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131  c h a p t e r 5 Collective Reading  Arabic-speaking societies and Third World communities in general have sometimes been portrayed as typically “oral.” The tag is intended to distinguish them from societies in the West, whose culture, especially in modern times, has been characterized as “literacy” oriented. Thus Walter Ong, once a guru of “orality and literacy” theories, spoke in 1967 of “the still functionally oral-aural Arab cultures.” He related the story of an Arab student of engineering who, though educated, was an illustrative “product of a verbomotor society, an oral-aural personality.” When this man was faced with a challenge of building a bridge, Ong observed, Every fiber of his being made him want to respond to the situation by verbalization —he wanted to speak of what so-and-so had said in the past about building a bridge, of great battles fought over bridges, of the usefulness of bridges to men, and so on. A bridge, like everything else, had its most glorious existence in the universe of discourse. The idea of withdrawing into himself and starting out with surveying and drilling . . . struck the typical Arab student as antisocial, a prostitution of intellect, infrahuman and bestial.1 According to this argument, Arabs were not only intrinsically inclined to excessive verbalization; they were also prone to “oral-aural” communication —as distinct, so Ong seems to imply, from written modes of expression —and that tendency represented an inherent if not unchangeable cultural quality in them. Such a sweeping attribution of traits to whole societies is, of course, ever problematic; and Ong may well have sinned by oversimplifying an intricate case. It is true that Islam, the faith of the great majority of Arabs, has traditionally attached particular importance to the spoken word, memorization, and recitation, especially in relation to certain r e a d i n g p a l e s t i n e 132 sacred texts, as already noted. It is also true that oral modes permeated the circulation of information and ideas in Arab societies until very recently, and that this characteristic went together with illiteracy, which the dependence on oral means at once reflected and encouraged. In addition, there is little doubt that in following such practices in modern times, these societies increasingly differed from their European counterparts, in which oral modes of communication had been outstripped by other mechanisms. At the same time, however, it is equally true that Arabic-speaking societies had a rich tradition of written scholarship, book production, library building, and a written discourse in many fields over the generations. The concept of the Arab inherent “orality” is thus somewhat shaky, and its value in explaining the recent Arab reliance on the spoken word dubious. Leaving aside such flat labels as offered by Ong, it is quite clear that in pre-twentieth-century Arab societies, illiteracy, the paucity of written texts, and the centrality of religious rituals performed vocally combined to make oral forms of communication predominant. Most often the circulation of messages of any kind was conducted without the actual presence of a written text. At other times, writings were at hand and read or cited by one individual to an audience. A time-honored norm, it served the society satisfactorily to the extent of rendering any other means—including printing—rather superfluous. By the onset of the modern phase, as written information began to arrive in unprecedented quantities, the old channels, long proven effective, were in place to contain the flood. At first there was no alternative anyway. But the massive inflow of information in print was followed by the arrival of organized education, whose fruits—always taking a generation or two to ripen—would put into the society’s hands more tools for handling the wealth of written texts. In the interim, between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, they were circulated largely by way of the old, familiar conduits. The Old, Familiar Conduits Oral transmission of messages—from religious injunctions through current news to popular legends—was a practice which Arab societies had long shared with Europe. Text-based oral communication was widely employed in the West in conveying old and new types of knowledge until quite recently . As late as the first half of the nineteenth century, reading of news and commentary by an educated person to a crowd of illiterate listeners was still common in London and Paris, let alone smaller towns and villages in [3...

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