القاعدة --إسحاق أسيموف

now that i'm back, it's time for a new obsession. the liberal avenger emailed me this four-year old article (LA posted about it here and MatthewB directed me to this other article that discusses the same theory). the article argues that the name for the terrorist group "al-qa'ida" may have been inspired by the 1952 arabic translation of isaac asimov's "foundation". the translation used "al-qa'ida" as the arabic title.

so now i simply must have a copy of the arabic translation of this book. the 1952 edition would be ideal, but i would also be satisfied with any version that has the title القاعدة ("al-qa'ida").

for the record, i think the notion that osama bin laden named his terrorist organization as an homage to the classic sci-fi novel (by a jewish author, no less) is rather far fetched. but this is one of those rare intersections between two otherwise unrelated interests of mine (science fiction and the arabic language), so i just gotta find me a copy of this.

this morning, i sent several emails out to people i know who may have some leads, either from the book collecting or arabic language angles. so far nothing has panned out (though i also haven't heard back from everyone yet either). i think what i need is a searchable database of books in arabic like AddALL, or even just an arabic version of amazon. of course, if anyone out there happens to have a mouldering old copy sitting in their attic that would work too. the arabic wiki entry for asimov does not have any external links that can be used to track down his books. in fact, the wiki article doesn't mention "foundation" at all.

if anyone out there has any ideas or information that could conceivably lead to that book ending up in my greedy hands, let me know.