Miqyas Al Dhad Completes Arab World's Largest Field Survey Ahead of Launching First Comprehensive Scientific Framework to Assess Arabic Literacy
The field survey encompassed over 110,000 students from 204 schools across 70 rural and urban areas in nine Arab countries, namely the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Sultanate of Oman, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Kingdom of Morocco, the State of Libya, the Lebanese Republic, and the Republic of Iraq, reflecting the initiative's scope and scale. The field survey was administered digitally using tablets, desktops, and computer labs. Rigorous proctoring was followed to ensure security of survey administration.
In developing the field survey items, several reading frameworks and standards were reviewed and the socio-cognitive framework for reading (Khalifa & Weir, 2009) was utilized. It should be noted that the sociocognitive framework for reading has been used by reputable examination boards such as Cambridge. The key components of the sociocognitive framework for reading comprehension are linguistic knowledge, cognitive processing, background knowledge, and metacognitive strategies. In building the reading items for the survey, a rigorous methodology was followed in terms of recruiting, inducting, training, monitoring and evaluating item writers to ensure the highest standards of item quality.
The Arabic Scale is developed using triangulation scientific research methodology that integrates both quantitative and qualitative analyses of multiple data sources. In addition to data gathered from the field survey on students' reading proficiency, the second data source involved the creation of a large Arabic corpus featuring over 70 million structures and words, derived from more than 8,000 carefully curated Arabic texts from various subject areas, fields and topics reflecting the language's richness, culture, heritage and diversity.
The third data source was via conducting a pairwise comparative study with participation from over 450 Arabic language experts and educators from 18 Arab countries. In this study, participants were given two passages and had to identify which one was more difficult. The data collected from this study was used to create rankings of difficulty for 2,000 passages. These were the basis for the machine learning algorithms of Miqyas Al Dhad readability formulae. Pairwise study is a known methodology in the machine learning field.
Smart and Comprehensive Services / Innovative and Large-scale Solutions:
Miqyas Al Dhad offers a comprehensive suite of smart tools and services designed to elevate Arabic reading proficiency and enable accurate assessment of reading ability and text readability. At the Centre of it all is the Reading Scale, an innovative tool that evaluates reading comprehension, empowering educators to assess student reading ability and pinpoint learning needs accurately.
Additional tools include: a validated item bank of reading items suitable for each school grade; a Smart Text Analyzer, an AI-powered tool for evaluating text complexity; and high frequency keyword lists offering a rich academic vocabulary database for every school grade. It also includes 'Find-a-Book', a smart digital hub that provides students, educators, and parents with measured texts and books suitable for their reading levels and interests. Miqyas Al Dhad further supports educators through its innovative Reading Growth Plan, a predictive system that monitors student reading development over time and delivers actionable insights to guide educational planning based on individual needs.
A Scientific Reference for Arabic Educational Development:
Miqyas Al Dhad marks a significant milestone in advancing Arabic literacy. By providing standardised, research-based tools, it enables the creation of more effective and responsive educational curricula tailored to the needs of educators. Additionally, it provides educational decision-makers and researchers with accurate data to understand linguistic challenges and devise sustainable solutions. The initiative aims to empower students to use Arabic confidently and efficiently across various academic and professional contexts, establishing new criteria for excellence in Arabic language learning.
