Faisal Saeed Al Mutar on Ideas Beyond Borders
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/07/21
Faisal Saeed Al Mutar is the founder of Ideas Beyond Borders and Bayt Al-Hikma 2.0. I sat down and talked with him about some of his recent work.
To open the discussion, Al Mutar and I discussed the project, its execution, and the importance of it. He spoke on the project entitled House of Wisdom or Bayt-al-Hikma 2.0. The basic idea is the mass translation of Enlightenment writings from English and other languages into Arabic for consumption by the Arab world.
Al Matar stated, “It is something that needs to be highlighted. The Arabic language is one of the least languages translated to. There was a report from the UN in 2002. He said that there are more books translated to Spanish in one year than into Arabic in 1,000 years. Maybe, the statistics have changed. There have been recent statistics from the MIT language Lab. It is probably now 700 to 1 [Laughing].”
He continued to talk about the slow, steady drip of progress for the region. However, the arc of progress takes a long time, and this problem represents something systemic and is a huge problem. He noted some reports that have been verified by a large number of people. There are the conspiracy and anti-Semitic hate literature, e.g. Mein Kempf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, distributed, sold, and, in fact, as bestsellers, in the Arab World. This bothers Al Mutar.are some of the bestsellers in the Arab world. That also bothers me.
“I think that the dictators and Islamists and authoritarian regimes have been trying to shelter the Arab speaking world from being exposed to the ideas of human rights, women’s rights, of scientific development, because they do not want to be challenged,” Al Mutar opined, “Now, with the existence of the internet, there is a huge opportunity to spread these ideas into the Arab speaking world. I have done research on many of the social media pages that exist in the region speaking on science and human rights.”
He estimates that combined, the number is about 40 million people. That is, there is a huge amount of interest and curiosity in these ideas from the perspective and motivations of the young people. Those young populations with new and fresh ideas. He thinks most of these young people want the freedom and opportunity to be exposed to these ideas at their leisure.
Al Mutar continued, “That itself can build some sort of view that the world is not black and white. That itself can build a counternarrative to extremism. Extremism flourishes on this idea that the world is black and white. There are good guys and bad guys. People are being exposed to all of these uncertain types of ideas. Many of them are dangerous. We are trying to provide these good ideas a platform. It is necessary on multiple levels. From a purely educational level, it is important for students to be exposed to different ideas and make up their minds.”
He noted the core importance of the provision of a counternarrative to the extremists of the world, especially with the rise of the extremist and terrorist groups. He and others are working for the legal rights of the authors at the same time. In fact, authors including Steven Pinker, Maajid Nawaz, Sam Harris, and others, will not take money from this cause. Because they care about it.
“I am sure there are other authors that want to. They may want to make some income out of this. So, we are working things out with as many authors as we can and for licensing as we can. It is places that need these books the most,” Al Mutar explained, “I heard from Majid Nawaz, former Islamist extremism and now a liberal democratic fighting Islamic extremists.”Maajid Nawaz was a part of Hizb ut-Tahrir. He wrote a book called Radical. One publishing company in the Arab world has been doing outreach to Nawaz. Al Mutar views their work as becoming a publishing company of sorts. There is a distribution throughout the online realm. There is a balance between “safety and freedom” with the first step being the acquisition of the licenses plus the translation, high-quality translation.
Al Mutar stated, “These books are not only for this generation but for the next generation. Until today, people still read Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. We want to make these books available for the next generation and in the highest quality possible. There are multiple people that do the proofreading and the revisions. These next would be to get these books in a digital form. Most likely in a PDF. The way we are building this up is that we are making a short video. A synopsis of the book: let’s take an example of a book like Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.”
Within the text, Al Mutar notes, there is a chapter on the salience of civilization and the requisite stages for a better world. He mentioned the possibility of the creation of a four-minute video with talking points about the book because videos remain an important means by which to reach people in the digital era – “metaphorically, not literally.” He stated that people can watch videos, become hooked, and then the article can be linked to the video. Then those with an interest could go and download the book for reading. He see stories as a transformative aspect of people’s lives.
“Books have a symbolic as well as a meaningful way to change people’s lives. For me, it was the books of Carl Sagan and the personality of him. They changed my perspective and how I see not only the world but how I see my life,” Al Mutar concluded, “So, this is happening step-by-step. Our plan is to go beyond the books and go into articles from Scientific American and scientific publications as well as human rights and liberal-secular publications and introduce these ideas to the Arab speaking world, which desperately needs them.”
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