Frankfurt Book Fair 2004 (6,800 exhibitors from 111 nations)

Reading between the lines

Monday September 13, 2004

The most eye-catching exhibit at the Beirut book fair a few years ago was a mock gravestone adorned with a vase of shrivelled flowers and labelled: The Arab Reader. The practice of reading, writing and publishing books in Arab countries may not actually be dead but it is far from well.
At the annual Frankfurt book fair, the world's most prestigious publishing event, Arab books are usually tucked away in a corner and treated as unworthy of much attention. This year, though, when the Frankfurt fair opens on October 6, the Arab world will take pride of place. Besides Arab books on display, there will be exhibitions of Arab culture, showings of award-winning Arab films, and readings by prominent Arab writers and poets.

The idea behind this, Volker Neumann, the book fair's president, explained at a press conference last June, is to promote dialogue and mutual understanding between cultures. A fine sentiment, but there has already been some anxiety in the Arab media about the sort of impression it will make. Will the exhibition be good enough? Will it reflect authentic Arab culture, warts and all, or will it concentrate on those aspects that find favour in the west?

Arab books became a political issue earlier this year when the Bush administration launched its "greater Middle East initiative" and blamed low output of books for a "knowledge deficit" in the Arab countries. ("Knowledge", in this context, is defined in western terms and automatically excludes such things as memorising the Qur'an or knowing how to milk a goat.)

"The Greater Middle East region, once the cradle of scientific discovery and learning, has largely failed to keep up with today's knowledge-oriented world," the US said in a working paper for the G8 summit. "Arab countries' output of books represents just 1.1% of the world total."

The working paper did not see fit to mention that this figure, which has been much quoted subsequently, is 13 years out of date and almost certainly wrong. It was plucked from an old Unesco report relating to book production in 1991 - probably an untypical year for publishing in the Arab world (and certainly for Iraq and Kuwait) because of the Gulf war.

As the UN noted last year in its Arab human development report, "there are no accurate statistics on the actual amount of book production in the Arab world". The report explained that tracking the publication of Arabic books is "very difficult" because many are published without registered numbers.

This suggests that any official figures are likely to be an underestimate, perhaps even a gross underestimate in view of all the pirate editions that are printed in the region without respect for copyright.

Regardless of how many books are actually published in the Arab world, a more relevant question is how many are worth reading. What do they contribute by way of useful knowledge, understanding or the spread of new ideas? All these qualities will be essential if reform in the Arab world is to have any hope of succeeding.

One very common criticism is that modern Arabic books, taken as a whole, are particularly unchallenging in their content. Inevitably, this is a subjective view but, even after allowing for some notable exceptions and recognising that a lot of rubbish gets published elsewhere in the world, there are plenty of reasons for thinking it's a fair complaint.

Some of the blame can certainly be pinned on Arab regimes and Islamist movements for stifling ideas that don't conform with their own. Arab interior ministers put far more effort into suppressing literary work than culture ministers put into encouraging it and Islamists harass authors that they disapprove of - as when they tried to have Nawal el-Saadawi, the Egyptian feminist writer, compulsorily divorced from her husband.

Though the stultifying effect is undeniable, adversity does sometimes give writers the fire they need to produce great work, and censorship can even boost sales. Adama, the 1998 novel by the Saudi writer Turki al-Hamad (an eye-opening tale of sedition, sex and alcohol in the conservative kingdom), was banned by several countries including Saudi Arabia and collected four religious fatwas. It became a bestseller within a month.

While it may be generally true, as the Arab human development report suggests, that creative activity needs "a climate of freedom and cultural pluralism" in order to flourish, this is not by any means the whole story. There are many far more mundane problems that hamper book publishing, too. "For Arabs, buying a book is like buying perfume," said Andre Gaspard, co-founder of Saqi Books, which publishes in both Arabic and English. "A book is a luxury in Lebanon, Syria, Morocco and Egypt."

Book buying also seems to be declining among the young. A bookseller quoted by the Lebanese Daily Star newspaper last week said most of his customers were in the 30 and above age category. "Among those, there is only an elite who would pay a large amount of money to buy a book," he said. "People here would much rather prefer spending such an amount on an outing or a new outfit."

Another bookseller in Beirut suggested high prices drive people to photocopy books rather than buying them. "Lebanese university students never buy books because they can't afford them," he said. A non-fiction book written in English that sells for $20 or £12.99 in the west can be sold in translation in the Middle East for no more than $8, Mr Gaspard said. If the price is higher, people simply won't buy it. This means it is less likely to be an economic proposition for publishers. The paper and printing costs for English and Arabic editions are virtually the same but the Arabic edition, besides having to be sold at a lower price, carries the extra burden of translation costs at around $14 per page.

Some Arab publishers use cheaper production methods but this can result in books that drop to bits or need to have their pages slit apart with a knife. People don't trust badly-produced books, Mr Gaspard said. Some also cut corners by paying their translators as little as possible - not a good policy if the result is gibberish. Mr Gaspard recalls once attending a dinner party where a guest sat scribbling between courses, hurriedly finishing off his Arabic translation of a book on structuralism.

The high cost of books in relation to Arab pockets is one factor, but another is the lack of libraries which, in the west, can account for as much as 70% of a book's total sales. There are some public libraries in the Gulf, but few elsewhere. Lebanon used to have one but it closed in 1975 because of the civil war and hasn't reopened. University libraries, another important potential customer, tend to shy away from controversial books, Mr Gaspard said.

Illicit photocopying, almost on an industrial scale, hits the sales of academic books in particular. While taking a course at a Jordanian university some years ago, I found the campus bookshop mostly deserted. But a shop just across the road from the main gate had several photocopiers going full tilt. Borrow a textbook from someone else and a couple of hours later you could have your own copy, bulky and crudely-bound but a lot cheaper than the original.

The general level of book sales is so low that an Arabic novel is considered successful if it sells 3,000 copies - in which case the lucky author earns royalties of about $1,800 (£1,000). At that rate, nobody can seriously hope to make a living from writing novels in Arabic.

This, as well as political conditions in the Middle East, may help to explain why so many Arab novelists live abroad and write in other languages such as English, French or (in a few cases) German.

The American G8 working paper also highlighted the relatively small number of books that are translated into Arabic - allegedly about 330 a year. "Five times as many books are translated into Greek (spoken by just 11 million people) as Arabic," it said.

This is another statistic that has been much quoted since, though where it originated - and whether is it correct - is unclear. The National Book Centre of Greece, which might be expected to know about translations into Greek, does not keep count, according to a recent issue of the Index on Censorship journal.

It is clear, though, that economic conditions in the Arab book trade discourage translation in general while favouring pirate translations where no royalties are paid or slapdash translations that readers may have difficulty understanding.

The implication of the American working paper is that Arabs suffer from a "knowledge deficit" for want of translated books and that more translations would help to rectify the deficit. At the very least, that is debatable: sheer numbers are not the issue and it depends partly on whether we're talking about Harry Potter in Arabic or the seminal works of western culture.

It is also doubtful whether a lack of Arabic-language books about science and technology is a barrier to progress. At the more advanced levels they are virtually impossible to translate and the Arabs who work in these fields are usually accustomed to reading in English or another foreign language.

Despite the talk of a knowledge deficit, reading in foreign languages is far more widespread in the Arab world than in the west. Arab countries import about $40m (£22m) worth of books and magazines every year, according to a background note for the Frankfurt book fair. Most of these are textbooks and reference books.

By far the best selling book in Beirut at the moment is The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. One shop alone claims to have shifted 1,000 copies. It is available in English, French and Arabic but the Arabic version seems to stay longest on the shelves.

General-purpose bookshops in the Arab capitals - unlike their counterparts in the west - almost always have substantial foreign language sections, and in some shops the English and French books outnumber those in Arabic.

The flow of ideas between east and west ought, of course, to be a two-way traffic so we should also consider whether the west has a knowledge deficit of its own where Arab books are concerned - a question that I hope to look at in a future article.