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Chaos, gangs, Israeli gunfire: Gaza aid fails to reach most needy: AFP report - War on Gaza
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Al-Ahram Weekly
31-07-2025
- Al-Ahram Weekly
Translating logic and hunting poems - Culture - Al-Ahram Weekly
The Library of Arabic Literature published by New York University Press in Abu Dhabi celebrated its tenth anniversary two years ago with events designed to reflect on the past successes and future directions of this remarkable series of translations from mostly classical Arabic literature into modern English. Speaking to the Al-Ahram Weekly in a 2018 interview, the editors said that 'the series is aimed at the general reader who may not know anything at all about Arabic literature or Arab-Islamic civilisation… [and is] intended to reach out directly to this readership, requiring of readers as little effort and occasioning them as little cultural and intellectual anxiety as possible in order to enjoy our books.' It has produced dozens of works of classical Arabic literature in hardback editions featuring newly edited Arabic texts and facing English translations. Many of these have been republished in English-only paperback versions aimed at readers not requiring the original Arabic texts and the scholarly annotations, the intention being eventually to produce English-only paperbacks of all the books. 'Our editions of the Arabic texts are aimed to reach out to readers of Arabic. These editions are authoritative, but they are not burdened with excessive annotation. All our translations will in due course appear in English-only paperback versions. We also produce PDF files of our Arabic texts and make them available on the Library's Arabic Website,' the editors told the Weekly, adding that the series aims to meet the requirements of multiple constituencies, from scholars to classroom use to interested general readers. It has established itself as including go-to English versions of sometimes hard-to-find classical Arabic texts in the same way that the well-known Loeb series has done for classical Greek and Latin texts with their facing English translations. Many readers of the Weekly will have followed the Library of Arabic Literature since its inception a dozen or so years ago. Even more will have been grateful for the opportunities it has provided to read intriguing works of early modern Egyptian literature in English translation. Roger Allen's translation of What Isa ibn Hisham Told Us by the early 20th-century Egyptian journalist Muhammad al-Muwaylihi appeared in the series in 2018, for example, allowing contemporary readers access to this satirical account of Cairo. Humphrey Davies's translation of the 17th-century writer Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded appeared in the series in 2019, with this satirical work pitting Egypt's rural population against its urban residents and including a scholarly commentary on a poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf. The Library has since returned to the mediaeval period, including by publishing new translations of works like the 13th-century scholar Najm al-Din al-Katibi's The Rules of Logic, a textbook for use in schools, and the 'hunting poems,' published as A Demon Spirit, of the 8th-century Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas. Both books contain introductions setting the works in the context of their time and containing useful hints about how modern English-speaking readers might approach them. While the poems of Abu Nuwas make significant demands on the reader – and of course also the translator – owing to their employment of elaborate and highly metaphorical language, curiously the demands of al-Katibi's textbook are in some ways more straightforward. His discussion of what is essentially post-Aristotleian logic will be intelligible to anyone familiar with the basics of the traditional subject, even if for modern readers his formulations are challenging. Hunting poems: The 8th-century Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas ('the one with the curly hair') has quite a reputation in Arabic letters, and James Montgomery, Professor of Arabic Literature at Cambridge University in the UK and the translator of the 'hunting poems' (tardiyyat), begins by reviewing it for contemporary readers. Abu Nuwas, he says, 'heretic, countercultural icon, brigand, court jester… ritual clown [and] justified sinner,' was 'arguably the greatest poet of the Arabic language' and at the very least was a virtuoso in the Abbasid poetic genres of 'panegyrics (madih), reunciant poems (zuhdiyyat), lampoons (hija), hunting poems, wine poems (khamriyyat), love poems (ghazaliyyat), and transgressive verse (mujun).' Produced for the entertainment of the Abbasid elite – Abu Nuwas was a kind of court companion of the Caliphs Haroun al-Rashid and Al-Amin – his poetry 'never fails to delight, surprise, and excite,' Montgomery says, adding that 'what is most striking is its apparent effortlessness and the naturalness of its Arabic, despite the deployment of the full panoply of the new rhetorical style known as badi,' meaning 'modern' or even 'modernist.' Abu Nuwas's poetry is occasional, he adds, in the sense that it must be imagined as having been written for specific occasions to entertain the poet's aristocratic audience. Perhaps for those coming to the poetry from an Anglophone background, a comparison might be made to the work of the early 17th-century English poet John Donne, also a master of transgression and a writer of self-consciously 'modern' poems for a coterie audience. Montgomery has translated some 120 of Abu Nuwas's hunting poems including some of uncertain attribution. Most of them are short, perhaps a couple of stanzas long, and they are written in a highly charged poetic language. For those opening the book for the first time and wondering