Arab books and human development

Eugene Rogan

THE 2002 ARAB HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Report was a landmark document. Written by Arab social scientists, it was the first auto-critique to address the challenges faced by the Arab world at the start of a new century. The 2002 Report set out an agenda of reform based on three perceived 'deficits': the freedom deficit, a deficit of empowerment of women, and the 'human capabilities/knowledge deficit relative to income.' To support their bold assertions, the Report's authors assembled data from a wide range of sources, and, drawing on the model of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Reports, sought to view the social and economic challenges from new and innovative angles. Consequently, the AHDR 2002 provided a wealth of new ideas to stimulate discussion and debate on the contemporary Arab world.

Given the weight of data and arguments, the general reader might be forgiven for having overlooked a brief paragraph, in a chapter otherwise dedicated to research and information technology, on the state of books in the Arab world. "There are no reliable figures on the production of books," the Report contends, "but many indicators suggest a severe shortage of writing; a large share of the market consists of religious books and educational publications that are limited in their creative content." Drawing on a 1999 study, (1) the Report continued:

   The figures for translated books are also discouraging. The
   Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of
   the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of
   translated books since the Caliph Maa'moun's [sic] time (the
   ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain
   translates in one year. (AHDR 2002, p. 78)

It is no coincidence that the authors chose the Caliph Ma'mun as a starting point. The Caliph is credited with initiating one of the most important translation projects in human history. A convinced rationalist, al-Ma'mun (r. 813-33) established in Baghdad the famous 'House of Wisdom' (Dar al-Hikma) dedicated to the translation of Greek philosophical works, preserving in Arabic the wisdom of ancient Greece for all posterity. The irony of the quote is to say that the Arab world today, representing 270 million people spread over 22 countries, can only manage one-fifth the translations of modern Greece.

Such round figures are hard to substantiate. The National Book Centre of Greece, founded by the Ministry of Culture, does not keep records on translations into Greek. However, they reported 6826 books total published in Greece in 2002. (2) While it is possible that one quarter of Greece's publications were translations, it is not clear to me that this would be a sign of publishing vitality. The figure for Spain is spurious; its total figure for book publishing, of which translations would be a minor part, does not exceed several thousand each year. Yet these shortcomings in the statistics have not hindered the international reception of the AHDR's data on Arab book publishing.

The AHDR figures were seized upon by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to illustrate the isolation of the Arabs in an increasingly globalized world.

   On education, the report reveals that the whole Arab world
   translates about three hundred books annually--one fifth the
   number that Greece alone translates; investment in research
   and development is less than one seventh the world average;
   and Internet connectivity is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa.

Friedman derived the title of his column from a quote in the AHDR: "The Arab world is at a crossroads. The fundamental choice is whether its trajectory will remain marked by inertia ... or whether prospects for an Arab renaissance, anchored in human development, will be actively pursued."

The authority of the AHDR and The New York Times combined to give these data great weight in public debate. Respected analysts noted for their sympathy with the Arab world, such as Vartan Gregorian, quoted the book figures to demonstrate the need for an opening of the Arab mind to outside influences as a strategy for countering the power of Islam in Arab politics. (4) U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly cited the AHDR to validate a new American policy to invest in social change in the Arab world, repeating the quote Friedman cited of the region at a 'crossroads' between 'inertia' and 'renaissance.' (5)

Books in the Arab world had thus come to be associated with the forces retarding an Arab renaissance. And so the authors of the AHDR 2003 returned to the subject in some detail. While cautioning readers about the lack of reliable statistics 'on the actual amount of literary production in the Arab world,' they draw on UNESCO figures to assert that, in 1991, "Arab countries produced 6,500 [emphasis in the original] books compared to 102,000 books in North America, and 42,000 in Latin America and the Caribbean." Still drawing on UNESCO figures, the 2003 Report claimed:

   Book production in Arab countries was just 1.1 percent of
   world production, although Arabs constitute 5% of the world's
   population. The publication of literary works was lower than
   the average level of book production. In 1996, Arab countries
   produced no more than 1945 literary and artistic books, which
   represents 0.8% of international production. This is less than
   what a country such as Turkey produces, with a population
   about one-quarter that of the Arab countries. In general, Arab
   book production centers mainly on religious topics and less on
   other fields such as literature, art and the social sciences.
   (AHDR 2003, p. 77)

