Just imagine that you couldn’t read, or that if you could read, you only had access to a very restricted range of material. I know, the pain of not being able to read this blog would be almost unbearable …
One index of a society’s health and modernity is the extent to which its members can read and write. Another is the quantity of books available for reading. Literacy and printing have played a crucial role in the development of knowledge because they have allowed knowledge to be recorded and spread. You don’t have to re-invent the metaphorical wheel if you can read an account of how someone has done it before. You can focus your energy on developing a better wheel more cheaply. And, of course, the recent technological revolution has enabled ideas to be recorded and spread more quickly and further enabled interaction, so that development and improvement is even faster.
In past centuries, Arabic learning was a source of great riches for the Western intellectual tradition. However, in recent history, at least, many countries in the Arab world have lagged behind the West, not just in literacy, but in the availability of books - and this, despite earning great oil wealth. If you visit an Arab bookshop you will find plenty of copies of Shifra Dafinshi (The Da Vinci Code) and the tales of Hari Butor (Harry Potter). But some people are beginning to lament the lack of quality books translated into Arabic from other languages, and the poor state of Arabic publishing.
To put this into context:
- Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years and
- For every one million Arabs only one book is translated into Arabic each year
(Source: UNDP Arab Human Development Report, 2003)
In an encouraging attempt to address this problem, a new publishing venture called Kalima (”Word” in Arabic), has been set up. Kalima aims “to fund the translation, publication, and distribution of high-quality works of classic and contemporary writing from other languages into Arabic” - starting with 100 titles in the first year.
“Currently in most Arab countries, ‘great works’ of world literature or academia are only available in the original language, limiting access to a select group of society,” Kalima says. “The rest of the world has enjoyed a wealth of both domestic and translated writing, why should the Arab world be any different? Arabic is also a beautiful, expressive language, and one that should be celebrated and valued more by giving readers a greater choice of quality titles in translation.”
The project is backed by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammad bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and funded by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage and the financial risks to the 20 publishers involved so far are being covered.
You can view the list to be published here. Kalima has selected books from 16 languages including Japanese, Swedish, Czech, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Yiddish, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Latin and ancient Greek. Out of the 100, 52 are from English, 10 from French, nine from German and seven from Latin. Seventy-one of the books are classed as “contemporary” (written after the second world war) and, on the literary side, include such writers as Nadine Gordimer, Khaled Hosseini, Haruki Murakami, Albert Camus and George Eliot.
It is an encouraging start, though sadly, many of the Arab societies do not enjoy the intellectual freedom that the West has evolved. It took over 1000 years and endless battles and torture and burnings for intellectual enquiry to break free from the control of the Catholic Church, and fundamentalist Islamic censorship is a factor in many parts of the Arab world. However, the Kalima project is an important move forward in facilitating a potential change of perspective on human existence.
I look forward to the day when it will be possible for Arabs to freely purchase Arabic translations of the works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali alongside those of Dan Brown and J.K.Rowling, and to be able to read them without fear. I also look forward to the day when those Arabs who dare to think ’outside the box’ will be able to get their own controversial works published in their own language in their own country.
This is a great project. One of the keys to breaking the stranglehold of regressive religious ideas in the Islamic world will be getting a diverse range of quality literature and ideas in the hands of the general population. Literacy and the expansive exchange of thought it allows is an important tool for opening minds and societies.
It is one thing for the books to be available and another for people to read them. I recall it being said during the original furore over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses that most of the people calling for his death had not read, and would never read, his book.
Of course, if the books are not available, then they will definitely not be read so it is much better that they be available and the Kalima project thus deserves our enthusiastic support.
It is very sad when we reflect that it was Arabic scholars, recovering and translating ancient Greek texts, who sparked a new age of learning in the West. We owe those scholars a huge debt of gratitude and should not forget it.
The other day, I was reading The God Delusion on the tube and a young man leaned across and enquired “Excuse me, sir. What is that book about?” I’m pretty sure he knew but outlined the argument anyway. He smiled a knowing smiled and waved a slim volume at me as I got off the train. “All the answers are here,” he said complacently.
No prizes for guessing what the slim volume was. How long before such people will read and, more importantly, consider seriously what they read?
[...] because of this. Such attitudes clog up cognitive evolution and hold societies back (see Opening Up). It doesn’t seem wrong to say that things are false if the evidence about their falsehood [...]