UAE promotes love for reading
Arab Reading Challenge and Sharjah book fair are proving to be resounding successes year on year
It straightaway calls for a drum roll: A 25 per cent jump in participants from 7.4 million readers last year to 10.5 million this year and more than 250 million books collectively read for the Arab Reading Challenge (ARC). What can be a greater validation of the UAE’s supercharged vision to make books an integral part of Arab youths’ lives? The ARC, the largest ever Arab literacy initiative, launched in 2015 by His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, is continuing to be a resounding success. The award won this year by a nine-year-old Moroccan girl for her exceptional assimilation of knowledge demonstrates the undeniable transformation that can be achieved by initiatives that are guided by the right vision.
The ARC’s core mission to raise awareness on the importance of reading among students and youth in the Arab world is premised on the region’s dismal reading habit numbers and the initiative is working at the grass roots to lead to a resurgence in self-learning, analytical thinking and enriching one’s emotional and intellectual intelligence.
The ARC is addressing this reading crisis by encouraging young readers to devour as many books as possible (more than 50) in one academic year and vie for the coveted awards, with a combined prize money of around Dh11 million. ARC’s incentivisation thus is, in its root form, the oldest and the most critical tool gifted to young minds that will help them forge ahead. This was the tool used by ambitious societies through the centuries to become intellectual path-breakers and thought leaders and this tool will continue to maintain its preeminence in the centuries to come.
This week also sees another stream of intellectual vigour, the Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF), further irrigate the UAE’s role in spreading the culture of reading. The SIBF, the largest of its kind in the region, is now in its 37th edition and its growing footprint endorses its success in promoting the reading habit with a stunning array of international publishers, authors and intellectuals gathering in the emirate year after year and lending their combined might to celebrate the role and power of the written word.
In an era that is beset with digital self-determinism by the young and its advertent fallout — shrinking attention spans, socio-cultural isolation and diminished pursuit of intellectual challenges, grave fault lines that are developing faster than one can map them — endeavours by the UAE such as the ARC and SIBF are lifelines for the classical survival and intellectual revival of the written word and the love of reading.