KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (ABU DHABI)
In the old Arabian folklore tale “Zarqa Al Yamama”; a blue-eyed lady called Zarqa is known far and wide for her ability to predict the future and see riders approaching weeks before they arrive. One day, knowledgeable of her powers, enemies of her tribe cunningly hid behind trees to avoid Zarqa’s gaze as they approached.
Noticing the manoeuvre, Zarqa warns her tribe of the trees moving towards them hiding soldiers within their shrubs. To her dismay, she is dismissed by her tribesmen as having gone mad. Enemy soldiers eventually reach the tribe and kill all, including Zarqa.
With this grim tale, distinguished Emirati author and Chairman of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Library Foundation, Mohammad Al Murr, began his powerful speech at the Culture Summit Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, where he urged the leaders of the world of the need to take more notice of the warnings given in literature.
For Al Murr, the tale of Zarqa is analogous to what can happen when a society ignores the warnings that are given to it. In our current age, warnings of our demise into a technological and climatic dystopia can be found throughout humanity’s rich literature, and yet, the leaders of the world fail to take notice, he said.
“I remember that story of our Arab community when I look at my type of writing, which is fiction. In the last 100 years, many writers of fiction, when they saw the effect of machines in the lives of people, they began to write two types of novels,” he told the crowd at the Manarat Al Saadiyat.
“Those were utopias and dystopias. In these novels, the writers tried to be like Zarqa, they tried to warn humanity and the leaders that there are many things in our life that if we don’t try to control, will lead to a bleak future.”
“Unfortunately, many of those leaders who make decisions for our future look at these not as a reflection of the original warning, they look at them as if we are looking at the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’. It’s nice to see, and that’s it; not as a prediction of the future, as a warning for the future.”
Al Marr gave the example during the recent pandemic, which he said had affected him and hospitalised his sister. He highlighted how there was an abundance of literature that predicted and warned of the catastrophe that a global pandemic could have on modern society, and yet, when one occurred, most nations in the world were caught off guard. He said very much of the same is currently happening in relation to AI, climate change, and global conflict.
“In our novels of utopia or dystopia, do they understand the warnings in these novels?” he asked the crowd.
“Many of those people who wrote these novels, they were not normal people like me, they were educated and trained scientists. If we don’t read them, we may fall into the trap, whether it is AI, whether it is climate change, or whether it is new, modern wars.”
“If those people who decide our fate don’t read and they don’t understand the lessons of what humble writers wrote about, what will our future be?”