Once upon a time, in the Arab world, not long ago, there were books and magazines specializing in Arab children’s culture. They were diverse and distributed in capitals such as Kuwait, Beirut, Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and even Amman.
Personally, I owe a great deal of the “foundation of knowledge” to Majid magazine, which began publication in Abu Dhabi in the 1970s, and many other magazines alongside it that were published by respected elites in the world of thought, culture, and art (for example, the great Syrian artist Nihad Qala’i was, in his last days, the editor of a Lebanese magazine for young men called Samer).
This condition was one of the most important motivators for “reading,” which was included in hobbies such as swimming and collecting stamps and coins (how can we explain stamps and coins in the age of email, WhatsApp, and digital currency?).
Perhaps I can claim that I am from a generation that managed to escape with some awareness due to those early, studied readings that were not restricted by the guardianship of jurisprudence and heritage.
This specialized publication has ended and become extinct, and has withdrawn from the scene for several reasons, the first of which is the spread of knowledge technology, which we have not employed in the Arab world in its optimal form. We have ended up with a vacuum that extremist movements that have mastered the use of smart media have been able to fill with “religious” content in the form of a discourse directed at children. We have ended up with children’s television channels that are directed at filling the child with the same traditional heritage instead of motivating him to think. In fact, I browse the Internet to find talk about scientific reports in psychology and child education that warn that the content of some of these specialized channels harms children, and creates addiction to them and then autism in them!
I do not adopt the opinions of those studies whose sources I have not carefully examined, but I have followed some of those channels that are directed in one direction, and I was terrified by the idea of addressing a child with any discourse that restricts his freedom to create wonder and questions in his small world that is open to innocence.
The funny thing is that during my research, I found Salafi websites that also attack those specialized stations, but from the perspective that it is not permissible for a Muslim child to learn anything from musical instruments and music, based on the opinions of Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim, which are the same opinions that, by the way, permit, and even encourage the marriage of minors, and from which the traditional heritage was inspired, and childhood was assassinated in many of our Arab societies.
Why is this topic important?
Because simply if we thought about creating a generation free from all our disappointments and complexes that have been passed down from generation to generation, and gave childhood its due with a sound family upbringing that is open to dialogue, we would end up with an advanced Arab world after at least one or two generations.
Our problem – in general – with our children and children is that we reproduce the same experience that we had as children with them again, even if the tools and methods are different.
The Arab child is no different from any other child in the world, except for the incubators that nurture his growth, starting with the family incubator and ending with the state incubator.
Children are not just an ornament of this worldly life. If we stopped at this classification and were satisfied with it, we would end up establishing them as a case of momentary enjoyment. Children, any children, are projects for the growth of awareness, and in our Arab world, unfortunately, they are sometimes projects of stillborn awareness.
*Jordanian writer residing in Belgium
#Reproducing #healthy #childhood