Arab Oral Culture and Lack of Knowledge

by Sami Alrabaa

We Arabs, the majority of us, at least, rarely read. Hassan, a Syrian graduate, said, “What do you want me to read? State-controlled newspapers? Cooking books? Horoscope and dream interpreting books? That is all you can get in almost all Arab countries in terms of books.”

Most Arabs watch TV or listen to the radio. What do they watch and listen to? They listen to music and watch movies and soap opera serials. Politically-interested Arabs watch Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya for news and political discussions. Most Arabs distrust news on state-controlled radios and TVs. Viewers of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, the majority of whom are anti-Western and anti-American, enjoy the black and white picture depicted by these channels.

Very few political Muslims, the so-called Islamists, have read the Koran and Hadeeth. The majority have not, but dream of paradise on earth ruled by Al Shari’a.

Arab leaders and their affiliates do not read either. The Saudi despot, Abdullah, for example, is almost illiterate. He reads his speeches like a child who has just learned reading. No Arab leader is capable of speaking Standard Arabic fluently which all Arabs learn as a second language. To avoid using broken Arabic, lack of knowledge, and embarrassing questions, Arab leaders shy away from meeting the local and international media. At most, they prefer written questions whose answers are prepared by their aides.

A former interpreter of an Arab leader told me that he used to wrap his boss’s incoherent statements in beautiful presentable English.

Censorship is common in most Arab countries. Critical publications are forbidden, even the “One Thousand and One Night” is unavailable in many Arab bookshops. A former student of mine who works at the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information told me, “When we hear of a book that is suspicious we ban it immediately before even seeing it, let alone reading it.”

Sociologists believe that people who are poorly informed, are easier to rule and gear in the direction delineated by the regime.

The lack of interest in reading and books begins at an early age, at school. Schools and universities do not encourage reading extracurricular publications. By and large, students plagiarize when asked to prepare term papers. In the Arab Gulf region, there are offices specialized in selling these papers for a price ranging between $ 30 and $ 100. Ads to this effect can be found in almost every local newspaper.

In an effort to help teachers and professor at the Islamist Al Azhar University in Cairo/Egypt, improve their English and read international publications, the American Embassy offered establishing an English Language Center (ELRC) at this university for free. The majority of Al Azhar staff and professors at other Egyptian universities rejected the idea. Ahmed Thabet, professor of political science at Cairo University, described the project in Al Ahram Weekly (Dec. 12) as a “Gradual cultural occupation which will eventually lead to American hegemony over Al Azhar curricula.”

Azza Korayem, a sociologist at the National Social Studies Research Center in Cairo told Al Ahram Weekly (Dec. 30), “I’m dubious of US intentions for many reasons. After 9/11 the US has regarded Islam as the enemy and sought to limit its prevalence in the world, so I find it perplexing that the US opens a center to help Muslims communicate with others in order to serve Islam.” This is a typical conspiratorial theory of the Arab “elite”. Fresh air into the anachronistic curriculum of Al Azhar University should not be allowed in.

According to the UNESCO report (2006) “No more than 10.000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium, equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year.”

Wadi, a Palestinian who has been living in Germany for over 20 years, is typical of many Arabs here in Germany. He still speaks broken German, lives on the welfare system, and does not read either. He blames the plight of his people on the “atrocities” of Israelis, Americans, and capitalism. “Palestinians are the victim of a world conspiracy.” He laments. When confronted with real instances of peaceful solutions to historical conflicts in East Timor and South Africa, Wadi and his ilk reject the same to Palestine. He claims that it is Israel which does not want peace. “Israel is feeding on Arab threat to continue existing.” Wadi believes.

Certainly, a modern knowledge society is not a panacea for all problems of the Arab countries. But it is an essential one. The majority of Arab societies are ruled by either absolute monarchies, military, or totalitarian, and to a great extent aided by fundamentalist Muslim establishments. All these regimes are setting limits on the exercise of individual freedom and modernizing existing anachronistic value and education systems. Arab schools and universities are producing parrots which merely recycle shallow information and knowledge in politics, economy, and media. Critical teaching/learning and publications are forbidden.

Over the past 15 years, the Arab regimes have found in Muslim fundamentalists the best ally to muzzle people and keep them shallowly and unilaterally “informed”. All that is happening in the name of dogmatic Islam. Both state-controlled media and private ones, especially those owned by the Saudi tycoon Al Waleed Bin Talal drum the fundamentalist Muslim discourse and the anti-Western propaganda. The gist of this discourse is “The West hates us and our Islam.”

The whole campaign is music to the ears of Arab leaders. The Arab regimes know quite well that a diversely informed and knowledgeable population would demand freedom in the way they choose to think, live, manage their affairs, and eventually demand real democracy.

Unless Arabs turn their focus on economic development, like the Chinese and the South Koreans, they have no chance of establishing a decent base for living in peace. The belligerent discourse must stop. Balanced media reporting must be established. Economic development and free speech and publications are indispensable ingredients for transition to democratic civilized societies. Otherwise the Arabs will endlessly spin in a vicious circle.