Why Arabs Hate Reading

15 Responses

1. Great thought. So very logical. It has filled a gap as to why so little has been translated into Arabic script languages, and why they may never have a Reformation, since new ideas seem not to be easily read and understood. Where is the Gutenberg equivalent when we/they need it? Perhaps the Latinisation of the alphabet was Ataturk’s greatest gift to Turkey, and Turkey may not finally (despite Erdogan), be condemned to full re-Islamisation with its attendant ignorance and violence (and the same might apply in Indonesia and other Muslim lands where Arabic script was not adopted).

   Reply

2. Why has Tunisia been the seeming odd man out among Arab lands? The determined secularism of Habib Bourguiba, the leader of Tunisia’s nationalist movement who had studied and lived for a long time in France, and of his Destour Party, was aided by the French language. The Tunisian elite, or many of its members, either studied in France, or studied in French-language schools, staffed by young French men and women sent out by the French government. France took root among that elite, and French-language newspapers did not whither after the French rule ended. Knowledge of French allowed that elite to have continued access to the wider world of French, and thus of Western, intellectual life. French-language newspapers and magazines, French-language radio and then television — including newspapers and magazines from France itself, and broadcasts from France, too, easily picked up in Tunisia. Would Bourguiba have succeeded in creating and sustaining this secular elite — an elite whose numbers, like that of the secular elite in Turkey, do not ensure their continued dominance. As the secularists in Turkey discovered when Citizen and Padishah Erdogan came to power, they represent only about 25% of the populuation, though minorities — Alevis, and now Kurds (a complicated story, for Turkish hyper-nationalists are found in the anti-Erdogan camp), and they are always in danger of being swampe, and initially Erdogan wanted to make peace with the Kurds because, in his view, the unity of Muslim peoples should and would overcome ethnic resentments and grievances).

   French embassies and consulates all over the world make much of French-language culture. They support an organization of the countries — that archipelago of lands — that belong to La Francophonie. They promote — as they should — their language against the onslaught of English.

   But what they have not done, and cannot do publicly, is do what I am doing here: take note of how the French language has indeed had a remarkable cultural — and, therefore, political — effect, in helping to shore up the secularists in Tunisia and, not quite so dramatically, elsewhere in North Africa (and, but only among the Maronites, in Lebanon).

   The French linguistic mission civilisatrice deserves recognition — even if it can’t be done by the French state itself. French writers can do the recognizing, and so can we. And it is not only the French language that makes possible that some Arabs can escape from the Islam-based prison of Arabic.

   Whenever I read something semi or fully sensible from a writer in an Arab publication put out in The Gulf States or in London, I know that not only does the writer know English, but that very likely his children are being schooled either in the local American School, or in boarding school in England. This is not the result, as it is in the case of Tunisia, of French government policy to encourage the spread of its language. No government is behind the use and study and adoption, of English by elites in foreign lands. It’s a matter of necessity and of prestige. The ease with which English is used, and even preferred to Arabic by some Arabs, is remarkable. I once heard a Kuwaiti billionaire tell dinner-table guests that his son, who attended the American School in Kuwait, knew so little Arabic that he had had to hire a tutor for him. He said this not with embarrassment but with pride, for this meant his son had been so immersed in English that he had not sufficiently learned, or had forgotten too much of, his Arabic. He took it as a sign of cultural advancement that his son had trouble with Arabic.

   Many of those rich Gulf Arabs who attend English schools, may use it merely to acquire a half-timbered Tudor house or, like Prince Bandar, a Plantagenet hunting lodge, or to demand that another hand be dealt at Crockford’s or to bark orders to waiters at Claridge’s, or to send orders to an agent to buy, whatever it costs, a particular painting at Sotheby’s, which painting will then be put in a local museum to show off the cultural advancement of Qatar, Kuwait, the Emirates (an advancement measured, the locals are showing they understand, by the examples of Western art their nascent but spectacularly-funded museums contain). But there are others who, having been schooled in English, and having access to English-language newspapers and magazines and books, might be free of their own Arabic-language prison, so wedded to Islam. Imagine a boy from the Emirates having been made to read,in his boarding school in Sussex, snippets of writers in English — think of what effect Milton’s Areopagitica might have on him, as he is asked to discuss in class “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue” or to read Shakespeare on the responsibilities of rule.

