• A Quarter of a Century of Knowledge

A Quarter of a Century of Knowledge

A quarter of a century ago one of the most important Arab cultural series was launched from Kuwait, involving a cultural project to bring enlightenment to the Arab nation. It has achieved unparalleled success such as no other Arab cultural series ever achieved.

Many people regarded it as a unique cultural experiment which embodies the ability of Arab intellectuals to work together. Will we benefit from the lessons of its success at the climax of our fragmentation and differences as we enter the twenty-first century?

In January 1978, the first book in the World of Knowledge series was published. It was entitled Civilization, and was by Dr. Hussein Mounis. Over the course of a quarter of a century, the World of Knowledge became the most widely circulated and invluential cultural series in the whole Arab region, both in terms of of the number of issues, and of the regularity of publication and its notable cultural and scientific standard. So far it has produced a total of 277 books, which form a comprehensive library covering various fields of knowledge, beginning with philosophy and psychology, to astronomy, genetics, information technology, ecology, linguistics, art, and the remaining branches of contemporary human knowledge.

This cultural project is not merely a cultural series published by the State of Kuwait, it is also a success story, a cultural project which embodied on the one hand all the ambitions of the cultural mission which was launched from Kuwait, and on the other hand the ability of Arab intellectuals to have a joint achievement when the right circumstance is there. More important, it is a pioneering experiment in respecting freedom of thought, research and publication for men of science, thought and culture. This is another story that we shall deal with in a separate article.

The beginning of this cultural project was an attempt to close the gaps which had begun to appear in the Arab cultural arena in the phase of the great setback which befell Arab culture and thought in the 1970s, following the military defeat of June 1967 and its destructive effects on the whole Arab situation. One of the most important of these gaps was the lack of cultural editions which publish books of a high standard on various branches of knowledge, and are cheaply priced so that ordinary people can acquire them, particularly after the demise of the distinctive series which had flourished in previous decades. From this starting-point came the proposal for a project to publish a monthly cultural series in which each book would deal with one of the aspects of knowledge. Its aim was to keep Arab readers abreast with the latest developments in thinking.

In drawing up the project, use was made of a collection of studies carried out by a number of prominent Arab thinkers. They included Dr. Fuad Zakaria, Dr. Abdulrahman Badawi, Dr.Abdul Hadi Abu Rayda, Dr. Mahmoud Hijazi, Dr. Muhammad Al-Qassas, Dr. Shakir Mustafa, Dr. Muhammad Yusuf Najm and others.

On the basis of an official assignment from officials in the National Council for Culture, the eminent thinker Dr. Fuad Zakaria - then Head of Kuwait University's Philosophy Department - presented a working paper on the project to publish a series of cultural books from Kuwait with generous full support from the State. He indicated that there is a need to publish a series that would be concerned with meeting the needs of non-specialist Arab readers to acquaint themselves with the culture of the age and to understand the problems of the world we live in, without ignoring their heritage and traditional elements in the national character. This series should constantly preserve a reasonable standard of learning, and not sacrifice this standard for any other consideration.

The World of Knowledge

So that the project when it was implemented would conform to the cultural and intellectual vision required, the responsibility of implementation had to be entrusted to someone capable of managing the project within the regulations and principles which would maintain its standing, so that it would continue without false steps on the way or interference by those who would try to politicize the project or exploit it for purposes of extraneous interests. For all these reasons Dr. Fuad Zakaria was asked to take charge of the scholarly supervision of what the project would produce. In choosing the members of the editorial board, care was taken that they should be eminent learned personalities with wide experience in their branches of learning and scholarly publication, and abreast with what is published in the Arab countries and the world. The task of the board was to draw up a plan for writing and translating books, propose names of authors and translator, follow up implementation of the plan and assess it, help examine books or review them scholastically, propose names of other examiners and reviewers, and everything related to the soundness of authorship, translation and publishing, by enforcing the strictest scholarly and research conditions.

In January 1978 the first book contained an introduction by Kuwaiti poet Ahmad Mushari Al-Adwani, in which he said: "When we thought of publishing a monthly series of cultural books, that was inspired by our feeling of the Arab reader's pressing need for books that keep him abreast of the latest developments in the fields of knowledge, without this keeping up to date losing him his membership of his civilization and his nation. They need to combine the spirit of the age with the spirit of the nation. The reader's need becomes increasingly urgent at a time when massive technology is promoting Western cultures which grew up in particular societies. This Western culture or cultures are advancing on him, to assault his existence, take away his identity and shake his confidence in his nation's past, present and future."

Here we sense the awareness of those who were behind the project because of its aims and purposes. They spoke about the Arab, not only the Kuwaiti and the Gulf reader, about equilibrium between the spirit of the age and the spirit of the Arab nation together, about their awareness of the effects of Western culture that make Arabs lose their identity and their future, about their clear grasp of the unity of Arab culture and the greatness of its role in the cohesion of the nation, and about the Arab reader in general, not specialists.

