A new culture of reading is born in the UAE

When His Highness Shaikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, declared 2016 as the Year of Reading in the UAE, many knew that this ambitious initiative would herald the country towards a new dawn of knowledge. The Arab Reading Challenge was a step in that direction. With the first prize of $150,000 going to the seven-year-old Mohammad Farah from Algeria, the outcome of the challenge has galvanised millions of young men and women around the region. As many as three million participants in the Arab world took part in the Arab Reading Challenge that also saw the Talaih Al Amal High School in Palestine walk away with the $1-million prize for the ‘school with the best reading initiatives in the region’.

As students pored through scores of books, the main aim to encourage and inspire students in the Arab world to read close to 50 million books came to fruition. Attracting millions of students from 54 nationalities, representing 30,000 schools in 21 countries including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Tunisia, Sudan, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania, the initiative was successful in fostering a culture of reading. When the challenge was first announced, Shaikh Mohammad had noted: “Reading opens minds, magnifies hunger for knowledge, and instills the values of openness and moderation that define great civilisations.” This has remained the cornerstone of the UAE’s quest for a better tomorrow — a prospect under which an educated, enlightened and better-informed citizenry gets to decide the future of this great country. Not surprisingly education features prominently in the UAE’s National Agenda for the next few years, leading right upto 2020. In the words of Dubai Ruler, “The country was aiming to become a beacon of knowledge, “just as Baghdad, Andalusia and other civilisations seeking enlightenment were”.