This preoccupation with religious books, first raised in the 2002 Report, recurs throughout the 2003 text. "There are no accurate statistics on the types of books preferred by Arab readers," the Report notes. "but according to many publishers and observers, the bestsellers at the Cairo International Book Fair are religious books, followed by books categorized as educational." (AHDR 2003, p. 78) The Report then directs the reader to a table that purports to support these generalizations. Comparing the relative distribution of published books, by field, in ten Arab countries and the rest of the world in 1996, the table shows that the Arab world did produce more than three times the world relative distribution of books on religion--some 17.5% of Arab books, compared to just over 5% of the rest of the world. However, religious books represented a distinct minority, and the smallest category overall, of the relative distribution of books in Arabic, with the social sciences representing closer to 20%, the sciences exceeding 20%, and the arts and literature tallying the highest figure of some 22.5%. (AHDR 2003: Table 3.4, p. 78)

The Arab book, the 2003 Report concludes, is a "threatened species." The challenges faced by Arab book publishing, as set out in the report, are very real. Print runs of books are very low, ranging for the average novel between 1,000 and 3,000 copies. "A book that sells 5,000 copies is considered a bestseller." (AHDR 2003, p. 78) With fewer books being published, in low numbers, book publishing risks becoming 'economically unfeasible.' According to Fathi Khalil al-Biss, the Vice President of the Arab Publishers Union, Arab book publishing has been threatened by three factors: censorship and the practice of banning books among the 22 Arab states; low readership, blamed on economic stagnation and competition from the mass media; and the lack of adequate distribution of books across the Arab world. Al-Biss added that a lack of respect for intellectual property rights was also a deterrent. (AHDR 2003, p. 79)

Just as Colin Powell drew on the first AHDR to justify the 2002 "U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative," so the U.S. administration drew on the two AHDRs in drafting their 2004 working paper for the G-8 setting out the parameters of a "Greater Middle East Partnership". Again, the dearth of Arab publishing is named as one of the underlying problems in education and literacy, citing the now familiar numbers (however unreliable the source) and again the same preoccupation with the relative share of Islamic books:

   The region's growing knowledge gap and continuing brain
   drain challenge its development prospects. Arab countries'
   output of books represents just 1.1 percent of the world total
   (with religious books constituting over 15 percent of this.)....
   Five times as many books are translated into Greek (spoken by
   just 11 million people) as Arabic. (6)

Given the concerns for 'building a knowledge society' set out in the 2003 Report, the state of the Arab book deserves further examination. After all, books are one of the most important vehicles for the dissemination of knowledge in a society. While the issues raised by the two AHDRs are very real, the paucity of hard statistics, the normative value assigned to certain types of books, and the unspoken assumption that the Arab world lags behind the rest of the world in intellectual terms for want of a sufficient number of translated works are matters worthy of further discussion.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

As one of the major preoccupations of the AHDRs has been the paucity of books translated into Arabic, the subject warrants further discussion. I should state from the outset that I do not presume to have better statistics at hand than those used by the authors of the AHDRs. Instead 1 propose guidelines for the sort of statistics we would need to arrive at a better understanding of the place of translation in the state of the Arab book.

'Pirate' versus Authorized Translation

There are a number of problems facing any researcher attempting to count the number of foreign works translated into Arabic. There are 22 member states of the Arab League, each with their own publishing industry. Admittedly the scale of production varies widely between major centers like Cairo and Beirut, and smaller publishing states like Yemen or Oman. Yet to the best of my knowledge there is no body that oversees publishing in all 22 states, to compile statistics on the total numbers of books, let alone to disaggregate the totals into categories such as translations, the humanities, social sciences or religion. Publishing, like many industries in the Arab region, goes unregulated. This has important implications for book statistics.