   I don’t want to overlook the obvious: not every Arab who masters English or French or some other Western language becomes more enlightened as a result. Many who live in the West, chained by the mind-forged manacles of Islam, may learn — as native speakers — other languages, and then put them to use not to free or enlighten themselves but to better work for the dominance of Islam.

   Perhaps Pollyanna has been too much with us. After all, how can we ignore the use, or even mastery, of English and French by Muslim Arabs as a weapon. Think of Tariq Ramadan, so much more insidious and effective because of his native command of French and good command of English. Think of the lying propagandists of the PLO, such as Saeb Erekat, appearing on the BBC. Think, too, of some of the propagandists for the Islamic State, some raised in Europe and using English and French both to taunt and threaten Westerners, and to recruit other Muslims in Europe and North America. This, too, has to be kept in mind. But if you were born into Islam, and saw what was wrong with its effect on the minds of its adherents — the True Believers are making your country, your life, unbearable — you might consider that, all in all, what Ataturk did deliberately, in replacing the Arabic script of Ottoman for the Latin alphabet of modern Turkish, and what Bourguiba did without calculation, because he and others like him had studied and lived in France and French came so naturally to him, have had good effects. And those effects should be recognized and understood.

   Reply

3. The Difficulties of Literacy for Speakers of Arabic
   The language issue should not be underestimated for precisely the reason that in the Arabic speaking world, there is a catastrophic deficiency of translations from other languages that would make the fruit of other civilizations comprehensible. The Greeks or Swedes with a population each of just over ten million people have more literature and news, economic, political, cultural and scientific information reports translated into their “minor languages” than almost 300 million Arabs. In most Arab countries, there is a huge percentage of illiterate women, and regional dialectical differences make the standard literary Arabic learned in schools (fusha), referred to in Arabic as fu??? l-?a?r (Modern Standard Arabic) and fu??? t-tur??, (modeled after the Koran but with modern vocabulary) an artificial medium so that even among the diverse Arab peoples, there is little intercommunication.
   Statistics taken from the most recent posting on the internet by Index Translationium, collected by UNESCO tell a remarkable though unbelievable story. The number of books translated into the target language show for example that a “minor language” like Danish is still major in the sense that it makes available to the Danish reading public of less than six million people, a “universe” of 64,864 books and articles putting it in 12th place whereas Modern Standard Arabic with a supposed official number of readers in excess of 300 million was the target language of 12,700 works just barely ahead of the less than 7 million speakers of Hebrew who could read 10,965 in a translation! On the basis of per million potential readers, the Hebrew speaking audience has at its disposal roughly 1,500 foreign works and that of the “Arab World” only 44. The database contains cumulative bibliographical information on books translated and published in about one hundred UNESCO Member States since 1979. It totals more than 2,000,000 entries in all disciplines: literature, social and human sciences, natural and exact sciences, art, history and so forth and is updated regularly. By publishing this list, UNESCO provides the general public with the valuable tool of referencing bibliographical inventories of translations on a worldwide scale.
   Israel is a state where language is a powerful factor encouraging acculturation to values and norms traditionally ignored or despised in the Arab-Muslim culture of the Middle East such as freedom of conscience and expression, women’s rights and religious liberty.
   Israeli linguist Eliezer Ben-Rafael emphasizes that the native Palestinian Arabic dialect in current and popular usage in Israel differs substantially from the literary form (Modern Standard – the fusha) used by those with a higher education for entertainment, reading, education, listening to the media. He explains why many Israeli Arabs find it easier to use Hebrew textbooks in many subjects rather than those from Arab countries which the Ministry of Education is thus reluctant to import and are in the literary form of Arabic.
   The situation with Hebrew is however quite different than that described by Colin Wells Why Arabs Hate Reading – who wrote “Hebrew writing is a special case, a consonantal script for a dead language that was brought back to life by European Zionists for use in Israel, where alphabetic script is also commonly used.” This is misleading. Modern Hebrew for adults employs a consonantal alphabet without vowel signs – the nikud, the vowel system first employed in the 9th century A.D. and familiar to most Jews in the diaspora who cannot get along without it, and it is currently employed for poems, songs, prayer books and the Old Testament in use outside of the synagogue service which employs the ancient version of the text on Torah scrolls (no vowels at all).
   Modern Hebrew carried out a minor reform employing what is known as ktiv maleh (Full writing) by using the weak consonants yod, vav and ayin which are missing in the ancient Biblical text ktiv haser (“missing writing”).
   In brief, Israelis have a problem with literacy too but not as serious as in Arabic. Many times, an educated reader will suddenly stop midway in a sentence because he is uncertain which word is indicated by the Hebrew letters where no vowels are able to guide him. This is made even more confusing by the attachment of prepositions and articles to the words they refer to and one or two letters at the end of a word may refer to the possessive pronoun.
   Proposals for a new alphabet or Latinization were tried and rejected. Objections came not only from the Orthodox but from any traditionalists and those afraid of an unbridgeable gap with the past.
   For a detailed discussion of this problem, see my new book Modern Hebrew, The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language. July 2014. McFarland.ISBN 978-0-7864-9492-7

