various Arab media over many years. The glossary contains short and long explanations.

Organisations

Names of organisations can often be translated in different ways, all of which are correct from a translator's point of view but having different names for the same organisation makes it difficult when trying to find a particular organisation. We found in 2008 9138 different names for approximately 2000 different organisations. We thus created a list of standardized translations for organisations and linked articles mentioning the same organizations.

Qur’ān, Hadīth, and Bible references 

We collected all numeral references of Qur'ān (over 1474), Hadīth (82), and Bible (880) from 1997 till week 26 of 2008. This helps to understand how references to religious texts are used in the current discourse. This became in particular important when we responded to the film Fitna of Geert Wilders which highlighted five Qur’anic verses in a very negative context. Our database showed that Muslim authors writing for a Muslim audience presented the same verses in a very different context.

Books

We collected all of the titles, over 1482, of books mentioned in our articles from 1997 till week 26 of 2008. This includes both book reviews as well as references to concrete books in the articles we selected for AWR. For the Arabic titles we have transliterated their names and they will be checked and standardized. Foreign book titles are checked and placed online.

Places and countries

We have collected 3655 names of places and countries mentioned in AWR starting from 1997 till week 26 of 2008. The spelling of Arabic names was standardized according to the transliteration system of the Library of Congress and subcategorized according to districts (merakaz) and governorates in Egypt. We were also able to make short descriptions of a number of important Egyptian cities and villages relevant to events related to certain incidents and occasions.

Who's Who 

By January 1, 2009 we completed writing text boxes describing personalities in who-is-who for all the weekly issues from 1997 up to week 18 of 2008.

Biographies

Between 2007 and 2010 the Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institute (DEDI) provided scholarships for Danish and Egyptian interns to write short biographies of personalities and other reports related to Arab-West mutual understanding.

Drupal

In 2008 experts from the Princess Sumaya University for Technology advised us to move our data to a Drupal content management system. We worked on this throughout 2009 and the drupal based website went online in February 2010.

Growing database

Articles until January 1, 2008 have been indexed and tagged. The index was placed online in 2009. The old program before drupal did not have sufficient fields needed for the index.

Tagging continued for a while but problems with differences in the spelling of names created problems. Drupal provided the fields needed for the index and tagging but continuously changing staff over the years and lack of supervision by Sawsan Gabra who had left for the Netherlands created further problems in continuing this elaborate system.

We may not have been able to realize all our ambitions but we continue to build our database with (summary) translations, own reporting and since 2014 international news clippings.

Until January 1, 2012, Arabic articles tended to correspond with one English summary unless we had more than one Arabic article on the same subject. In such cases press reviews were written. Per January 1, 2012, we started making daily news overviews that were linking to more than one Arabic text and thus the numbering in the English weeks jumped according to the number of Arabic articles used for a news overview. This database is probably the largest English database worldwide covering Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt.

Since 2012 a system has been developed that provides easy calculations to divide uploaded own AWR production under the following categories:

-       Summary Translations & Press Overviews

-       Background Analysis: Muslim-Christian Relations in Egypt/ME

-       Background Analysis: Egyptian reporting on Muslim/non-Muslim Events in Europe

-       Media Review of Reporting Related ME

-       Rapid-Response Reporting on Current Events Related to ME

-       Interview Article / Report by AWR

-       Investigative Reporting

-       Newsletters

Ambitions for the future

We aim to improve our EDC and connect it to relevant academic institutions and their electronic libraries so that its full potential is realized and it becomes a valuable, highly-regarded resource.

All above tag lists should be made scrollable for easy search and reference. Only names appearing more than 4 times in our “Who's Who” should be made scrollable.

The “Who's Who” should include basic information such as the person's nationality, their profession, their religious or political affiliation and well as a brief note connecting them to relevant new items. It further more connects to statements from or about these people in our database.

 The names of the "Who's Who" should be brought in the subject index under the relevant subjects, making it possible to search for people who have written or made statements on specific subjects.

Search feature improvements: articles should be searchable under a variety of different criteria, such as peoples’ names, geographic locations, organization names etc. Geographic locations should be organized in a string of village, markaz (district), governorate and country and are for Egypt only linked to a map, showing immediately where in Egypt a particular markaz is located. Individual articles can then be cross-referenced for other articles featuring the same person/organization/place/book/Bible/Qur'ān verse. Searches can further be combined with either date or name of publication in order to limit the research to a specific period or publication.

It should be possible for users to print the full subject index for easy view of the tree. The AWR subject index should match library of congress and dewy subject indexes     

Our aim is also to extend work on biographies of significant figures, linking these biographies to all reviewed texts in which the figures are featured.

·         Sort search results by date/publisher, improve display of search results to show date published, publisher, author.

·         All summary translations should be cross-referenced with original Arabic source texts (now partially done).

·         Improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so EDC articles appear in Google searches

·         Providing an overview of Arab media with short descriptions of each medium, where does it stand, quality rating, etc. This quality rating can then be used to provide a real-time watch on the quality of media reporting, arranged by newspaper or reporter.

·         Media watch, listing articles that do not meet basic criteria of media ethics and providing content criticism. Users have to know these articles have been published but also why they are not reliable. Tools will be developed to help students discover why to be careful with certain articles. The media watch can also recommend articles for their excellent quality or for giving background information.

·         Selective automated mailing. The user can type in what categories from the subject index he/she would like to receive by e-mail and instead of receiving the large entire weekly issue of AWR the user receives only those articles the user is interested in.

·         Add more photos in the text to make database more attractive. Photos should help explain texts as much as possible.

·         Bibliography of books and articles in European languages about Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt. This work was started by Cornelis Hulsman prior to going to Egypt in 1994 and was based on systematic library research. Search possibilities according to the period that the book or article covers, subject and name.

·         Future plans include listing books and articles published worldwide about the Holy Family traditions. Later, other traditions that are relevant for an understanding between different cultures could be added.

·         Interviews carried out over 20 years by Cornelis Hulsman, made available online and linked to transcription texts.

·         Solve the ‘Ayn’ problem within our database: at present all transliterations of the Arabic letter ‘ayn are carried out with an English letter ‘c’ in superscript (ie ^c). In html coding this is carried as ^c but also sometimes appears as a standard ‘c’ creating some confusion amongst words such as cAlī, sharīcah etc.

Call for assistance

We have seen from experience that providing accurate and reliable information in context can contribute greatly to a better Arab-West understanding. The Electronic Documentation Center could be a great tool to achieve this. The ambitions described above are too large for our small number of staff. Technical support is very limited and poor internet speed in Maadi does not help us either.

We are open to cooperation with any party that is dedicated to the same objectives as ours: creating a better understanding between people of different cultures and convictions.