British columnist Peter Hitchens is the brother of Christopher Hitchens but, unlike Christopher, often makes a lot of sense. In his latest post on his blog, he laments what he sees as a wholesale moral and cultural decline in British society. The entire post is worth reading, but he concludes by pointing to what he sees as the most serious problem of all:
But the worst damage of all, I think, has been done by the wholesale destruction of imagination because children are nowadays never allowed to be bored, and are always able to silence their thoughts with noise or pictures. Imagination matters because it is there that we are able to picture the results of what we do before we do it.
It is where we are most ourselves. It is the fortress where we guard our individuality and where - until now - commercialism and authority have been able to get at us.But listen to Jacqueline Wilson, who obviously has a huge and powerful imagination. Children at book signings ask her how she writes and she replies “‘Oh, you know, it’s just like when you play imaginary games and you simply write it all down.’
“All I get is blank faces, I don’t think children use their imaginations any more”. This must be one of the saddest things ever written. Will any of these children recover from the blankness of their lives, from having become knowing teenagers at the age of about six, and conformist members of the admass at about the same age?
We can only hope that they will get better, and can be rescued. But without imaginations it is going to be very difficult.
It is difficult to disagree with Mr Hitchen’s observation. Children’s literature, for example, does seem to be losing the race for the increasingly short attention spans of children. Muslim children are, obviously, not immume to this and one need only look at the almost complete absence of literature targeted at any Muslim over the age of eight to see where things are at and where they are heading. Where is the Muslim C.S. Lewis to fire the imagination of the young reader with Islamically-inspired tales of yore? Do we have anything to offer as an alternative to the bromidic secular sermons of the so-called kid lit genre?
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I am glad someone is finally lamenting this… it is something that has shocked me no end since I moved here from the UK. I love reading, and often end up reading while my wife watches TV (there is nothing worthwhile on these days for me to watch). I have many friends who work either voluntarily or otherwise as tutors for Muslim school kids from all types of backgrounds, and one of the common observations is that there are literally no books in the house; none at all! In fact, some even remarked that they were lucky to see an actual Qur’an somewhere out of the way.
To me, this is disasterous, especially considering the idea that knowledge is a religious obligation - yet how many of us have enough knowledge of our religion let alone anything else these days?
Considering the vast amounts of information, inspiring stories and real life “heroes” that our religious tradition has (beginning with Muhammad [saw] himself!), I feel that there is a huge possibility which is being lost to educate our kids (and others in general) about real life people from our tradition that we should be proud of. That is especially true when we read articles, for example, discussing the relationship with the ‘Dune’ mythology and what the creator borrowed from Islamic thought and so on.
Anyway, great point you brought up!
Exactly! I really worry for our community when so few Muslims seem to read books anymore. If parents don’t read, then it is not surprising that their children don’t read either. I honestly don’t know how one goes about changing a culture of ignorance — both religious and secular — if many people don’t even recognise that there is a problem. And the price being paid isn’t going to just be ignorance (although that would be bad enough) but also the lack of imagination, short attention span, and so forth that seems to accompany a childhood that is barren of books.
Perhaps if there were, as you point out, books written that draw on our rich history it would go some way to solve the problem. Parents that themselves can’t read or don’t like reading but are religious might then feel more comfortable with their children reading novels. That said, I am also not entirely convinced that the problem is simply an absence of Islamic literature. There are plenty of good books written by non-Muslims from which one can extrapolate all sorts of Islamic lessons.
Do you think that this culture of reading and a love of literature is more prolific in the United Kingdom than Australia?
Excellent post Amir, Jazak Allahu khier. We have reason to be worried because it is not only imagination we should be mourning but attending the funeral of story-telling.
I remember growing up with stories about not only the prophet (ASWS) and his companions (as) but also tales of Juha (a folktale charactor that uses humour and contradicting forms of wisdom to portray lessons about people and society during the early days of Islamic civil society, many claim that the origins of the word ‘joke’ comes from ‘Juha’), we all sat fascinated around my dad (we still do alhamidulillah) while he brought charactors to life, he entertained us with thousands of slide shows of his travels around the world, he sat us down and reviewed books he found interesting, the modest library at home contains the most interesting, eloquent and rarest books in the world - including old copies of the Bible and Torah. We had weekly Arabic story-telling, where each child read the book out loud and made notes. As children one of our favourite programmes was The Story-teller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storyteller). Nothing made him happier than to see one of his children reading/writing. He gave us projects to write stories in Arabic and English, he took us to Museums where he sat with us as we drew the exhibits of art, costumes, crafts and textiles and then compiled a small book in its name, I still have them to this day, he never threw any of our work or school books away. Whenever I visited the library or bought a book, he would ask me what I thought about it, he would encourage me to read books that were ‘anti-Muslim’, and/or ‘anti-religion’ in order to gain perspective and form an opinion to respond with, should we ever be in a position to. I could ask him about any issue and he’d have a response for it mashallah, at times he would respond with a proverb or a joke or a story. He is a combination of years of experience, wisdom and literature mashallah, time spent with him is never time wasted and I learnt early that the key was to surround myself with people of this nature.
But the sad thing is, I was naive to think that this was the norm in most households, but as I grew up and visited friends, I found that wasnt the case, while other children got video games and TVs in their rooms, we got books and to that I am forever grateful, to my father, for my love of books, where the words danced off the page and brought dimensions to my childhood alhamidulillah.
Bottomline is, imagination takes patience, patience takes time, time that society dictacts children dont have, books cant compete with the fast pace of video games or the beat of MTV. However, children these days are forming a new kind of imagination, one where 12 year olds are creating their own webpages, home movies and their own music. So it seems that imagination is still there but it is being portrayed via colour and sound instead of words. Where the mouse is their pen and technology be their books.
Is there anything more amazing than cracking open a new book and discovering a new world in it? When I was a child I devoured books, and to this day I think there is nothing to match the power of imagination when reading.
Movies, games and tv do most of the work for you, but a book makes you utilise your brain, tap into the parts of yourself that thrive on adventure, history or the ways of the world and people in general, and there’s no cheating.
Here’s something to think about: why is it that we can read a book in several sittings over a period of time but we cannot watch a movie or watch a play in the same way?
Because the pen is mighter than Harrison Ford.
One reason why I think that may be the case is books have the luxury of time and investment of it, by the former I mean, a book can be as comprehensive or as short as the author wants, it can be intense and has the luxury of developing charactors/ideas/events/circumstances, allowing them to marinate under a literary fire, while a movie has to shrink all that into a short space of time, a script that fulfils only a shallow version of that. This leads into the main point regarding the investment of time, you invest on average about one and half hours to a movie, it leaves your memory as quickly as it arrived, while a book can take days/weeks to digest, bringing with it thoughts, ideas and later on memories, that you would want to trigger and refer back to time and time again.
The volumes a book speaks will drown out the message of any movie. Books contribute to the development of a person’s intellectual enrichment, one book can literally change your life, you can not say the same for movies, atleast I hope you cant. Books have changed the fate of nations, brought religion to man, switched the religion of men, shaped policies, fed us, armed us, enlightened us, educated us, icons, theories, ideas, history, events all are found in books, movies can not boast to such an achievement. And for that reason, books remain king in the power of expression and more importantly, impression.
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