The librarian attended the Riyadh Book Fair in Saudi Arabia to purchase Arabic language materials for the school library. She found purchasing quality Arabic books challenging due to conservative censorship laws, but was able to find resources from publishers like Dar Al-Muna. Attending the restrictive but important book fair allowed her to begin developing the school's Arabic language collection.

1. Librarian in Pursuit of Arabic Resources for Young Adults
The Riyadh Book Fair 2011
Mary Alice Osborne
May 2011
IST 635
Professor Rebecca Schaffer-Mannion
Syracuse University

2. I have been a school library media specialist for 14 years, first in Vermont, USA
and then overseas in Tunisia and China. After two years in China I had several job offers
including one from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, then being
built on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. I accepted the offer and over the past two years I
have had some very unusual collection development experiences.
When I first thought about living in Saudi Arabia, I had real concerns about what
it would be like to work in a country where covered women, human rights abuses, and
lack of freedom of speech and academic freedom were normal occurrences. I wondered
if there would be restrictions on what could be ordered for the library and whether
materials would be censored. Before taking the job I was reassured that I would be able
to order books with complete freedom. I spent several months before traveling to Saudi
researching and ordering the initial collection for the three libraries, K-12. Budget was
“not a problem.” Philosophically, I wanted books and resources from many different
points of view to be available for our students to read and debate to support the
inquiry-based curriculum. I ordered many different types and genres of books including
those on different religions and even the popular novel Girls of Riyadh, both banned in
Saudi Arabia. That fall, we received 52 pallets of books from the United States and none
had been opened.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is an exception to
the commonly held assumptions about Saudi Arabia. KAUST is a remarkable new
project developed from the vision of King Abdullah to build a world-class graduate
school that would attract some of the most talented and prestigious professors and
students from all over the world. Faculty has come from universities and research
facilities such as Harvard, MIT, Wood’s Hole, Stamford and Cambridge to help create a
western-based educational facility and a global scientific center rivaling those in the

3. United States, Europe and Asia. It is hoped that KAUST will make Saudi Arabia
competitive at a research and academic level far after their oil runs out.Even more
ambitious and radical is the fact that KAUST is a co-ed campus, the first in Saudi Arabia.
Women are not required to wear full-length black abayas, as they are in the rest of the
country. Women can drive on campus and are treated as educational equals and taught
in the same classrooms with men. But, the university is very controversial. Conservative
religious leaders here disagree with men and women mixing. "Mixing is a great sin and a
great evil," Saad bin Nasser al-Shithri was quoted as saying in the al-Watan newspaper.
"When men mix with women, their hearts burn, and they will be diverted from their
main goal," which he said is "education." (Raghaven, 2009) The project sounded so
phenomenal, I had to come.
KAUST was a brand new school, and it was very important to study the
population demographics and the student and staff needs when deciding what books
and resources to order for our collection. Before I came to KAUST, I had made my best
effort, from a distance, with limited information about the future student demographics,
to acquire an appropriate opening day collection. Over the first year of operation
however, it became clear that the library collection was lacking resources for the
students who were not native English speakers. According to Muchinsky (2007), the
library media specialist is significant in their role in helping English Language Learners
(ELL) adapt and succeed in school (p. 29). There are many strategies that can be used by the
librarian to make the Library Media Center’s collection meet the needs of the ELL student
population so they can soon become an integral part of their school community.
Most staff at the KAUST School would say that the major challenge in starting the
new school has been the lack of resources for working with the high percentage of ELL
students. As an example, teachers have had to use children’s easy reader books from the

