Arab Human Development Report 2003: Building a Knowledge Society [Paperback]

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 27, 2004 | ISBN-10: 9211261570 | ISBN-13: 978-9211261578

The report affirms that knowledge can help the region to expand the scope of human freedoms, enhance the capacity to guarantee those freedoms through good governance and achieve the higher moral human goals of justice and human dignity. It also underlies the importance of knowledge to Arab countries as a powerful driver of economic groeth through higher productivity. It's closing section puts forward a strategic vision for creating knowledge societies on the Arab world built on five pillars:
1. Guaranteeing the key freedoms of opinion, speech and assembly through good governance bounded by the law. 2. Disseminating high quality education for all. 3. Embedding and ingraining science and building and broadening the capacity for research and development across society. 4. Shifting rapidly towards knowledge-based production in Arab socioeconomic structures. 5. Developing an authentic, broadminded and enlightened Arab knowledge model. AHDR 2003 makes it clear that, in the Arab civilization, the pursuit of knowledge is prompted by religion, culture, history and the human will to achieve success. Obstructions to this quest are the defective structures created by human beings - social, economic and above all political. Arabs must remove or reform these structures in order to take the place they deserve in the world of knowledge at the beginning of the knowledge millennium.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations' global development network, is the largest multilateral source of development assistance in the world.

Product Details

• Paperback: 230 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9211261570
• ISBN-13: 978-9211261578
• Product Dimensions: 11.5 x 8.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,613,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Key issue downplayed, June 14, 2005

By 

David L. Steinberg "David Steinberg" (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Arab Human Development Report 2003: Building a Knowledge Society (Paperback)

There is a great deal of value in this report. However, it does not squarely face the profound problems caused by Arabic diglossia i.e. using Modern Standard Arabic for writing and formal speech and the numerous Arabic "dialects" for normal conversation.

Modern Standard Arabic is based on the Arabic of the Quran and has the same relationship to the spoken forms of Arabic as Classical Latin has to modern French or Italian. The prestige of the language of the Quran in Islam, and the fact that Modern Standard Arabic is similar throughout the Arab world, have combined to support the opinion among many Arabic speakers that their native spoken language is "bad Arabic". Of course, Modern Egyptian or Moroccan Arabic is no more "bad Arabic" than the language of Madrid is bad Latin. The tremendous barrier to education and modernization of diglossia is described in "Language Education and Human Development Arabic diglossia and its impact on the quality of education in the Arab region" http://literacy.org/products/ili/pdf/OP0002.pdf.

An analogous situation was overcome in Europe during the renaissance by the development of the vernaculars as literary vehicles. In all likelihood, something similar will have to happen in the Arab world by either adopting educated spoken Egyptian Arabic as a universal standard or by the development of a few regional standards based on the educated speech of major regional cities.