Moving to Saudi Arabia a few years ago, after having lived a large part of my life in England, meant that I couldn’t help but make some observations about the differences between the two countries. Of course, there are obvious political and cultural differences, but those were not the issues that caught my attention or surprised me much. They have been dealt with at length in both the local and international media, and so their shock factor, for me at least, wasn’t so great. What truly stunned me and left me genuinely puzzled was reading — or, more exactly, the lack thereof.
I grew up in England where reading was a national pastime. People read everywhere, be it on the bus or on the train, at a cafe or in the park or even at sports stadiums — a friend of mine had actually seen a young boy reading while waiting for a soccer match to start. Meanwhile, at King Faisal University (KFU), one professor caught me reading and, fascinated, struck up a conversation with me. She told me that I was the first student she had seen reading in all her years of teaching at the university.
She wasn’t exaggerating. When I was studying at KFU I too never saw anyone reading. I’m sure that there are many who do read but so long as reading is not publicly visible, then that suggests, to me at least, that reading is not a common activity.
Reading is not something that should ever be underestimated. It is because of reading that our ancestors made such great advancements for humanity. During the 9th and 10th centuries the Arabs began to translate texts from civilizations that they had come into contact with when trying to spread Islam and this led to great advancements by the Arabs, and in general Muslims, in the fields of medicine, the physical sciences and mathematics. In a nutshell, reading was the reason behind our glorious past and should never be underestimated.
How did we go from Arabic being the language of science between the 9th and 13th centuries to a time when even at university, most Arab students do not read anything other than their set textbooks and anyone reading is accused of intrigue?
At this rate, by not reading and viewing reading as something done by those with too much time on their hands (a common view held by many here), we are never going to move forward. We are never going to give the world what our past did, like Ibn Sina who gave the world “The Canon of Medicine” which was used in Europe and in the Islamic world for 800 years as a standard medical text, or Ibn Al-Haytham who gave the world the “Book of Optics” which was a groundbreaking book in physics, or Al-Zahrawi who is considered to be the father of modern surgery and who invented many of the surgical tools used today, or Al-Biruni who was a great scientist and let us not forget the great mathematician Al-Khwarizmi who gave the world “The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing” which made him the father of algebra, and of course Ibn Al-Nafis who discovered human blood and pulmonary circulation, and Al-Jazari who created the first recorded design of a human robot. I could go on and on about these scientists alone and what they achieved and I could also name some more great pioneers of our golden age, but there wouldn’t be enough space for the remainder of this article.
Nader Fergany, the lead author of the Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) published in 2002, says “deficits in the acquisition and production of knowledge” are one of the major obstacles found in preventing human development in the Arab world. The AHDR states that only 0.6 percent of the Arab population use the Internet, which explains why English Wikipedia contains over two million articles in its database yet the Arabic version has just over 40,000, with many of the articles incomplete and not even close to being as comprehensive as their English counterparts. And, according to Fergany, over the last 1,000 years, the entire Arab world has translated the same number of books as Spain translates in a year. If we continue down this road then how are we ever going to regain the glory of our past?