The most obvious regulation problem has to do with respect for intellectual property rights and copyright. When the AHDR claims that only 330 works are translated into Arabic each year, they probably are quoting figures for books whose rights were formally acquired from a Western publisher. Arguably, far more books are translated and published in Arabic without the consent of author or publisher than are works for which rights have been formally acquired. To give a personal example, a Saudi publisher formally contacted the Cambridge University Press for rights to an Arabic edition of a book I edited with Avi Shlaim entitled The War for Palestine. Cambridge was delighted to be approached by an Arab publisher, for they had seldom if ever received an offer to pay for rights to an Arabic translation. However, shortly after the Saudi publisher acquired the Arabic rights for this book, an Egyptian publisher brought out a pirate edition without notice to either the authors or publisher. The same Cairo-based house had already published a pirate translation of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall. I suspect that these books, which have found their way onto bookshelves in other Arab states, eluded those compiling Arabic translation statistics. If such piracy is as widespread as this anecdotal evidence implies, it would suggest a much larger, much more difficult figure to tally than that given by the AHDR 2002 for works translated into Arabic.

Such piracy is easy to explain. Arab publishers hear the expense of translation and sell barely enough copies to cover their costs, leaving little incentive to pay Western publishing houses to acquire rights formally. Arab publishers take their risks, knowing that the margin is simply not big enough to warrant Western publishers taking them to court for infringement of copyright. The situation is changing, however, as Arab states increasingly accede to the World Trade Organization and sign the relevant conventions on respect for intellectual property rights. (7) Ironically, incorporation of the Arab world to the WTO could prove a real deterrent to translation in the Arab world, as the cost of rights tips the balance of what is economically viable.

In terms of meaningful statistics, we would need to have a count of all works translated into Arabic, both legitimate and pirate, to assess this aspect of Arab publishing. To arrive at such a figure one would have to go through the main book retail and distribution offices in each of the 22 Arab states counting the number of translated works published in a given year.

Quantity vs quality

The AHDR claims that Greece translates five times more works than all Arab countries combined, as though the sheer number alone is significant. Let us assume for a moment that the figures are accurate. We would still need to know what kinds of books were being translated into the two languages, Greek and Arabic, before we could come to any conclusions about the relative openness of the different societies.

Sheer numbers alone are not a very useful indicator. Few would criticize the Arab world for not translating works of pornography, Mills and Boone-style romantic literature, celebrity biographies, the prophecies of Nostradamus, the scientology of L.Ron Hubbard, or works on such phenomena as the Bermuda Triangle or extra-terrestrial encounters--although all such categories rank highly among translated best-sellers in the West. In addition to obtaining reliable figures for the number of translations into Arabic, ideally we would want to see some sort of breakdown on the type of book published before passing judgment on what this says about the state of the Arab book.

Books are a part of consumer culture, and consumer tastes vary from culture to culture. Clearly Arab readers are interested in those books written in the West on their society. Books on the history, politics or society of Egypt, Yemen or Lebanon appear in Arabic editions in Cairo, San'a and Beirut. Works on U.S. Middle East policy or the Arab-Israeli conflict find readers across the region. Works by expatriate Arab authors who publish in English, such as Edward Said, Hisham Sharabi, Albert Hourani, Aziz al-Azmeh and Amin Maalouf (random examples from a much larger field), are in demand. I suspect the Arab world is better known for reprehensible books in translation, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, than for the full range of books being translated. One place to redress this imbalance is at the main Arab book fairs.

The largest Arab book fair, and one of the largest book fairs in the world, is held each year in Cairo. Started in 1969, the Cairo International Book Fair was created by the state-owned General Egyptian Book Organization to bridge the gap between publishing in the Arab world and the rest of the world, 'in order to fill the gap between [...] foreign books and [...] Arab books [as] at that time [i.e. 1969] foreign books outnumbered what was available of Arabic translated foreign books.' (8) The statistics for the Cairo book fair attest to the continued enthusiasm for the published word in the Arab world. The first fair of 1969 drew 462 publishers from 47 countries, displaying 100,000 books and attracting 500,000 visitors. By 2003, the CIBF drew 3,125 publishers from 97 countries, displaying 5 million books and attracting 4,350,000 visitors. (9) Unfortunately, the organizers' statistics shed little light on the types of books displayed, thought the fair generates extensive press coverage through the ten days of events in January each year.

