Quote:
Originally Posted by whitearrow
I googled the term "book censorship in arab countries" and found this very interesting report by the Rand Corporation (pdf).
From the summary:
Three major barriers confront the dissemination and consumption of Arabic literature. The first barrier is censorship, which is a significant problem in the Middle East. Nearly all Arab Middle East countries employ government censors. Censorship is often aimed at stopping the publication or distribution of content deemed politically, morally, or religiously sensitive. Religious institutions, such as al-Azhar, Cairo’s center of Islamic learning, often assist government censors by recommending books to be banned. A second barrier is the small market for literary material in the Arab world. Book production and, presumably, reader consumption are relatively low in the Middle East in comparison to other regions with similar socioeconomic levels of development. One factor behind this low book-consumption rate is the region’s high rates of illiteracy, especially among the generations born before 1970. A final barrier is the poor internal distribution systems for books. This is compounded by the challenge of selling books across a vast number of countries all with their own censorship requirements, regulations, and tax codes. All of these reasons, in various ways, provide rationales why Amazon either could not bring the Kindle to certain countries because of these barriers, or made a business decision that the potential profit was simply too low to justify the costs of doing so.
If any country insisted that every Kindle book go through a censorship review prior to being available in that particular country, do you blame Amazon for saying that doing business in that country probably isn't worth it, when you add that on top of the costs of the wireless service, the probable low rate of Kindle sales, etc.? |
On the issue of illiteracy, I would like to provide some context. The local dialect (3amiyya) in the Arab countries can vary quite markedly from written, literary Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic, Modern Literary Arabic, Media Arabic, etc. derived from Fus7a or classical Arabic). As a result, literacy is not a simple matter of learning the alphabet and then applying it to the language that you speak in daily life. There are substantial pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical differences between MSA and, say, Moroccan dialect. These are considerable hurdles in the path to literacy. The Western North African dialects, in particular, are, according to some scholars, on the path to becoming distinct languages, leading to the phenomena known as diglossia, where there is a split between written and vernacular forms of the language.