November 21, 2007: A
major effort in the Arab Reform Movement is to increase the education levels
throughout the Arab world. This will have a major impact on eliminating Islamic
terrorists. The widespread ignorance and poverty in the Arab world has a lot to
do with the popularity of Islamic radicalism.
But this effort will
require more than opening additional schools and universities. One thing that
has long been lacking in the Arab world is translations of technical and
scholarly books into Arabic. As many reform minded Arabs like to point out,
more books are translated into Spanish in one year, than have been translated
into Arabic in the last thousand years. That dismal situation is largely the
result of religious pressure. Islamic conservative opposition to outside
influences is nothing new, and was one of the reasons why the "Islamic Golden
Age" of knowledge lasted only for a few centuries, and was replaced by the kind
of reactionary behavior that is at the core of groups like al Qaeda and the
Taliban.
Another problem with
getting stuff translated was the
backward, and often nonexistent, state of printing in Arabic. Part of this was
technical (written Arabic has many, many rules) and part religious (those
Islamic conservatives again). Computerized typesetting has eliminated the
technical problems, and the growing number of reformers (including the Saudi
royal family) has forced the religious conservatives to back off.
Millions of dollars is
being spent on publishing Western works into Arabic. There are plenty of
potential translators available, because for generations, most Arabs out for a
university education, especially in technical subjects, learned a Western language,
so they could read the most advanced material on the subject. In the Arab
world, colleges are full of more religious and literature majors than in the
West. Part of that has to do with the availability of books in those subjects.
Television, radio and the
Internet have a disproportionate impact in the Arab world, largely because of
low education levels (lots of illiteracy) and lack of books in Arabic. These
electronic media have been used aggressively by Islamic radicals to spread
their message of hatred and terror. The best antidote for that is more
education and higher literacy levels, and books. Changing the education levels
is going to take a generation or two, but it's something that those in the
West, and most Arabs, agree on.