Ghassan Tueni, long-time editor of the Beirut daily newspaper Al-Nahar, and now president of the Dar Al-Nahar publishing house, attended the Beirut Arab Book Fair of 2003 and gave a profile of the most prominent titles on display in a lecture delivered in Oxford. (10) The three best-sellers of the fair were Tarif Khalidi's study of Jesus in Islamic texts and tradition, translated from English; a study of Shi'i clerics in South Lebanon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, translated from the French; and a collection of essays on 'confessionalism' by former Lebanese Prime Minister Salim el Hoss. (11) Other prominent titles at the fair included a book of essays on political scandals surrounding Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri by Najah Wakim; a book on the assassinated Christian militia leader Elie Hobeika; a biography of assassinated Druze leader Kamal Joumblatt written in Arabic by the Russian scholar Igor Timofeev; a biography of Christian politician Raymond Edde; a translation of John Boykin's biography of Philip Habib, Cursed is the Peacemaker; and Arabic translations of two academic books published in Britain on modern Lebanon--Samir Khalaf's Civil and Uncivil Violence, and Farid Khazen's The Breakdown of the State of Lebanon, 1967-1976. Two conclusions can be drawn from Tueni's description of the fair. Some of the most celebrated works were in fact Arabic translations of books first published in the West. And the profile of books that generate interest, in Beirut at least, are overwhelmingly political and local.

Thus, added to the need for a more accurate tally of the actual number of works translated into Arabic would be a profile of the type of works published. Were such a profile available, analysts would have a more useful indicator of the relative openness of the Arab world to outside ideas than is provided by the brute number of works translated.

Who Needs Translations?

All research into Arab publishing agrees that print runs on individual titles are very small, seldom exceeding 1,000-3,000 copies. Yet the Arab public literate in Western languages as well as Arabic by far exceeds the average print run of Arab books. Indeed, bookstores in every Arab capital can be found selling books in Western languages as well as in Arabic. Before embarking on a translation, an Arab publisher would need to be convinced that the 'Arabic-only" reading public would buy a given titles in sufficient numbers to warrant translation.

The opposite clearly is not true in the West. The number of Americans or Europeans who can read a title in the Arabic original is miniscule when compared to the size of the book buying public. Because people in the West tend not to read books in languages other than their own, they are dependent on translations to enter the literature of another culture.

Thus, if the Arab translation industry seems to favor a narrow band of local and political subjects, this need not mean that educated Arabs are unaware of books published and debated in other cultures. Some of those interested in subjects not available in Arabic translation are probably able to access the titles in the original. Others follow foreign book publishing through the Arab press and television. Two examples are worth citing here.

Weghat Nazar ('Points of View') is a Cairo literary monthly now in its sixth year. It reads very much like the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement, a well-designed magazine with contributions from leading Arab intellectuals. The doyen of Arab journalists, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, has been a regular contributor. The magazine provides detailed essays on a wide range of books, in Arabic and in foreign languages. The February 2004 issue, for example, featured extensive essays on Tariq Ramadan's To Be a European Muslim, David Miller's edited book, Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, Ron Suskind's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, and Chile: The Other September 11 by Pilar Aguilera and Ricardo Fredes. In the same issue, brief reviews were given for five other English-language books on diverse topics. (12) Readers of Weghat Nazar (like readers of the TLS and NYRB) may not go on to read the books themselves, but through this medium they are engaging in a global debate on ideas. Nor is Weghat Nazar unique. A number of literary magazines are published in Arabic that engage with international books and authors across the Arab world.

The Qatar-based satellite television channel Al-Jazeera runs a weekly book review program called al-Kitab ('the Book'). The program's presenter, Khaled al-Hroub, is an Arab academic based in Cambridge University. Al-Kitab brings Arab intellectuals together to argue the merits and demerits of books mostly written in the West.

      Rather than focusing on books published in the Arab
   world that are available through local bookshops and widely
   reviewed in the media, [I] look at books on the Middle East--Arabs,
   Islam, social phenomena, political subjects, cultural
   controversies -published in the West. (13)

Hroub estimates that only twenty percent of the books discussed on his program are in Arabic, while the rest are published in the West. His reasons for favoring works published in the West are both to introduce Arab audiences to issues and debates in the West they might otherwise not know about, but also to hold Western authors to account before an Arab audience. With one of the largest viewerships of all cable and satellite television stations in the world, Al-Jazeera is a powerful vehicle for disseminating debates from Western books to Arab audiences.

