“THE universe”, wrote Borges, “was called by some the library.” Mostafa El-Abbadi, foremost among Egyptian scholars of the Graeco-Roman world, was of the same opinion. His universe was the ancient Great Library of Alexandria, long since vanished, which had occupied his mind and heart since his student days.

As he told it, an elfin figure wreathed in smiles with the joy of it all, the original Bibliotheca Alexandrina had been inspired by the conquering expeditions of Alexander the Great, which had shown for the first time the diversity of mankind and the Earth; and had been funded by Ptolemy I, who wished it to contain “all the texts in the world that are worthy of study”. There had been half a million, maybe many more. Visitors to Alexandria were searched in case they had a book which was not in stock. Ptolemy III managed to acquire, by trickery, the originals of the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. Mr Abbadi was sure the collection included books from Phoenecia, Buddhist texts from India, the Septuagint of the Hebrews and Mazdean writings from Persia.

Alexandria’s library was not the first. As a proud citizen—Alexandrian by both parents, holder (as was his wife, Azza Kararah) of distinguished posts at the university, admirer of the sea view from the balcony of his elegant, book-crammed flat—he might have wished it so. But Syria and Babylon both had libraries earlier, as did the temple at Karnak. The difference was that these were regional institutions, with local interests. Alexandria’s library was the first to be set up as a repository of all human knowledge: the universe under one roof.

And it was never, he stressed, just a collection of texts. The real heart of the enterprise was the Museion or Shrine of the Muses, which was a centre of research. There, among walkways and arcades especially designed for thinking, Euclid came to formulate his theorems; Eratosthenes to measure the circumference of the Earth; and Herophilos to prove that the brain, not the heart, was the seat of the intellect. There, too (to Mr Abbadi’s chuckling delight), the philosopher Plotinus four times achieved complete union with the divine.

It struck him then as sad, when he returned to Alexandria in 1960 from his doctoral studies at Cambridge, that the modern city had no great library. Of course, Egypt had no sacks of silver now to spill out on culture, unlike the Ptolemaic kings. Yet the wonder of the library, despite Caesar’s incineration of it (for he held Caesar strictly to blame), had been seared on the memory of the world and on its image of Alexandria, as a cosmopolitan city of learning. Imitations had been built in Baghdad, Córdoba, London and Washington, DC; visiting world leaders asked after what remained of it. So in the 1970s he began to float, gently, the idea or dream of a new library, following the “spiritual example” of the ancients. The seed did not take for years. In 1986, however, UNESCO agreed to help and money began to flow.

The sun half-rising

He was well aware of the project’s limitations. Because books were so costly, it seemed best to build up the library as a series of circles. He began by amassing all possible bibliographical references for the city of Alexandria, and then moved outwards: to Egypt, the Middle East, Africa. He did not say “the world”, but he intended it. The new library, like the old, should be universal, taking in donations from all countries, digitising texts (though his love was for physical books, not screens) and drawing scholars to a new Shrine of the Muses, where they could work in an almost sacred atmosphere of tolerance and bright ideas.

The regime of Hosni Mubarak could not see what he was getting at. Officials envisaged a big library and an Egyptian cultural centre; Egypt was, after all, paying half the $225m cost. In 2002 the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened, with space for 8m books on 11 storeys—and four museums, 19 galleries, a Culturama Hall with a vast interactive screen, and gift shops. One museum was filled with the personal effects of Anwar Sadat, a former president. Mr Abbadi gave the library his precious 16th-century copy of the Codex of Justinian. It seemed slightly out of place.

He was not invited to the opening. He was known to have misgivings, and to have made a fuss when he spotted the bulldozers dumping chunks of mosaic in the sea; for the project involved huge excavations on the site of the Ptolemies’ palace, and he was a man whose idea of a holiday was to tour the ancient ruins of the Middle East. He did not carp about his exclusion, but kept quiet company in his study with his cat, Cleopatra. At least his booklet on the Great Library (only a booklet, he insisted, not a book) had been handed out at the opening. He did his job; they did theirs.

The design of the library, which he liked in principle, was a half-buried sphere that symbolised the sun rising, spreading the light of knowledge over the world. He only wished that it were true. The library made an efficient cultural centre, he sighed. But it did not function as a universal centre of research. Archimedes and Galen would not have done their thinking under that interactive screen. The Muses would not have touched brains, and hearts. And Plotinus would not have written, having encountered the One-and-its-power, “He is, Himself…the encompassment of all things.”