   Reply

4. The author’s thesis can be summed up in his words: “consonantal writing by definition is a recipe for poor literacy”. Yet he notes that the only languages that use only consonants are Arabic – and Hebrew, that is, modern Hebrew.

   Then why do Arabs have a literacy problem and Israelis publish more books than any other country by proportion and its citizens have a 97% literacy rate according to the CIA World Factbook?

   Here are more facts: “The appetite for books in the country of only seven million is prodigious: 4,000,000 Hebrew readers, 1,500,000 Arabic readers and 1,500,000 Russian readers support two major bookselling chains (Steimatzky and Tsomet Sefarim) and a total of 300 stores. 4,200 new titles are published each year while 35 million books are sold annually.”

   I wonder that this article did not mention the spectacular literacy rate in Israel compared to the lack of literacy in Arab countries. Both languages write in consonants.

   The answer is that Israel has a population that values education, and reading is the key to learning. Consonants have nothing to do with it. But I must admit that Hebrew poetry uses vowels printed with the consonants, and in prose specific consonants do the work of vowels.

   But it’s not the difficulty of reading Arabic that is the issue. Maybe Arabs are not interested in reading.

   Hebrew has its difficulties, too, especially for native English speakers. But those of us who love the language and consider it the doorway to Israeli and Jewish culture – we want to make the effort, and we do.

   Reply

5. I appreciate the detailed comments and thank those readers who have offered the benefit of their insight and learning. I hope I might clarify one or two points that perhaps I should have made more clear in the piece. Israelis commonly speak and read languages that use alphabetic writing, as I suggest in the article. This is all I meant by describing Israel as “a special case.” In other words, the literary culture of Israeli Jews is far from relying solely on Hebrew texts, which explains the high literacy rate quite well. This is not to deny a role to Jewish culture in promoting literacy, which it undoubtedly does. But Jews have been multilingual (and often highly literate) since Hellenistic times. Perhaps I should have said that consonantal writing is a recipe for poor literacy if relied upon exclusively.

   Reply

6. i agree with the two comments above. to say that there are two languages, hebrew and arabic, and one works and the other doesn’t (in terms of literacy), pretty much hints that what they have in common is not the problem. hebrew has been modernized, yes, but it still doesn’t use vowels, so the evidence seems to refute the theory.

   Reply

7. Dear Abby, I’m not making any claims about language at all, much less that “one works and the other doesn’t.” I’m claiming that one kind of writing is harder to read than another, in whatever language. Sorry if this was unclear.

   Reply

8. Interesting essay and commentary. Ignorance and illiteracy is, among other things, a political asset. Those who know the least obey the best. Oui bono!

   Reply

9. I teach English to Gulf-State Arabs.
   I have just read Daniel Boorstin’s chapter “The Island of Islam” in his book, The Discoverers.
   I have lived in Japan and learnt to read and write their combination logographic and syllabic script, and have also studied Spanish.
   The consistent inability of even my most vocal Arab students to extract meaning from simple unfamiliar text has always worried me.

   And now your brilliant article.

   Reading it was a eureka-epiphany moment.

   I wish to share it with my colleagues who also face struggling Arab students. However, with all due respect, I found two little points of worry: First, the mention of Hebrew – and then its quick dismissal – a worry. (This has been pointed out in some other comments, which you have clearly addressed.) Second, it was a little stilted in places. I was really hoping you might write another – shall I say – more stream-lined version.

   Any chance?

   Reply

10. Dear James, thank you for your interest and your kind words about my article. I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’m not clear on what you mean by “streamlined” but I suspect you may be speaking of the obviously touchy identity politics that seem to attach themselves to such discussions so easily. I’m hoping to write a book on this subject, and at this point all I can do is direct you to my much longer two-part piece in Arion, which is available online. Part II (forthcoming) may be more streamlined than Part I, if I understand you right, anyway. By the way, in both parts you’ll find suggestions for further reading on writing systems and literacy. Thanks again.