In talking here about the World of Knowledge as an effective reality in Arab culture, we must express profound respect for the effort of the Consultant of the series, who has put the essence of his thinking, his experience and his efforts into it. These efforts harmonized with the commitment of those responsible to the Arab national character of the project and its mission of enlightenment. The name of Fuad Zakaria has become linked to the World of Knowledge, and the World of Knowledge has become linked to the name of Fuad Zakaria. Since it was first published in 1978 he has supervised its editing in terms of scholarship exactly as he had imagined it when it was an idea on paper. In the same way his name has become linked to impressive creative thought like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Scientific Thinking, A Message to the Arab Intellect and many other books. One could talk a great deal - if given free rein - about Fuad Zakaria and his contributions to the thinking, planning and implementation of many cultural and scholarly projects in Kuwait throughout the last quarter of a century.

A Unique Experiment

The World of Knowledge has combined the arts of writing in its various forms, in original authorship and translation, in a way that affirms the meaning and inevitability and necessity of cultural encounter, and positive openness to the cultures of the world, in receiving and giving. The series published extremely objective writings by Arab authors, as well as translating the of what modern world thinking has produced. Most of the books of the series have been unique in their domain. On Islamic subjects, for example, there was the huge book The Heritage of Islam, three volumes which observed the contributions of the Arabs to world civilization, The Mosque, Quranic Concepts, Islam in China, Islam and Human Rights, Islam and Economics, Islam and Poetry, Islam, Christianity and the Islamic City and An Introduction to the History of Scientific Thought in Islam.

In the field of human sciences, there was Fuad Zakaria's book Scientific Thinking was one of the most important intellectual achievements of this great thinker, which was reprinted more than four times by more than one publishing house with a total of more than 100,000 copies. There were also Contemporary Philosophy in Europe, The Wisdom of the West, Theoretical Trends in Sociology, Humanity and Psychology, The Story of Anthropology and Humanity between Science and Superstition, etc.

On the Arab heritage there were Stories of Scoundrels and Vagabonds in the Arab Heritage, Love in the Arab Heritage and The Arab Juha. On economics there were The Industry of Hunger, The Population Problem and the Superstition of Malthusianism, The Third World and the Challenges of survival, Capitalism Renews Itself and Transnational Companies.

On arts and literature there were Comedy and Tragedy, Theater in the Arab Homeland, The Director in Modern Theater, The Turning-Point: Forty Years in Exploring the Theater, Invitation to Music and The Literature of Latin America.

Books about the Arab-Israeli conflict included Egypt and Palestine, The Zionist Ideology in two parts, Jewish Colonization Projects, Non-Jewish Zionism and The Fiction of Ancient Israel. Political Science was dealt with in The United States and the Arab East, The Conflict of the Great Powers in the Horn of Africa, Changing the World, The Contemporary World and International Conflicts and The Future of the Arab System after the Gulf Crisis.

With regard to the Arabs and questions of development, the list is long, and includes Problems of Food Production in the Arab World, Basic Human Needs in the Arab Homeland. In the realm of Arab thought, there were Justice and Freedom in the Thought of the Arab Renaissance, Transformations of Thought and Politics in the Arab East, Signposts on the Road to Modernizing Arab Thought and The Arabs and the Age of Information, etc.

All the World of Knowledge books are sold out almost as soon as they reach the markets. Arab readers' demand for a number of these books has been so great that the people in charge of the series have had to publish second and third editions of a large number of its books, like The Heritage of Islam, Scientific Thinking, The Tyrant, The Globalization Trap, Straight Thinking and Crooked Thinking and Humanity Confused between Science and Superstition. There are a number of titles which sold as many as 60,000 copies.

World of Knowledge has maintained its constant standard. Indeed, many people believe that it has made more and more progress year after year. As Fuad Zakaria says, if we bear in mind that each year witnesses the publication of twelve books, we will realize that this is an unusual success compared to any similar Arab project. As for other reasons for the success, there are two factors in Fuad Zakaria's opinion: the scientific factor and the moral factor. With regard to the scientific factor, we find that everybody who has any connection with the series give it a great deal of his time and effort. This means that we are very painstaking. There is no attempt to be easygoing or negligent. Indeed, this work is taken extremely seriously, and this has been inseparable from the series from the beginning up to this moment.

As for the moral aspect, there is what we can call the moral role of conscience in this matter, because in our Arab society we often spoil our successful works and projects with flattery, showing deference to whims, and string-pulling. Thank God flattery, fanaticism, or local or regional factors, all these have no role in this series. We try as much as possible to make the value of the work itself the only criterion. For this reason, you find that we apologize for not using the works of some great personages or we ask them to rewrite these works or to reconsider them substantially, whereas other works have been accepted written by people who are at the beginning of the ladder of learning, but they have offered something new, and so these works have been accepted. Their entry to the World of Knowledge series may have been the beginning of the road for these people to become known throughout the whole Arab world.

The aim of the project was to create an enlightened, learned public opinion by simplifying modern culture and familiarizing the Arab reader with it. This familiarization should be the conscious intermediary between him and this accelerated age in human studies, sociology, literary, linguistic, artistic and scientific studies, technology and the sciences of the future. It embraces all branches of human knowledge from the history of thought to biology and astronomy, from aesthetics to applied mathematics, from literature to planning and investigations into languages and civilizations.

