Green Energy

Why Arabs Hate Reading

From the New English Review:

Though little reliable research has been done on Arabic literacy, the little that has been done is quite clear in one regard. As Johns Hopkins researcher Niloofar Haeri concludes in her contribution to The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (2009), throughout the Arab world educated people find reading very difficult, don’t like to do it, and do as little of it as possible—even the librarians.

Why this uniformly strong dislike of reading? Haeri’s answer is that Arabic literature is written in “classical Arabic,” the archaic language of the Quran, which is stilted, difficult, and often unfamiliar to speakers of the many modern dialects of spoken or “street Arabic.”

This may be true as far as it goes, but the argument that it’s the underlying obstacle to Arabic literacy is not persuasive. Similar gaps between written and spoken language (which are called “diglossias”) didn’t stop literacy from spreading in alphabetic cultures like that of Italy, where—to take a single example of this common historical process—written Latin was eventually replaced by written Italian.

Diglossia, then, doesn’t explain why spoken Arabic dialects haven’t become written languages in their own right, with robust literary traditions and wide readerships of their own, the way spoken Italian did after authors such as Dante helped establish it.

If you look up “writing” in the current Encyclopedia Britannica online, you’ll find an article by David Olson, a leading scholar of writing systems at the University of Toronto, where much of the most important research on literacy has been done over the past half century.

Among the entry’s many interesting bits of information, one brief observation is easily overlooked: writing that has only consonants must be understood before it can be read, while writing that has both consonants and vowels reverses that process.

With consonants alone, the consonants act as hints, but the reader has to fill in the missing vowel sounds, as in “Ll mn r crtd ql” or “Nc pn tm thr ws lttl prncss.” This seems easy enough, at first glance. With both consonants and vowels, on the other hand, you read it first and then go on to figure out what it means, as in “Look out the window and bring me the nail file.”

In Olson’s academese, with consonantal writing “interpretation precedes decipherment,” while with alphabetic writing “decipherment precedes interpretation.” With a fine-tuned academic alertness to thin ideological ice, Olson deftly skates away from exploring the implications of this well-known fact.

Nor is he alone in doing so. Only two kinds of consonantal writing are widely used today, Hebrew and Arabic, and both are considered sacred by their practitioners. So among scholars, there’s an unspoken and perhaps understandable reluctance to look closely at how—and at how well—they work when it comes to reading them, and especially to countenance that alphabetic writing might be easier to read.

GO READ THE WHOLE THING.

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