Given the many sources Arab readers have access to in non-Arab books, there is a real risk of overstating the importance of translation. This is not to say that the translation of books is unimportant. If, however, the priority is the diffusion of alternate ideas and debates, we should not overemphasize one vehicle over others.

Western Ignorance of Arab Books

Given the critical tone adopted by many Western analysts of the apparent shortcomings in Arab publishing, it is worth noting the relative neglect of contemporary Arab thought in the West. Given the number and diversity of foreign language works translated into English, the paucity of Arab books translated into English is cause for concern. Never has the West had greater need to understand current thinking in the Arab world than they have since the events of 11 September 2001. Yet this is not reflected in any noteworthy translation projects of Arabic-language books.

It is true that a vast and growing collection of modern works of Arabic literature are being translated into English and other European languages. However, with the exception of Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, very few works of Arab literature reach beyond a small circle of university students and teachers, and their print runs are more in keeping with books published in the Arab world than in the West. Mahfouz himself only gained an audience when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and relatively few of his works--The Cairo Trilogy, for the most part--have found a wide readership. Indeed, the growth of Arabic literature in translation reflects the dedication of a small group of Western scholars who translate these works rather than the publishing industry itself.

Far fewer works of Arab non-fiction are translated into Western languages than works of creative writing. Aside from a handful of Arab authors like Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, who has seen at least ten of his books translated into English, the works of key Arab thinkers are not accessible to readers in the West. None of the key books by Damascene Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, such as his critique of religious thought, his critique of the Palestinian opposition movements, or his essay on the Rushdie Affair, has been translated--despite the fact he is addressing issues of key concern to readers in the West. (14) Critical Islamic thinkers like Nasr Abu Zayd in Egypt, Muhammad Talbi in Tunisia and Mohamed Arkoun of Morocco remain largely unknown to English readers (though Arkoun's work is widely available in French). In the realm of contemporary Arab political thought, the many books published by the Center for Arab Unity Studies would be well worth the translating.

In an age when many in the West seek to understand the differences that separate them from the Arab world, one would expect greater interest to be shown in Arab books in the West. It is as much a problem for the Western world to come to grips with Arab authors in this inter-connected age as vice versa. Even if commercial considerations in the West make the wholesale translation of Arabic books unfeasible, there should be more discussion of Arab thought in Western literary journals such as the NYRB and TLS. Engagement is a two way exchange, and the West in many ways lags behind the Arab world in addressing the issues raised in the books of the other.

Religious Books

By all accounts, religious texts represent a large part of the Arab book industry. As already noted, the 2003 AHDR reproduced figures suggesting that between 15 and 20 percent of Arab books are on 'religious' topics. A recent study of publishing in Beirut found that 52 percent of Lebanese publishers produced books that might be termed Islamic. Yet the same study went on to say that religious books represent no more than 15 percent of total production, with only some 30 new Islamic titles being published each month, or a total of some 360 new 'Islamic' books per year. (15) Clearly there is a risk of overstating the problem as set out in the AHDR, if there is a problem at all.

A first observation to these figures is that there is nothing surprising about the large number of books on 'religious topics' published in Arabic. Religion is a very important aspect of the personal and intellectual life of many Arabs and Westerners alike. Arab publishers will print religious books only if Arab consumers wish to buy them, and there is no clear 'appropriate market share' for books on religion in any culture. A second observation is that many 'religious books' are also about politics, the economy, history, contemporary society, and self improvement. Bernard Haykel gives a vivid description of these 'Islamic best sellers':

   The most recent of these [Islamic best sellers] is La tahzun
   [Don't be sad] written by Aaidh ibn Abdullah al-Qarni, a
   Wahhabi scholar. It is a compilation of all the Quranic
   quotations and hadith (sayings of the Prophet) enjoining
   Muslims not to feel sad and suggesting what they can do to
   cheer their spirits: a 'feel good' book in Islamic guise. And
   there are others, all offering answers to current predicaments
   that engage Muslims: what attitude to take to the events of 11
   September, or what the Quran has to say about Jews. These
   really sell, because they address what people are engaged with
   at any given time. (16)

Because the authors use a religious language to address these issues, their works might be classed as 'religious.' However, the term 'Islamic' or 'religious books' is too broad to be of particular use for analytical purposes. One would never class a book published by a Western academic on Islam in society or politics as a 'religious book', but as a work in politics, sociology or Middle Eastern studies. Clearly Islamic books need to be broken down into different types of book rather than being treated as a common category.

