Help from a Far Corner of the Globe

11:01 PM PDT, June 18, 2007

A couple days ago I received an email from a website visitor named David J. Fry. He did not identify himself other than to say he was writing from India and would be returning to the North America soon. He expressed enthusiasm for Ibn al-Haytham: First Scientist and thanked me for bringing attention to the great Muslim scholar known in the West as Alhazen, Alhacen, or Alhazeni. That was not the purpose of his email, however.

He was writing to inform me about a problem he saw with the Arabic script that appeared near the top of the pages of my website. “I was disappointed to see that you have been let down by whoever put together the Arabic script which is prominent on your website–or perhaps by a word-processor that does not handle Arabic properly,” he wrote. “My knowledge of Arabic is very small, but I know a little about Arabic script, and it is written–as no doubt you are well aware–from right to left.  The Arabic on your website has, as far as I can tell, the correct letters, but they run from left to right!”

I was mortified. I had added the Arabic script to my site to help make Arabic readers feel welcome and to create a visual impression in keeping with the site’s Middle Eastern topic and theme. I felt the characters of Ibn al-Haytham’s name lent the pages an exotic, sophisticated look. Imagine my chagrin at learning that I pretty much had accomplished the opposite of my intentions. I had created an impression of graceless ignorance in one fell cut-and-paste.

Here’s how it happened. I saw an Arabic version of Ibn al-Haytham’s full name at the head of an entry about him in an online encyclopedia. I highlighted the Arabic text, copied it, and pasted it into Microsoft Word. I then increased the font size, colored the characters to match my site, made a screen print of the image, cropped it in Microsoft Paint, and uploaded it to my site. The problem occurred at the pasting stage. For some reason the Arabic characters came down in Word in reverse order.

The Arabic text in the online encyclopedia is so small that I did not notice the change. This is no excuse; I should have looked more carefully or had someone fluent in Arabic proofread the words before posting them as a banner on every page of my site. I regret this amateurish mistake, and I apologize to all Arabic readers who visited my site when the flawed text was in place.

Once David Fry alerted me to the problem, I copied the Arabic characters and pasted them in the correct order. I posted the change to the website and emailed David, asking him to take a look. He wrote back to say I had corrected the initial problem, but he still felt uneasy with the appearance of the computer fonts. He very kindly took the time to create his own version of Ibn al-Haytham’s full name and send it to me as a bitmap image. That image now appears on my site.

Thank you, David. I appreciate your advice and assistance. You didn’t have to do what you did, but my site is the better for it, and the World Wide Web—and the world itself—seems a smaller, friendlier place.

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