You are what you read, they say. Your knowledge of the world is sharpened and enhanced through reading. Books, and now electronic books, are the best medium for presenting the world to us and revealing science, culture, sports and everything we experience in our lives. You travel abroad and you see people reading in cafes, on buses, on trains and in parks. Now of course when we travel these sights surprise us because here in Saudi Arabia, you never see people reading in public. Books for most Saudis mean textbooks which means study which means unpleasant drudgery. There are very few English language books and even fewer good translations of English books into Arabic in our bookstores.
Bookshops are here but somehow people do not seem inclined to browse. Yet when we travel, many of us go to bookshops, wander through the shelves and titles and eventually come home carrying loads of books.
So what is it that is found in foreign bookshops that is not found here? The widest variety of books is one answer. What we get here is normally a limited range of topics. Of course there are limitations on certain subjects that are considered unfit. Apart from that, there is a wide range of topics that can be offered without breaching any codes. The problem seems to be deeper than that, however. Why don’t businessmen open large bookstores such as those which lure us abroad? Why do they spend all their money building shopping centers — without bookstores?
Why do we see the easy way out by letting our children waste their time playing computer games and not encouraging them to read? Some will no doubt claim that the Internet and TV have taken the place of books and this is partly true. In Europe, the Internet is common — and much faster than our local variety. There is also a wide variety of TV channels and many other things that people use to fill up their time. And yet, bookstores in Europe are always busy, full of people seeking specific titles and asking questions or at least browsing. The problem is more visible here, and I daresay we ourselves are responsible for it. Too many of us are simply too lazy to read — even lazier when it comes to encouraging children to learn however they can — and one important way of learning is through reading.
Our society needs to move toward reading and make it plain which books are allowed and which are not. Imagine bringing books and magazines from abroad to read here and having many of them confiscated at the airport. Some of these books might be genuinely banned but in most cases, uninformed customs and Ministry of Information personnel just confiscate everything since, after all, that is the easiest way.
There is no unified list of banned titles since thousands of books are published everyday. This of course means that the customs/ministry personnel have to use their own judgment in confiscating books. This then leads to haphazard action.
Magazines get the same treatment, and if you are lucky you’ll get a few pages torn out. The problem is that there is no common ground between the customs personnel and those who decide what books should be banned.
Between being too lazy to widen our horizons and expand our minds and the untrained customs officials, we are left with filling our free time with nothing but fillers.