While many in the West assume that 'religious books' in the Arab world must be in some way obscurantist or radicalizing, they are unaware of the heated debates that certain religious books have provoked. Sadiq Jalal al-Azm's critique of religious thought, or Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd's critique of religious discourse, might well be on religion, but are none the less critical of their subject matter. Even on 'religious topics' the widest range of issues may be treated, such as the striking renunciation of violence by a former member of the Egyptian militant Gama'a Islamiyya (Islamic Group) entitled Life is More Beautiful than Paradise. (17) The book sold very well in Arabic and was translated into five languages, though it has yet to appear in English.

Another problem with the term 'Islamic books' is that it suggests more unity to Islam than the community demonstrates. There are many different Islams, and consequently many different types of Islamic books. As Haykel argues: "A Shia bookshop in Beirut's southern suburbs will not sell Sunni books and vice ersa in West Beirut. The pattern is repeated wherever the sectarian divide is found." (18) Yet he argues that the financial weight of Saudi Arabia has led to disproportionate Saudi influence in the publishing industry. "It is noticeable that when you go to a book fair in Amman or San'a or Cairo, the Islamic books are cheaper to buy because they tend to have some Saudi or Qatari subsidy," he explains.

In their implicit critique of the 'religious content' of Arab books the authors of the AHDR played into a range of current concerns in America and the West more generally. The 'clash of civilizations' thesis put forward by Samuel Huntington has gained support since the events of 11 September 2001, with many in the West expressing concerns about the 'religious' or Islamic orientation of Arab culture, society and politics. Yet there is no way to diminish the Islamic orientation of current Arab culture, society and politics. Attempts to do so at any level are bound to have the opposite effect intended, making people in the Arab world doubly suspicious of the intentions of the West and more likely to cling more tenaciously to their religion. This is to turn a bad argument into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is far better to leave the same luxury of choice to Arab consumers as people in the West demand, and recognize that for the foreseeable future books on Islam or written in the language of Islam will continue to find a wide audience--and to recognize that even by the AHDR's count, some 85 percent of Arab books have nothing to do with religion.

CONCLUSION

This essay has been more an exercise in systematic doubt than a case of superior statistics overwhelming those published in the two AHDRs. Given the significance attached by Western commentators and government figures to the Reports' claims about books in the Arab world, the issue warranted further scrutiny. There is good reason to doubt the actual figures provided by the AHDR. It seems likely that far more works are translated and published in Arabic in pirate editions than gets reported by those who try to keep statistics on Arab books. Market concerns limit what publishers deem viable for translation to the local and political. However, Arab readers have access to a broader literature than what is available to them in their own language either because they are literate in Western languages or because they read about foreign books in the press or watch foreign books discussed on television. Indeed, the great public interest shown in book fairs in the Arab world suggests that, whatever the figures on books published and translated, books remain valued cultural artifacts in the Arab world. As for the implied concern about the relative weight of Arabic books on religious topics, this has been dismissed as something of a red herring. The term is too broad to be analytically meaningful. Even if this objection is overlooked, and Arab books on 'religious topics' were deemed a problem, the solutions would be only worse--censorship or repression. Wisdom dictates that in Arab books, as in any other article of consumption, the consumer is king.