4. Elementary School Library Media Center to teach high school students to read English
because our school lacked appropriate resources.
Muchisky, (2007) makes the following suggestions for additions to the library
collection for the ELL population:
• Multicultural picture books: have broad accessibility across grade levels and age
ranges.
• Big Books with shared visual and print features
• Books on Tape, CD, MP3, etc.: help ELL students track auditory messages with
written ones
• Videos and DVDs, with closed captions
• Bilingual Books
• First language materials: encourage students to maintain and improve their
mothertongue language skills
• Fairy and Folktales: traditional stories that cross cultural boundaries
• Easy Readers: high interest with low vocabulary, and simple style
• Weeding of outdated or culturally inappropriate books (p.30).
I have recently ordered many different ELL-friendly books from the above list, such as hi-
low readers, graphic novels and audio books. However, I had been having trouble finding
quality resources in student’s mother tongue languages. I wanted to find books that reflected
the student’s home cultures, not just translated English books like the Harry Potter series or
Twilight series, which I was able to get through Follett in the United States.
Mother Tongue books are especially important to help students retain their
linguistic and cultural heritage and maintain a link to their home countries. Research
shows that learning one’s mother tongue provides a scaffold for learning another
language such as English. It is very important for the school library media center to
provide these resources for students and teachers.
There are many advantages to providing materials in student’s mother tongue
languages in an English-instruction school. According to Goldberg (2008), if both
English and the mother tongue are valued and nurtured in a quality environment
(additive bilingualism), students are more likely to establish a strong foundation on

5. which they can build their second language proficiency. On the other hand, if the mother
tongue is held in low esteem and is sacrificed (subtractive bilingualism) it is likely that
students will suffer academic and second language acquisition delays.
It has been asserted that learning in the mother tongue may delay the acquisition
of English. However, Hamayan & Freeman, (2006) have found that students continuing
to learn their mother tongue (alongside English) show some delay in earlier stages of
second language development. Research has shown that the delay disappears in the
long run. Students who continue to learn through their mother tongue are more likely to
eventually reach a high level of proficiency in English than those whose mother tongue
was suppressed.
Mother tongue learning can act as a scaffold rather than a barrier to learning
English. (Escamilla, in press) The home language is the “something familiar” that
students can use in order to learn the “something new” (Cloud, Genesee & Hamayan,
2009). Much of what is learned in the mother tongue transfers to the second language,
including: word recognition skills, vocabulary knowledge for words that are cognates,
spelling knowledge, reading comprehension, even when the languages have different
alphabets and writing skills (August, 2006)
Unfortunately, the vast majority of English Language Learners are in school
programs where English is the only medium of instruction and students are not learning
to read and write in their mother tongues. Even in these cases, the native language
plays a critical role in the student’s life and academic career. Too often English medium
programs think that they must ban the use of students’ native languages in order to
accelerate the acquisition of English. It is important for educators to know that there is
NO research to support this. In fact, the research indicates that banning the use of a
student’s native language in school may be counter productive to learning English

6. (Goldenberg, 2008). There were many sound reasons to actively pursue acquiring
Arabic Language materials for the library at my school as soon as possible.
I was able to enlist the help of a veteran teacher of Arabic, Ranah Nazzal, who
had been involved with purchasing Arabic books for the Queen Rania School and the
Baccalaureate School in Amman, Jordan where she had worked before coming to KAUST. I
especially needed Ranah’s help because I do not read or speak Arabic. Ranah advised me
that finding Arabic language books was “a matter of building your own research base of
contact and knowing the publishers and keeping in touch with them for updates on the new
books being published each year.” (interview, 2011)
There were several problems with finding quality Arabic language books in
Saudi Arabia. Reading for pleasure has not been a tradition here. Saudi Arabia is
governed by extremely conservative Islamic Sharia Law which has controlled and
prevented the printing and selling of any books except religious texts until very
recently. Ranah said that the publishing situation in the Middle East has improved
dramatically.“We are very lucky in the last 10 years with what is going on with the
Arabic publishers. It was always very hard to find materials in Arabic before that.” The
Internet has helped to publicize and introduce bookstores, organizations and individuals to
the publishers’ books. In the past, most publishers in Arab countries mainly produced
Islamic books about the Koran, the Prophet Mohammed, and his life. People were interested
in these subjects and would buy the books. Now people are more exposed to the world
through the Internet and they want to have access to more information and books.
(Interview 2011)
“There is widespread awareness both inside and outside the Arab world that
reform is necessary to further human development in the region. 1 One critical
component of reform is the building of a knowledge society that supports and
values the production, diffusion, and application of new knowledge and the
expression of new ideas. A key aspect of a knowledge society is a well-educated