All varieties of subjects have been dealt with by the series, whose basic aim - as already stated - was to create an enlightened, learned public opinion - and as one of the researches on the subjects of the series has said - enlightenment requires that the method be scientific, since one cannot direct a message to the intellect except according to its own laws. The aim of the series should be comprehensive awareness of everything that was, is, will be or should be.

The Ordeal

This series of books continued to be published regularly on the first of every month, from its first issue in 1978 until August 1990, when a book was published with a prophetic title, Pollution is the Problem of the Age. After that the series halted because of the disaster of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. That occupation - as Fuad Zakaria has stated, was in reality a year of pollution: political and military pollution which afflicted us from the moment that an Arab country thought of solving its problem with another Arab country by invading it; moral pollution represented by the savage conduct which exceeded everything that a diseased mind could imagine; and material pollution in the mining, demolition and sabotage operations, and then the burning of the most inflammable of substances, Arab wealth that the invaders preferred to squander in the atmosphere when they found themselves unable to seize it. The most painful moment was when everyone who had contributed their effort and thought to ensure the success of a cultural project like the World of Knowledge discovered that these meanings which we had tried as hard as we could to plant in people's souls over thirteen years had been broken against the outer shell of many people's minds, and that values like freedom, human rights, solidarity, mutual understanding and reasonableness no longer had anyone to defend them among all the Arab peoples. Indeed, there were among the most famous "intellectuals" people who regarded these values as softness and weakness, and who called tyrannical, bloodthirsty fascism "sternness". However the shock of the painful discovery soon turned into more determination. The road was still long, this was the main fact established by that intellectual schism which has afflicted the Arab intellect since 2 August 1990. But this fact in itself is what makes the World of Knowledge even more essential and makes its aims more urgent. The enlightenment which it has adopted as its goal has to wage its battle, and in the end only the truth is correct.

In his introduction to the first book when the series resumed publication after the ordeal of the invasion, namely Kuwait and Arab Cultural Development, Fuad Zakaria began with an expression uttered by an Arab youth who had never visited Kuwait and knew only a little about it: "All I know about Kuwait is that it is a source of culture." This is what the young man said. Dr. Zakaria concluded the introduction with the words: "I go back to this Arab youth, who does not know anything about Kuwait except that it is a source of culture, I extend congratulations to him because one of the lofty structures of this culture has risen again. The editorial staff of the World of Knowledge can only promise this young man that they will continue to go forward along the same path that has enabled them to win the confidence of a whole generation, and will do all it can so that the Arab intellect may absorb those profound lessons taught to us by evil events which deprived our young people for a time of the authentic sources of their culture.

All these meanings were foremost in our minds when we began work to resume publication of the World of Knowledge series from Cairo from the first months of the invasion. We secured immediate agreement from the Kuwaiti Council of Ministers in exile to resume its publication. The required budget for this was ensured. We resumed publication in September 1991 from Cairo. It continued to be published from Cairo until it returned once again to be published from Kuwait after liberation, as from April 1992. It was printed by the first Kuwaiti printing press to be rebuilt and rehabilitated after the invasion and the liberation.

The Sanctity of Culture

The late Ahmad Bahauddin described the World of Knowledge as "the most advanced series in the Arabic language, which is equal to any series in any language". But the most eloquent way I can end this statement, which I see is a long one, is with those inspired expressions about the World of Knowledge which I borrow from my colleague Dr. Muhammad Al-Sayyid Said, when he said it has become "One of the great rivers in Arab Culture It has played a great role in developing and enriching Arab culture in numerous directions. I think Arab intellectuals owe a great deal to this series."

It was always in my thoughts that the State of Kuwait, by expanding this cultural giving, can establish a new concept which I believe is suitable as a basis for a pan-Arab security policy or a national security policy in Kuwait. This is what I call the policy of affirming cultural "sanctity". In the Arab heritage we know about the sanctity of certain months, the sacred months during which war or fighting between the Arabs was forbidden. I think we also need to affirm the meanings of the sanctity of certain countries or areas against attack, on the basis of the cultural gifts they can offer which the heartland and all parts of this nation need, in its spirit and its intellect, its present and its future. It is the cause of culture, which is paramount for the development of Arab societies. If Kuwait expands this cultural giving like the World of Knowledge series and the other cultural and scientific journals of high standard which are published there, I believe that we can in the end achieve Kuwait's cultural sanctity in every sense.

On this occasion as we celebrate twenty-five years since the World of Knowledge project began, we call on all Arab intellectuals whatever their schools of thought to raise the slogan of defending Arab cultural achievements in every Arab country, to confront all methods of oppression, persecution and backwardness, and with their thoughts and values to establish bridges which will rebuild what was destroyed in this nation over the last few decades. They should explore the facts on the basis of reality, and work to rebuild the Arab essence which has suffered a lot of damage at the hands of those who claim to be cultured, trade in words and promote the values of oppression and dictatorship.

Sulaiman Al-Askary

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