If Asimov's Foundation had been translated into Arabic, its title would plausibly have been al Qaeda, but apparently no such translation was ever published or even written. So I asked Marc Sageman about this, and he responded that 'it is the US media and US government that gave AQ its name around 1998', noting that 'At the time, the group around bin Laden was simply known Al Jamaat al Sheikh, or the Sheikh’s group', and that 'Originally, al-Qaeda referred to the military base that people sponsored by bin Laden trained at. Seldon uses a religion (based on scientific illusionism) to further his aims. The Empire attacks the Foundation with all its military arsenal and tries to crush it. He sets up his Foundation in a remote corner of the galaxy, hoping to build a new civilisation from the ruins of the old. Seldon is a scientist and prophet who predicts the Empire's fall. He developed and brought to its highest pitch the science of psycho-history.' That man was Hari Seldon, the man who represented the one spark of creative effort left among the gathering decay.

Beset by overconsumption, corruption and inefficiency, 'it had been falling for centuries before one man really became aware of that fall. The Empire portrayed in Asimov's novels is in turmoil – he cited Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as an influence. The author of the Guardian piece, Giles Foden, describes the parallels this way: 'This peculiar coincidence would be of little interest if not for abundant parallels between the plot of Asimov's book and the events unfolding now,' wrote Dmitri Gusev, the scientist who posted the article. And it seemed to have the evidence to back up its claims. It asserted that Isaac Asimov's 1951 classic Foundation was translated into Arabic under the title 'al-Qaida'. In October last year, an item appeared on an authoritative Russian studies website that soon had the science-fiction community buzzing with speculative excitement. The context was a 2002 article in the Guardian, ' What is the origin of the name al-Qaida?' (picked up on LLOG in ' Copy-editing terrorism', ): Meeting Dmitri Gusev here at Text By The Bay (' Rising sun', ) reminded me that I'd seen his name before. Did Osama bin Laden name Al Qaeda after Isaac Asimov's Foundation series?

Foundation by isaac asimov 1951