7. citizenry open to new ideas, motivated and capable of challenging the ideas of
others, and able to create important local knowledge.” (Zellman, 2011)
Arabic books are commonly published more freely in Egypt or Lebanon than in
Saudi Arabia, but many are poorly printed and bound and lack colorful artistic covers
and illustrations that would make them appealing to young people.(Zellman, 2011)
Unfortunately the book fair in Egypt this year was cancelled due to the political
uprisings there in February.
We decided to attend the
annual book fair of Arabic language
materials and books in the
conservative capital of Saudi Arabia,
At the fair, there were some familiar sights: here I am posing
in front of the Scholastic booth! Scholastic offers My Arabic
Library sets of paperback books for schools in grade level
sets
The book fair was held in a huge and modern convention
Riyadh. From a collection development center, but almost every woman was totally covered in
conservative black abayas and face covering niqaab. To me,
the effect was claustrophobic and controlling
perspective, attending the Riyadh Book Fair
to purchase children and young adults’ Arabic language books for my library was one of
the highlights of my career. On March 8th, we flew to Riyadh to attend the week long fair,
knowing that the fair was highly restrictive and possibly even dangerous.

8. I was worried because of the recent uprisings around the Middle East in Tunisia,
Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, and a Saudi Arabian “Day of Rage” that had been called
for Friday March 10th - right in the middle of the fair! To add to this, each year the Riyadh
Book Fair has taken place there have been controversial protests against freedom of
speech where books were pulled off the shelf by religious conservatives. This led to an
official pronouncement this year by the Ministry of Culture that no books would be
removed without written approval from the Ministry. (Hawari, 2011) Two days before
we arrived, there was an incident at the fair in which women authors who were
discussing and signing their books, were harassed and prevented from speaking by
groups of religious conservatives.(Khan, 2011)
This photo is taken from Arab News, Mar. 2, 2011. Clashes have occurred each year at the Riyadh
Book Fair between the religious conservatives and the government, which is trying to promote
reform. This year, the Saudi Minister of Culture was informed that “He was going to Hell.”

9. At the fair, Ranah advised me to cover my head to avoid being noticed too much.
I stayed with Ranah most of the time while we explored the convention center, stopping
at different vendors to look for high quality young adult fiction and Arabic classics.
Every once in a while I would hear the sharp comment: “Woman cover your face!”
directed at me by men with scruffy long beards, and short robes which exposed their
ankles. These men are called the Mutaween. Mutaween literally means "volunteers" and
is commonly used as a term for Islamic government-authorized or recognized religious
police.
Ranah had recommended the
publisher Dar Al Muna, of Stockholm
Sweden. Dar Al-Muna is an Arabic
Publisher of children’s books. We met
owner Mona Henning who was the only
woman at the fair who refused to cover
Mona Henning, owner of Dar Al-Muna Publishing Co. her head. She was born in Amman, Jordan
from Stockholm, Sweden posing with an Arabic version
of the children’s classic, Where the Wild Things Are by and founded the publishing house in 1984.
Maurice Sendak.
Most of the books are written by world-
famous Scandinavian authors, such as: Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking,
and Sven Nordqvist. She wanted to make sure that the culture of this “small country”
was represented and available to Arabic readers instead of the standard, English,
German and French titles. (Dar Al-Muna website, 2011)

10. Dar Al-Muna books are known for their attractive and artistic style and
meaningful human content. So far, she has published more than 100 titles. Henning’s
mission is to enhance reading promotion in the Arab world by publishing books in the
Arab people’s mother tongue. Henning says “knowing your mother tongue is always a
treasure.” Henning is now working on publishing adult literature by authors such as
Tove Jansson from Finland and Swedish mystery writer Henning Mankell.(Dar Al-Muna
website, 2011)
One of the biggest differences at the fair between similar events I have attended
in the west is the constant mixture of “church and state.” Religion is woven into any
shopping experience, with the five daily prayers taking precedent over everything else.
Shops close and everything comes to a standstill during prayer time.
I came around a corner to an unusual site:
prayer time at the book fair

11. “My experience at the Riyadh book fair was very interesting. At the book exhibition this year they changed
their policy about allowing some books to be at the fair. For me it was exciting to see the novels of Naguib
Mahfouz, and some political books. The works of these authors are being allowed here in Saudi Arabia for the
first time.” Ranah Nazzal (interview, 2011)
(Left) A woman wearing the burqa at the book fair. I wanted to capture this image because I find a person without a
face so chilling.
(Right) Our stacks of high quality Arabic books ready to be packed up at Dar Al-Muna

12. Leaving the fair after an exhausting but fruitful day browsing and purchasing books, you can see white, thobe-clad
men pouring out of the hall at closing time.
Students enjoying the new Arabic books that Ranah
and I purchased at the Riyadh Book Fair. I created a special section for Arabic books, apart from the
Islamic Studies area we already had which contains religious texts in Arabic. The new section includes
fiction and nonfiction from Dar Al-Muna, Scholastic and classic Arabic literature from Lebanese publisher
Dar al Saqi and others.