This is not to argue that all is well in Arab book publishing. By all accounts, book publishers and authors alike face real pressures in the region. The three factors threatening the Arab book outlined by Fathi Khalil al-Biss of the Arab Publishers Union are probably the chief culprits: censorship, low readership and poor distribution. These are the real issues that need to be addressed in the interest of stimulating Arab intellectual freedom. It would be much more constructive to focus attention on those state institutions that censor or ban books, or intimidate their authors, than to criticize those who translate them. Similarly, the economic constraints of the region need to be taken into consideration. As the AHDRs make clear, population growth is expanding much faster than per capita income in the Arab region. The average Arab consumer lacks the disposable income to be a regular book buyer. Drawing on UNESCO figures, the 2003 AHDR reports 4.4 book titles per million people in Algeria in the 1990s, and 20.8 titles per million people in Egypt, compared to 324.1 book titles per million in Argentina, 629.2 in Bulgaria, and 2727.4 book titles per million in Denmark in the 1990s (AHDR 2003: Table A-10, p.197). These discrepancies reflect differences in wealth rather than relative appreciation for books.

The way forward for Arab books, as for all other aspects of Arab life. is through greater political freedom and greater economic opportunity--the very focus of the Arab Human Development Reports.

ENDNOTES

(1.) The work cited by the AHDR is S. Galal, Translation in the Arab Homeland: Reality and Challenge (Cairo: Higher Council for Culture, 1999) (in Arabic).

(2.) The statistics are from the National Book Center web site: http://www.ekebi.gr/english.html

(3.) "Arabs at the Crossroads," The New York Times 2 July 2002. Friedman picked up on the points raised by the 2003 AHDR in his column of 19 October 2003.

(4.) Vartan Gregorian, Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), p. 54.

(5.) "The U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative: Building Hope for the Years Ahead," lecture delivered by the Hon. Colin L. Powell to the Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., 12 December 2002.

(6.) "U.S. Working Paper for G-8 Sherpas," Al-Hayat, 13 February 2004 (http://www.daralhayat.net/actions/print2.php).

(7.) Arab states with membership of the WTO are Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Tunisia and the UAE. Algeria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Yemen have applied for accession and a WTO working party has been established to assess their application. Afghanistan, Iran, Libya and Syria have applied, though their applications have not yet been reviewed.

(8.) From the Cairo International Book Fair web site (http://www.cibf.org/en/about/index.cfm).

(9.) Ibid. (http://www.cibf.org/en/about/statistics.cfm).

(10.) Ghassan Tueni, "Beirut as the Capital of Political Books," lecture delivered to the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford, 25 November 2003. An edited version of this lecture is in The Index on Censorship, 33 (April 2004), pp. 187-89.

(11.) The two translated works were Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Sabrina Mervin, Un reformiste chiite. Ulemas et Lettres de Gabal Amil de la fin de l'Empire ottoman a l'independence du Liban (Paris: Karthala, 2000).

(12.) Joshua Cohen and Ian Lague, (Eds.), The Place of Tolerance in Islam (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); Theodore Huters, (Ed.), China's New Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); David Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003); Robert Stevens, University to Uni: The Politics of Higher Education in England since 1944 (London: Politico's, 2004); Garry Wills, Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

(13.) Khaled al-Hroub, "Al-Kitab: Talking Books on Al-Jazeera," lecture delivered to the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford, 21 October 2003. In The Index on Censorship, p. 180.

(14.) Naqd al-fikr al-dini [A critique of religious thought] (Beirut: Dar al-Tali'a, 1969); Dirasa naqdiyya li-fikr al-muqawama al-filistiniyya [A critical study of the thought of the Palestinian opposition] (Beirut: Dar al-'Awda, 1973); Dhihniyat al-tahrim: Salman Rushdie wa haqiqat al-adab [The mentality of prohibition: Salman Rushdie and the truth of literature] (London: Riad Rayyis, 1992).

(15.) Faris Abi Sa'b et. al., Al-Kitab wa al-nashr fi lubnan: al-waqi' wa al-siyasa [The Book and Publishing in Lebanon: Reality and Politics] (Beirut: al-Markaz al-lubnani li al-dirasa, 2003) p. 131.

(16.) Bernard Haykel, "The Islamic Book Market," lecture delivered to the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford, 4 November 2003. In The Index on Censorship, pp. 192-96. Qamni's book has now been translated into English and published under the title, Don't be Sad by the Riyadh-based International Islamic Publishing House.

(17.) Khalid al-Barri, Al-hayat ajmal min al-jinna (Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 2003).

(18.) Haykel, "The Islamic Book Market," in Index, p. 194.

Eugene Rogan is Professor at St. Antony's College, Oxford University.

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