what makes a 'hunting' poem, Montgomery provides a useful explanation. The hunting poems are not descriptions of the act of hunting itself but instead are occasioned by it. Hunting of various kinds, always with animals such as dogs or hawks, was a favourite activity of the Abbasid elite for whom Abu Nuwas wrote his poems. He specialised in elaborate verbal pictures of the animals employed in the hunt, and one can imagine some of his poems being dedicated to prize specimens. Hunting was an occasion for ritualised display, Montgomery says, and at least for its human participants it does not seem to have involved much physical effort. For those whose idea of hunting, particularly hunting with dogs, is drawn from English foxhunting, Abbasid hunting seems to have been a rather sedentary affair, though not for the hunted animals. It mostly took place in the grounds of monasteries, where the human hunters would walk or ride about until prey broke ground, after which they would unleash hawks, dogs, or even cheetahs to bring it down. Abu Nuwas's hunting dogs are described as straining at the leash, their bodies tensed with expectation and nerves and muscles working together to leap upon their prey. 'The eye exults in his beauty,' Abu Nuwas writes of one hunting dog. 'The bright blaze / on his head, his white forelegs, fire-stick / thin, his long cheek, his scissor bite.' Of another, he writes of it 'pulling on the leash / like a lunatic terrified of needles / bolting from a doctor.' There is a rather jokey poem about a spider, also engaged in a form of hunting – 'this thing, this mean and despicable trifle / the colour of dark, muddy water, with its tiny back and chest … faster than a wink / or waking with a jolt, this thing scurries about / like a heady wine sprouting from an amphora / when broached.' Rules of logic: Najm al-Din al-Katibi's The Rules of Logic (Al-Risala Al-Shamsiyya), translated by Cambridge Arabist Tony Street, takes readers out of the entertainments of the Abbasid court and into the more earnest environment of the madrassas, the mediaeval Arab schools whose curriculum of philosophy and religion was in some ways similar to their equivalents in Europe. Aristotle was the philosopher most studied in the mediaeval European schools, and he was also the basis for the philosophical parts of the mediaeval madrassa curriculum in the Arab world, though as Street suggests this was Aristotle filtered through the work of the Islamic commentators. If one man can be described as having invented logic, broadly speaking the study of argument, it was Aristotle, and Aristotle's description of the field, inspiring the mediaeval logicians in both the Islamic and the European world, survived more or less unchanged until the last century when logic was developed for modern needs and almost completely rewritten by 20th-century logicians. Al-Katibi's Rules of Logic refers to the logic established by Aristotle, modified, in the Islamic case, by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and he begins with subjects and predicates of various types that provide the traditional groundwork for logical analysis. From there, following Aristotle, he moves onto the syllogism, attempting some classification of its different types with a view to establishing valid and invalid arguments. The treatise is divided into three parts, the first on terms and expressions, the second on propositions or sentence types, and the third on syllogisms and the rules of argument. Only if the premises are true can the conclusion of a syllogism be true, and al-Katibi sets out six forms of true proposition including those true by definition and those true by experience. He adds propositions true by 'intuition' and by 'widespread agreement,' while noting that experience, intuition, and consensus cannot yield certain knowledge. Only a syllogism taking propositions of these types as its premises can come close to yielding a true conclusion, he says, adding a list of uncertain propositions that people may nevertheless use in argument. These include 'endoxic' propositions –statements taken as true because it is convenient to do so – received propositions – arguments from authority – and suppositional propositions –jumping to conclusions. A syllogism 'built on these kinds of premises is called rhetoric,' he says, whose aim is to 'exhort the hearer' and does not have truth as its goal. As for propositions whose truth value is indeterminate – he gives the example of 'wine is liquid ruby' – their only value is in poetry. Propositions that claim to be true neither by definition nor by experience – his example is 'beyond the world is a limitless void' – are either false or meaningless. An argument built on such premises 'is called sophistry, and its goal is to silence or deceive an opponent.' Street says that while it can never be known why logic became a core subject of the mediaeval madrassas, 'there can be no doubt that [its] utility for analysing and justifying legal reasoning was a major consideration.' Even if some religious scholars 'regarded the broader logical tradition with suspicion,' owing to its non-religious origin, 'they were prepared to include the Rules among texts unobjectionable to pious concerns.' 'Few of the Rules's readers went on to formulate knowledge-claims in the propositional forms listed in the Rules,' he says, 'and still fewer went on to deduce new knowledge-claims using the inference-schemata' provided by al-Katibi. 'But all would have come away… with an appreciation of the many pitfalls of building an argument in natural language.' Abu Nuwas, A Demon Spirit: Arabic Hunting Poems, trans. James Montgomery, pp 432, Najim al-Din al-Katibi, The Rules of Logic, trans. Tony Street, pp179, both New York: New York University Press, 2024 * A version of this article appears in print in the 6 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Short link:
