At the beginning of every academic year in Qatar I would leave aside a few periods of my English class to teach my students a little history, a little reductionist history that is. Reductionism, anathema to all serious historians, is the attempt to understand complex phenomena, in this case historical, by breaking it down to its constituent parts and usually emphasizing one of these constituents as the primary motivator. This is the history of social scientists who are always attempting to "ferret out the independent variable." In other words, it's an attempt to explain the past, the whole of nearly infinite interconnecting variables, with a phrase like "it all boils down to" this. For example, take a historical question like why did the Germans kill the Jews in the Second World War? There are innumerable reductionist histories that attempt answer this complex question with an oversimplified response. Perhaps the most acclaimed attempt at an answer of recent years came from political scientist Daniel Goldhagen, reductionist extraordinaire, who boiled it down to "eliminationist antisemitism," a virulent strain of a religio-racist mindset that developed ONLY in Germans over centuries and made them Jew killers (forgetting of course that many of the most brutal concentration camps of the Holocaust were manned by other nationalities). Anyway, the point I'm trying to get across is that reductionism is bad history but it does serve a purpose, namely to throw into sharp relief one variable that may have acted as a catalyst, one of many as is always the case, for some momentous development in human affairs.
For my Qatari pupils, all of whom subscribe to a sort of third-worldism approach to history which demonizes the Europeans and their American successors as vile and insidious imperialists, I invented a reductionist narrative of about a millennium and a half of human history that would serve to explain why their country was paying me thousands of dollars to teach them to read in English. In other words I was explaining to them why it was that they had to attend university in English even though many would never spend any significant time of their life outside of their own country. Of course, my history would have to be palatable to their sensitivities so my narrative began with Mohammed's visitation by the angel Gabriel who entrusted him with a book of monumental importance. I would remind them of Francis Bacon's terse maxim, "knowledge is power," and ask them how a bunch of camel driving nomads would suddenly bolt forth from a desert and build an empire that would extend from the Iberian peninsula to the heart of Central Asia and beyond. Knowledge is power and they had received their knowledge from a book, a divinely inspired one (remember I was teaching Wahhabi Muslims). Yet learning increased as the Muslims amassed more books. The Abbasids in Baghdad were so eager for knowledge that they began a concerted effort to translate the great works of Greek philosophy. So great was the library and learning of the Arabs, I would flatteringly tell them, that were we living in the thirteenth century, I would be paying them to teach me Arabic for it was at this time that learned Europeans would make the pilgrimage to Toledo in Spain where they could encounter schools that would teach them to read in Arabic.
Alas, I would lament to my students, this Arab obsession with learning would soon dissipate as the Arab world was corrupted by invasions of Mongols and Turks. I would skip forward to Gutenberg's printing press and contrast Europe's meteoric rise after the Renaissance with the injurious Ottoman ban of printing throughout its Arab territories. While Europe was producing millions of volumes of books by the sixteenth century, only a few hundred could be found throughout the near east. This then must have caused the decay of the Arab mind and the consequent decline of Islamic geopolitical power. Naturally, I didn't believe the whole of what I was saying but it certainly left an impact on my students, and, to an extent, Gutenberg's press must be considered a monumental event in human history that did indeed catalyze learning in several European nations. After all, my job was not to teach them history but to teach them to read. Indeed, my lecture left them with a renewed sense of urgency to read in English--the new language of learning.
This was my life for two years, encouraging Arab youths to learn and, most especially, to read: to take joy in lifting a book from the shelves, to thumb through its contents, and to absorb its contents through an active engagement with the text. The apathy towards reading I abhorred in my students was a localized problem or so I thought.
On a recent flight, however, I had an encounter with a woman that caused me to think otherwise. There I was minding my own business on a rather empty international flight. As rarely happens in coach no one sat to either the left or right of me. So, as the lights went off in the plane I could stretch out, turn on my reading lamp, and enjoy my book. After a few minutes I was interrupted by a fellow passenger. She turned around to face me from the seat in front of me and complained, "excuse me, could you turn off your light? I'm trying to sleep!" By the tone of her voice you would think I had just lit up a cigar. When I informed her that I had no intention of turning off the light as I was reading, she only seemed more perturbed as she hunched back over and stretched out over the three seats in front of me. This occurrence jarred me and I have since spent a few minutes on each flight I take to observe the passengers and ascertain the number of fellow readers. My calculations have compelled to mourn the passing of the reading passenger.
