The Cairo International Book Fair, some of you must have heard of it. I have been attending the fair regularly since I was in high school, even when residing in England. But only to buy books. However, I attended one of their cultural events this time and was not disappointed.

By Emad Aysha
This year, the book fair was a little different, paradoxically more comfortable and crowded. The most popular joint by far was Sour al-Azbakiya, the big secondhand book market in Cairo. It had its own wing in a giant tent and was swamped by kids from schools sent in special buses.

Consequently, you couldn’t breathe or move, and secondhand books are my forte. That gave me time to attend an interesting panel discussion about “Digital Identities” (25 January 2025), with one of the key speakers being an Egyptologist no less – my good colleague Dr. Ola Al-Abudi.

Egypt is on the threshold of a significant digital transformation that could earn millions in proceeds and finally put it on the digital map. In the post-internet world, explained Dr Ola, we all have our digital identity online; we’re unverified, in other words. We’re categorised in the usual fashion via name, age, and gender. But that’s only the half of it.

Your country is acquiring a digital identity, too, specifically its history and cultural heritage, and that demands more than you filling out some details about yourself. It demands cataloguing everything, translating everything and authenticating everything that’s said about your country on the internet.

You need extensive databases, pictures of everything – artefacts, symbols, and motifs – and then a combination of fact-checking and copyrights. Oh, and a little AI as well.

The other speakers contributed these, explaining that tabulating all our heritage online could be a significant growth multiplier for the Egyptian economy. Anyone who wants to use our symbols—quite literally trademarks and logos—has to pay us money. In addition, they will be immersed in the virtual worlds of tourism, where they can see everything from all angles without actually going there.

PRISM OF GENIUS: Here's a list of all the contributors, proving that a multidimensional approach is the best solution is a sustainable business solution. [Image provided by Dr. Ola]

The country that has done this to perfection and garnered millions in the process is South Korea. Wouldn’t you know it? South Korean firms have been doing this for us. The trick, explained one of the panelists, is to get startups to foot the bill. They can finance universities to gather all the data, catalogue and translate everything, and fact-check historical dates and events. Then, the private sector will put it all online for a fee.

Dr. Ola explained that there’s more at stake than money, though. It’s your image abroad, how people perceive you. She gave a simple explanation to illustrate this: Go to an AI image creator, type in ancient Egypt or some figure from ancient Egyptian history, and look at the end result, whether it matches the historical persona or the hieroglyphics or not.

There’s also Chat GPT and the historical data it accesses to give answers, often with wrong data about ancient Egypt. Luckily, the panels also revealed that an Egyptian GPT would help counter this and people who want to steal our accomplishments or castigate our history. (How prophetic given the birth of China's rival AI, Deepdive, which has already sent stocks plummeting in the US).

Dr. Ola also made a distinctly Egyptian contribution to how you are classified online. Name by itself would never satisfy an ancient Egyptian, least of all a king who had five names—slogans identifying him with this or that god, along with his military or legal accomplishments, how long his reign was, his moral fortitude, etc. As for the rest of us lowly mortals, we also have five categories to brag about.

These are your physical body (along with the heart), your name and identity, your Ba or spirit, your Ka or animalistic essence (energy) and finally, your shadow.

Thus, tabulating your identity online would be a more complex process than in current usage but thoroughly doable nonetheless, and I’d wager it is also more rewarding. I remember watching an interview once with an Islamic thinker, Gamal Al-Banna, who explained that in ancient Egypt and also in Arabic, the same word was used for heart and mind.

The thinker also explained that the Near Eastern civilisations, Islam included, used the same word for truth and justice. But that was not the case in the West, where power and brute force were the only considerations. Dr. Ola’s talk cemented these notions in my mind, and straight away, I began to see the possibilities flowing out of these precepts.

I agree with the panellists that we must safeguard our heritage online by scanning our manuscripts and photographing our relics while correcting the historical and cultural data fed to Chat GPT. Still, we can do so much more by pursuing our digital identity.

We can diversify the way people think about the self worldwide online and finally break out of the stronghold of the mind/body problem that has afflicted modern Western thinking.

Thank heavens, science fiction is one of the new places where you can question this division, like in the movie Virtual Obsession, where the body grounds your moral faculties and the mind has its own corrupting pleasures within a computer mainframe.

But the Arabs and ancient Egyptians beat them to it. Using the Quran as a guide, we talk about the ruh (spirit), nafs (soul, combining body and spirit), aql (moral or rational steering mechanism), qalb (heart), wujdan and fuaad (which can be awareness, vision, or consciousness).

OLD AGE TECH: Bimaristan or 'Hospital of the Soul' (2014), a Sufi speculative novel that anticipated the role of the imagination in ameliorating our very real-world problems.

From there come moral and psychological remedies for our many ailments. Looking through the bookshelves at the fair, you find many novels about recovery and personal tragedy. Therefore, reviving ancient Egypt online can be the force multiplier we need to solve many of our own personal problems.

Never mind ancient Egyptian or Sufi science fiction!