President Abdelfattah Al-Sisi , Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), presided over the opening session of the seventeenth annual meeting of the Board, which was held on 9 April 2016. In his address to the Members of the Board, the President said that the BA has responded to the goals he had designated to it, and lauded the role of the Library of Alexandria, as a cultural institution of enlightenment, in its intellectual confrontation of extremism and violence, in collaboration with Al-Azhar, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Arab League. He praised the efforts and positive outcome of the annual conference on extremism launched by the BA in January 2015 with the aim of combatting extremist thought. President Al- Sisi commended the achievements of the Library in the past year which include: the “Embassies of Knowledge” project which links university students throughout Egypt to the Library, and a great part of which has already been achieved; the international distance learning programs; in addition to widening the range of the Arab and African networks. The President said that the BA is one of Egypt’s most important cultural windows on the world and thanked Ismail Serageldin for his constant and tireless efforts in upgrading the institution and in and reclaiming and building up its role in the enrichment of human thought and heritage, and in spreading enlightenment and moderate thought.