As Cicero once did in his oration against Catiline I want to inveigh against this illiterate generation, "O tempora o mores!" Oh the times, oh the customs! I consider the absence of literature on planes only a symptom of this corrupted age in which we live. People don't bring books with them--even on flights across the world. Why? Well, they've grown accustomed to the technological accoutrements of our i-civilization. When they go on a long trip, they bring their tablets or smart phones, but only a minority employ them to read those skimpy magazine articles filled with colorful pictures that would entertain even my two-year-old. The art of texting, tweeting, gaming, internet shopping and facebooking have displaced the simple but essential skill of a learned society: reading. And like the Byzantines and Sassanids of the seventh century, we may awake one morning to find the barbarians from our periphery overrunning the heart of our intellectual empire.
For my Qatari pupils, all of whom subscribe to a sort of third-worldism approach to history which demonizes the Europeans and their American successors as vile and insidious imperialists, I invented a reductionist narrative of about a millennium and a half of human history that would serve to explain why their country was paying me thousands of dollars to teach them to read in English. In other words I was explaining to them why it was that they had to attend university in English even though many would never spend any significant time of their life outside of their own country. Of course, my history would have to be palatable to their sensitivities so my narrative began with Mohammed's visitation by the angel Gabriel who entrusted him with a book of monumental importance. I would remind them of Francis Bacon's terse maxim, "knowledge is power," and ask them how a bunch of camel driving nomads would suddenly bolt forth from a desert and build an empire that would extend from the Iberian peninsula to the heart of Central Asia and beyond. Knowledge is power and they had received their knowledge from a book, a divinely inspired one (remember I was teaching Wahhabi Muslims). Yet learning increased as the Muslims amassed more books. The Abbasids in Baghdad were so eager for knowledge that they began a concerted effort to translate the great works of Greek philosophy. So great was the library and learning of the Arabs, I would flatteringly tell them, that were we living in the thirteenth century, I would be paying them to teach me Arabic for it was at this time that learned Europeans would make the pilgrimage to Toledo in Spain where they could encounter schools that would teach them to read in Arabic.
Alas, I would lament to my students, this Arab obsession with learning would soon dissipate as the Arab world was corrupted by invasions of Mongols and Turks. I would skip forward to Gutenberg's printing press and contrast Europe's meteoric rise after the Renaissance with the injurious Ottoman ban of printing throughout its Arab territories. While Europe was producing millions of volumes of books by the sixteenth century, only a few hundred could be found throughout the near east. This then must have caused the decay of the Arab mind and the consequent decline of Islamic geopolitical power. Naturally, I didn't believe the whole of what I was saying but it certainly left an impact on my students, and, to an extent, Gutenberg's press must be considered a monumental event in human history that did indeed catalyze learning in several European nations. After all, my job was not to teach them history but to teach them to read. Indeed, my lecture left them with a renewed sense of urgency to read in English--the new language of learning.
This was my life for two years, encouraging Arab youths to learn and, most especially, to read: to take joy in lifting a book from the shelves, to thumb through its contents, and to absorb its contents through an active engagement with the text. The apathy towards reading I abhorred in my students was a localized problem or so I thought.
On a recent flight, however, I had an encounter with a woman that caused me to think otherwise. There I was minding my own business on a rather empty international flight. As rarely happens in coach no one sat to either the left or right of me. So, as the lights went off in the plane I could stretch out, turn on my reading lamp, and enjoy my book. After a few minutes I was interrupted by a fellow passenger. She turned around to face me from the seat in front of me and complained, "excuse me, could you turn off your light? I'm trying to sleep!" By the tone of her voice you would think I had just lit up a cigar. When I informed her that I had no intention of turning off the light as I was reading, she only seemed more perturbed as she hunched back over and stretched out over the three seats in front of me. This occurrence jarred me and I have since spent a few minutes on each flight I take to observe the passengers and ascertain the number of fellow readers. My calculations have compelled to mourn the passing of the reading passenger.
As Cicero once did in his oration against Catiline I want to inveigh against this illiterate generation, "O tempora o mores!" Oh the times, oh the customs! I consider the absence of literature on planes only a symptom of this corrupted age in which we live. People don't bring books with them--even on flights across the world. Why? Well, they've grown accustomed to the technological accoutrements of our i-civilization. When they go on a long trip, they bring their tablets or smart phones, but only a minority employ them to read those skimpy magazine articles filled with colorful pictures that would entertain even my two-year-old. The art of texting, tweeting, gaming, internet shopping and facebooking have displaced the simple but essential skill of a learned society: reading. And like the Byzantines and Sassanids of the seventh century, we may awake one morning to find the barbarians from our periphery overrunning the heart of our intellectual empire.
