Harith Rasmi Al-Hiti
Photography: Wissam Al-Aqili
On restoring the status of the book among its audience in the Arab world in general and Iraq in particular, the seminar hall was hosted by Dr. Faris Haram and Mr. Muhammad Ghazi Al-Akhras, the seminar moderated by the novelist Khudair Falih Al-Zaidi dealt with this important topic from several aspects with the participation of the audience in the hall.
Muhammad Ghazi Al-Akhras talked about the types of books, where he said, “There are books that are written academically and their audience is clear, which is the academic, educated and elite audience, and there are books that are not academic, such as articles, novels and literary books, and these are their own audience, my experience began with poetry, I issued the first cloned collection, which is a hand-sized group, and we make it in a primitive way and distribute it to 50 friends, for example, and we consider ourselves that we distributed a book, and this is what I later called an illusion book, but in the next stage the stage of writing books and printing them began natural printing, and the truth There is no criterion by which we know how this or that book will succeed, many times writers write a book with the mind that it will succeed, but in fact they discover that there are few readers.”
Al-Akhras adds, “The success of a book on a subject related to the mood of the public at a certain historical moment, for example, when I printed my first book, The Autumn of the Intellectual, I was surprised by its success in that way, a success that was clear and the book was widely read because it was presented at an appropriate moment and the book discusses ideas of how Iraqi culture dealt from 1990 to 2008, this stage was of interest to the reader, so I read well, my book in the biography of cultural violence, which is an academic book and cost me a great effort that did not succeed like before.”
Fares Haram was his intervention about the paper book and reproduced or illustrated electronically says “The problem of the book in our society is a complex problem that goes beyond the electronic book (pdf) and can be considered and abbreviated in that it is a crisis in the application of legislation related to copyright, because countries that respect publishing laws there is a great limitation of this phenomenon, and there are in Western countries there are often severe penalties for the circulation of the book in this way, and diversity in reading as well, and once found in societies where this audience increases, it increases. A year ago, the World Knowledge Index appeared and showed that the UAE is No. 1 in the Arab world and No. 11 at the global level, Iraq is not already on the 2020 list out of a total of 150 countries on the knowledge list.”
Haram adds, “We have a crisis in reading the book and we have a crisis in the reading audience, which made this crisis not wars and blockades as is usually indicated in the process of evacuating successive governments on Iraq from the moment of its establishment until the moment, and especially from the moment of Saddam Hussein until now, there is a deliberate and organized process of ignorance practiced on society in order to deny cultural diversity, Iraqi society was intended to have one style of reading and thinking, and then came the governments that followed Saddam Hussein’s government did not One of the most important of these measures is the reform of the education sector, look at the history books, Islamic and Arabic language teaching books, which are books that alienate children from the Arabic language and grammar, as they contain a lot of vocabulary called brutal vocabulary.”