    Reply

11. However, Israel has an extremely high literacy rate and one of the highest per capita amount of books published per year. In Hebrew.

    So no, it’s not consonantal languages, it’s Arabic, or Arabs.

    Reply

12. I lived in Morocco for 10 years & it was very rare that I saw
    anyone read a book, apart from the Koran.
    I asked my Moroccan friends why was this?
    They said that they went to school & learnt to read, so why
    do they need to read more !!!!!!
    So I say that is an Arab thing, or just laziness?

    Reply

13. An article built on a trivial observation. It just occured to the author that that small difference in the script is the reason for a huge phenomenon “Arabs do not read”. In English you write “rough” and pronounce it ruf. German is much better in this respect.
    Arabic script is much like German. It is rather phonetic. The article suffers from little knowledge of Arabic, and a funny way of jumping and saying Eurica, before having anything substantial. I do agree “Arabs don’t read’, but the reasoning of the author is comletely wrong.

    Reply

14. This and "Modernization" are both great reads. I just want to point Mr. Wells in the direction of an article that convincingly argues for an alternate origin of "boko" than "book":

    http://www.megatchad.net/publications/Newman-2013-Etymology-of-Hausa-boko.pdf

    Of course, I won't be surprised if he's already seen it. The suggestion that romanization was referred to by a word that means "false" ties in neatly with his overall thesis.

    Reply

15. Dr./Mr. Wells’ article as well as the comments here made quite a Heureka moment to me. I include Ms. Haeri’s article which can be downloaded, btw. Thanks esp. for “Ignorance and illiteracy is, among other things, a political asset. Those who know the least obey the best. Cui bono!”. ‘Arab society’ may be described as extremely traditionalist and paternalistic, much of which is encased in and sanctioned by Islam. Am I to be confounded if I link education (in the Western/modern sense?)to non-religiousness? I derive this from casual observation. ———
    Interest in the topic stems from many hundreds of language course hrs I’ve taught to Arab-speaking students (incl. Kurds) here in Germany, among many other groups. I perceive the combined influences of the Arab language, religion/tradition and the quality of SCHOOLING students have received as debilitating. Most courses fail. After 1200 course hrs (each 45 min) and 3-4 yrs stay in Germany about half of my students were by any measure fluent. The other half will never be. Very few will ever attain any fluency in WRITING.—–
    The elephant in the room was, apart from the known cases of primary illiterates in the class, that almost anyone else was functionally illiterate, thus scantly reading, even less writing Arabic. Our didactics require preparing bilingual glossaries (new words), elaborated at best through own understanding, second best by using dictionaries (almost no one had bought) while most chose third best: copying from friends. I wondered also why very few ever wrote even short texts as part of exercises. “Ista’as (‘[male]Teacher’), WRITE, PLEASE!”. ——
    Only recently I found out that Arabs (brutally overgeneralizing as this may sound) just don’t have books at home, many not even the Qu’ran? They have HUGE TVs to which smartphone content, foremost video, can be streamed to. ——
    Pray, confound me but: The work I’ve been doing leads to unimaginably little sustainable language skills or amount of sociolinguistic and sociocultural INTEGRATION (immigration cannot be discussed without it in Germany; I taught “IMMIGRATION COURSE”). Most people from the Near East hate classes of any kind, some refuse, most stage a kind of fruitful participation which is rather a crooked form of obeisance.——
    YES, ARABIC as an influence, the gap between national/regional vernacular and classic/formally written Arabic has been mentioned by brighter students. Young Kurdish women broke it to me that most students never really learn to comprehend written texts, let alone write letters. Modern spoken Arabic has no cases. I observed that the most diligent student was asked multiple times to explain the meaning of Dative and Accusative. —-
    This “schism” of spoken and written leads to a final question: Given my own familiarity with CHINESE which, I suppose also has to be understood while being deciphered, why has ARABIC WRITING not been modernized in a similar way? Why is literacy on the high level it is in Chinese-speaking countries, compared to the low standard in Arab countries? One observation and hint: As early as 60 years ago, in urban Red China, teaching personnel with Western writing skills were in high demand. The 1st Grade curriculum starts with Aa-Bb-Cc. Arabic monotheist pride does not seem to afford this.

    Reply