Ayoon Wa Azan (“Reading Causes Heart Disease”)

Last week, the Arab Thought Foundation held a conference in Beirut focused on writing and publishing in the Arab world. The event’s slogan was “With each book published, the nation progresses”. His Royal Highness Prince Khaled al-Faysal, chairman of the foundation, announced at the end of the conference that a 100 thousand dollar award will be presented to the best Arab book each year, whatever its theme will be.

The Arab Thought Foundation is in fact a joint initiative marrying the worlds of thought and money, where the intellectuals among its board members are preoccupied with how to become men of finance and business, while the men of finance and business in the board are preoccupied with how to become writers and men of literature.

Nonetheless, the foundation does not boast a lot of money. Rather, it boasts many prominent men – and we are all trying hard to be that. It should also be mentioned that this new award is one of many annual prizes awarded for creativity, and which had a special session on the sidelines of the conference, in which I participated, to screen the works of the many candidates.

However, gone are the days when a book used to be the best companion. Instead, it sits today in the corner of a bookshelf gathering dust over a web of oblivion and neglect. In fact, I heard many statistics during the conference on reading in the Arab world, or the lack of reading to be precise. I then remembered Abu Ammar’s statement that the Palestinian cause is “the difficult number” [i.e. difficult to ignore], and I say that books in our country are “the impossible number”.

Across the entire developed world, there is a similar kind of freedom in which books prosper, while books in our country need a twofold kind of freedom: a freedom against political pressure, and a freedom against religious sensitiveness. As the reader is probably aware, pressure and sensitiveness are types of diseases; in fact, just when Arab governments are cured from one disease, they are quickly afflicted by another, and from the Plague of Emmaus (an event in Arab history which I hope the reader will get out of his comfortable chair and look up), to the foot and mouth disease, and then to the Asian flu and the swine flu. Who knows, maybe we will hear tomorrow that Arab governments were diagnosed with prostate cancer, but then “there is no blame upon the sick”.

Furthermore, the Arab citizen is not very much better than his government, when all he cares about is the drafting of his marriage certificate. He then divorces and mistreats his wife, before reading religious books and misinterpreting the scripture again to justify his bias against women. In the end, he accuses the government – although it is nothing but a mirror of his inner self – of failure and oppression against those who deserve protection.

Going back to the subject of writing – books that is, the subject of the conference, and not marriage certificates – I want to say that we have many geniuses. A given genius however, may spend a year or even ten years before publishing an interesting book that is worth reading, and then if he or she were to sell five thousand copies for instance, they would consider this as a success. But then, their books would probably be stolen and secretly printed, with disregard to the authors’ lost copyrights.

In any case, creative books remain a rare occurrence. As such, I have noticed that in the Arab style in writing, creative writing [in the sense of “inventing”] is mostly done in political books and auto-biographies where imagination defeats reality. As for novels, “documentary” writing prevails, where the theme usually involves a slight modification of the author’s personal experiences, and where the descriptions from the author’s life become anecdotes that are often advanced without any effort to conceal their subjective connotations. In other words, the author himself [or herself] becomes the novel’s protagonist.

I think I have depressed the leader enough for one morning, although there is enough depression in political news that would spare us the need for more anywhere else. In any case, I will continue with some light-hearted comments to ensure that the reader will return to this column tomorrow.

In fact, I heard many suggestions about how to encourage Arabs to return to reading; also there must be a lot of encouragement for reading in those one hundred thousand dollars: when the Emir of Mecca announced the award, I actually noticed two or three people from the audience rush outside, perhaps to start writing.

I have another suggestion to increase the number of Arab readers, since we are one of the most smoking-prone nations in the world despite the health risks involved, and perhaps we are indeed prone to smoking, because of our stubbornness to acknowledge these risks. I therefore suggest that we print on the cover of each book “Reading may be detrimental to your health”, or “reading causes heart disease”, and because half of our women are constantly pregnant, perhaps we should also print “reading may pose health risks to pregnant women and foetuses”.

This is because I am almost sure that any Arab who will read such a warning, will immediately take up reading the book with the same greed, gluttony, recklessness and idiocy with which he would take up smoking a full packet of cigarettes.

Also, and since I dedicate myself to serving the reader, I advise him to not sit at the front row of our conference, should he want to pretend that he is cultured and attend it, like I did. If he did so, he will not be able to yawn or sleep or even leave the session with the camera lights focused on him, and he wouldn’t be able to even stretch his legs lest some VIPs trip over them. Also, I advise him not to scratch should he get an itch, because everything that happens during the conference is recorded, and as such, his scratching would become a documented event in the conference’s archive.

Finally, after attending the UN General Assembly in New York, I left on Monday evening last week. I then arrived at Heathrow Airport in London on Tuesday morning and moved to a Lebanese plane that took me to Beirut. The business class was in fact full, while the economy class was half empty, thanks to the Lebanese’s known love of showing off. On the way back last Saturday to London, on board our people’s airliner (Middle East Airline), I ate a little of everything that was offered to me. Then a pretty young stewardess offered me a choice of omelettes or Kanafa bread. However, I apologized from accepting more food, but she kept insisting saying that the Kanafa is quite delicious. When I apologized again, she said “but you will make me sad”, as if she is having me at her parents’ house. The stewardess’s name was Sara, and I told her that what she said to me was the nicest thing I have heard in three weeks of work and travel across three continents.

* Al-Hayat, 6/10/2009