Building bridges back to the tenth century By Zvi Bar'el November 2003 "The issue of English is raised again every time," said the economics lecturer at the American University in Cairo. "We constantly receive complaints about our neglect of Arabic, that we require our students know English and insist on their conversing among themselves in English. There have even been some among us who have been accused of heresy, of disseminating Zionism and more, because of our requirements to learn English." The lecturer gives a good sample of impediments shared by most of the Arab countries on their way to the knowledge revolution. On the one hand the freezing of classical Arabic, and on the other, great reservations about studying foreign languages. This is also one of the "charges" that appears in the report on the progress of human development in the Arab world, published this month by the United Nations' Development Program. This is the second report the UN has published on the Arab world, and this time focuses Arab knowledge society, or rather the failure of that society. The list of figures presented in the report on the status of knowledge in Arab countries should arouse more than a little anxiety not only in the Arab countries, but also in the developed countries. The figures indicate that only about 0.2 percent of the gross domestic product of Arab countries is dedicated to R&D, unlike 3 percent in Japan and 2.2 percent in Israel. One of the implications of this figure is that the technology that is parachuted in from the West to Arab countries does not undergo an assimilation process, and there is no incentive for developing local science and technology. In effect, the report continues, the Arab countries have no national and governmental infrastructure for the systematic promotion of science and research. The authors provide a few impressive statistics. The average level of computerization in the Arab countries is 18 computers per 1,000 persons, compared to a world average of about 78 computers per 1,000 persons; only 1.6 percent of the population of Arab countries is hooked to the Internet, compared to 35-40 percent in developed countries, and the number of telephone lines is only about a fifth of the accepted figure even in developing countries. No ways, no means All these are the main impediment to developing connectivity, not only to world knowledge but even to the limited databases within the Arab countries themselves. The report's authors emphasize how hard it is to obtain information in Arab countries, not only from state restrictions but also because in many fields no one bothers to compile information. The authors do not state whether a reason for this lack of motivation to obtain knowledge is the absence of means - computers and telephone lines. Perhaps the opposite is the case - the lack of interest and the absence of government or private infrastructure that can initiate the acquisition of knowledge result in there being no initiatives for the development of such means. Theoretically, this is just a situation report, but the report's authors go a few steps further and distinguish between culture and government in the encouragement of knowledge acquisition. For example, they note the important role of Arab culture and Islam in the encouragement of knowledge acquisition. The culture that draws on its religion will find that the Koran and Islamic tradition demands the recognition of not only Arab knowledge, but also world knowledge. The ambition to learn and to strive for knowledge are the embodiment of Islamic culture. But when religion must meet the needs of the government, when religion is given a political interpretation, or when the government has to please conservative religious streams in order to survive, the main problem is created. Religious leaders receive censorship powers, which affect the ability to obtain any knowledge, freedom of thought and expression, and progress toward democratization. In this context the report notes the Arabization of universities in Arab countries. The meaning of this process is the allegiance to classical Arabic as the language of instruction and study, on the assumption that this will preserve the Arabic and Islamic heritage and will thwart foreign influences. The result is that the Arabic language is unable to innovate and function as a modern scientific language that is capable of assimilating the world's new ideas. This process, which creates seclusion, also strengthens the familiar phenomena of anti-Westernism and to be more precise, anti-Americanism. It is a short road from here to blaming the West for all the tragedies that have befallen the Arab world. Blaming the West, however, cannot explain, for example, the harsh reality of the education system, which is completely dependent on the government in the Arab countries. Cooking the books This issue receives broad coverage in the 167-page report. On the positive side, the Arab countries have significantly increased their investment in education, particularly per capita. Illiteracy fell from 60 percent in the 1980s to 40 percent in the 1990s and $26 billion was invested in education in 1995, compared to $18 billion in 1980. Even so, the per capital expenditure on education is still a tenth of the accepted level in industrialized countries and the real problem is the quality of the education. In Egypt government universities, not just private ones, have begun to set stiffer acceptance conditions. The average grade required for acceptance to a faculty of medicine is at least 95. The engineering faculties require a 90 average, as do computer science departments. The popularity of these professions comes mainly from the possibility of finding a job quickly. Graduates of the humanities and social sciences are often wait-listed for years before gaining a job interview for a government position. The unemployment rate among university graduates is among the highest - according to a government estimate, as much as 20 percent. A more realistic estimate is nearer 30 percent. Private companies, especially foreign companies, in which employees earn much more than the average wage, demand not only professional knowledge but also a full command of English. The stiff acceptance requirements cause two related phenomena - one is enormous payments to private tutors, and the second is the lowering of the work load at high schools so that students can more easily achieve higher marks on their matriculation exams. Two ministers are in charge of education in Egypt - Mufid Shihab, who is minister of higher education, and Hussein Kamal Bahaeddin, who is responsible for the rest of the education system. When the results of the final exams at high schools two years ago were published, there was considerable unease. It turned out that the number of students who passed the exams with excellence was 53,000 more than in the previous year. The education minister was asked to explain this great success, since there are those who believe that the figures cannot be realistic. Either there was a misrepresentation of the total figures, or the students were given a substantial "boost" in order to raise the number of students who excelled. This would prove that this education ministry was promoting the president's program, which set education as a top national priority, more than the other education ministry, which is in charge of higher education. Publish and perish Such a large number of excelling high school graduates caused no small headache for Shihab, who would have to find places for them all on the university benches and train them for an exit to the labor market with its few available jobs. More high-school graduates translates to more unemployed academics in four years time. The results of this system can be seen in the report's figures. Take for example scientific publications in the Arab world - just 2 percent of publications worldwide although the combined population of the Arab countries is more than 5 percent of the world population. Only 371 scientists and engineers per million citizens are involved in R&D, compared with the world average of 979. The number of books printed in the Arab states accounts for only 1.1 percent of the total printed worldwide. This is less that the book production of some individual countries, like Turkey. The report's authors took the trouble to note that of all the books printed in Arab countries, 17 percent are religious texts, compared to the world average of 5 percent. Seclusion, Arabization, a lack of encouragement for foreign languages, and mainly lack of motivation to acquire broad knowledge, because such knowledge does not ensure a dignified livelihood in Arab countries, have led to an accelerated brain drain out of these countries. About 25 percent of B.A. graduates left for the West, and over 15,000 doctoral graduates emigrated from Arab countries in the two-year period from 1998-2000 alone. By contrast, the number of Arab students in the U.S. has fallen by over 30 percent since the 9/11 terror attacks. The report's authors feel that all these factors, along with the absence of democracy, transparency and databases, distance the Arab countries from the possibility of bridging the gaps with the West, and are liable to be much more dangerous to regimes and to the stability of the region than economic crises. The report's authors are Arab researchers and intellectuals, all of them graduates of universities in the West, and they used western research tools to build indices for development and progress in Arab society. Even so, it is impossible to argue that this is once again the western worldview, aimed at re-educating the Arab world or finding another proof of the backwardness of Arab society. The guiding concept for the report's authors is that without knowledge development - and as a preliminary step, the development of an ambition to acquire knowledge and develop modern learning tools - the Arab countries will not be able to integrate into the globalization process and the gap between them and the other developing nations, not to mention between the developed nations, will become dangerously wider. In effect, concludes the report, economic aid will not be enough to improve the economic condition of most of the Arab countries without the construction of a technological and scientific infrastructure that will be able to turn these countries into manufacturers of knowledge both for themselves and for export. This is especially applicable considering that young people are now the majority in that part of the world, in unprecedented numbers.