13. We returned to KAUST from the book fair with hundreds of great works of
Arabic literature for our school. Many of the translated works were easy to find and
catalog using Z59 sources through our Follett Destiny software. But I am still working
with Arabic teachers to translate many of the titles and information about the Arabic
classics we purchased into recognizable English so they can be cataloged. I have set up a
special area in the library media center for the Arabic books and it has been
enthusiastically received by students and staff.
I had an incredibly interesting experience at the Riyadh Book Fair and I feel that
it was very fruitful due our success in finding and purchasing resources for our school
as well as developing relationships with publishers. It was wonderful visiting Ranah’s
family in Riyadh, and experiencing their incredibly warm and welcoming Middle East
hospitality.
In the future, to create a truly effective mother tongue collection at the KAUST
School, an Arabic speaking library media specialist will need to be hired and equal
funding should be allocated for building the Arabic collection. The two collections
should be developed in tandem with each other. But Ranah and I did make a start and I
am very happy that I was able to be part of making mother tongue language books and
resources more of a priority at my school.
Ranah with her Aunt and Nieces in Riyadh.

14. Bibliography
August, D. and Shanahan, T., Eds.(2006) Developing Literacy in Second-Language
Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language- Minority Children
and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Carter, B. (2007) Leading forward by looking backward. Library Media
Connection. 25(4), 16-20.
Escamilla, K. In press.What role does the home language play in an English language
learner’s life/schooling? In Hamayan, E. & Freeman, R. (eds.) English language
learners at school: A guide for administrators, 2 nd ed. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon.
Estimo, R. Jr. (2011) Riyadh book fair billed a big success. Arab News.
Web.http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article28542.ece
Goldenberg, C. (2008)Teaching English Language Learners: What the research
does—and does not—say. American Educator, 32 (2), 8-23, 42-44.
Greene, J. (1997)A meta-analysis of the Rossell and Baker review of bilingual education
research. Bilingual Research Journal, 21:103-122.
Hamayan, E. (2011) But I don’t speak their language! What every teacher can do to
support ESL students’ mother tongue. Presentation at the ECIS ESL/MT
Conference, Düsseldorf, March 2011
Hamayan, E. & Freeman, R. 2006.Does learning the native language delay the acquisition
of English? In Hamayan, E. & Freeman, R. (eds.) English language learners at
school: A guide for administrators (pp. 73-74). Philadelphia, PA: Caslon.
Hawari, W. (2011) Ministry: No one is authorized to pull out books from fair.
Arab News. Published: Feb 28, 2011. Web.
Henning, M. (2011) Dar Al Muna Website.http://www.daralmuna.com/ Web.
Muchisky, B. (2007) English language learner-friendly Library Media Centers.
School Library Media Activities Monthly.24(4), 29-31.
Khan, G. A. (2011) Haia members rough up book fair participants. Arab News. Mar. 2,
2011. Web.
Osborne, M.A. (2011) Interview with Ranah Nazzal. April 26, 2011. KAUST School,
Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.
Raghaven, S. (2009) In Saudi Arabia, a Campus Built as a 'Beacon of Tolerance'
High-Tech University Draws the Ire of Hard-Line Clerics for Freedoms It
Provides to Women. Washington Post Foreign Service. Friday, October 9, 2009.
Web.

15. Rolstad, K., Mahoney, K. and Glass, G. (2005)The big picture: A meta-analysis of
Program effectiveness research on English Language Learners. Educational Policy
19:572-594.
Wiki-Islam. (2011) Mutaween. Web.
Zellman, G. L., Martini, J. and Perlman, M. (2011) Identifying Arabic-Language Materials
for Children That Promote Tolerance and Critical Thinking. RAND Corporation,
Santa Monica, CA. Web.