Miqyas Al Dhad Completes Arab World's Largest Field Survey Ahead of Launching First Comprehensive Scientific Framework to Assess Arabic Literacy
In a significant milestone towards enhancing Arabic reading proficiency among native students, Arabic Scale – known as 'Miqyas Al Dhad' has successfully concluded the final phase of its comprehensive field survey. This achievement paves the way for the official launch of the Arabic reading scale in the third quarter of this year, following an intensive research effort grounded in advanced scientific methodologies. The field survey was carried out in collaboration with Ministries of Education and school chains across the Arab world and involved the active participation of hundreds of educators and language experts.
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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CairoScene
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The Other Albert: Egypt's Nihilist Who Gave Camus a Run for His Money
Somewhere in Cairo in the early 1940s, an idle figure reclines on a wicker chair, not reading, not writing, simply breathing. "Doing nothing," Albert Cossery would later quip, "is an act of revolt." Albert Cossery stands as one of the few Arab writers to embody what might be called passive nihilism, a philosophy that mocks power, revolution, and ambition - not with rage, but with a disarming, almost elegant indifference. Born in Cairo and shaped by its languid rhythms, he would eventually make his way to Paris, where his name secured a quiet permanence in French literary circles. And yet, for all his sharp prose and radical detachment, Cossery remains a faint presence in Egyptian cultural memory, a local son more revered abroad than at home. In 1945, Paris was piecing itself back together from the ruins of war. By then, Cossery had already settled into a rhythm of deliberate indifference. He lived in a small, unassuming room at Hotel La Louisiane on Rue de Seine. The space was tiny, but perfectly sufficient: a bed, a desk he rarely used, and a window overlooking the boulevard where life hustled below. Cossery lived a life measured not by accomplishment, but by the perfection of repeat ad infinitum. In the shrine of literary Alberts, however, one name has long overshadowed the other. Albert Camus: philosopher of the absurd, moral voice of occupied France, reluctant existentialist, and grudging Nobel laureate. His name brings back visions of plague-stricken Oran and mythic Sisyphean struggles. But Albert Cossery? Even in Cairo, his birthplace, he remains, at best, a vague idea. And yet, the two Alberts, Camus and Cossery, offer us a strange, inverted mirror of the 20th century. One laboured under the weight of moral responsibility in a world devoid of real, inherent meaning; the other shrugged, lit a cigarette, and asked why everyone was making such a fuss. In Paris, it was not unusual to see the two Alberts strolling side by side through the Latin Quarter, pausing at bookstalls and exchanging barbed observations over coffee. One carried the burden of the world's absurdity; the other, its futility. "Cossery is, in a way, the most extreme passive nihilist of all," says Léa Polverini, whose thesis at Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès charted the Egyptian writer's long, improbable career. When we spoke, Polverini painted a picture of a man at once radically disengaged and deeply embedded. "His early works still held some hope: In 'La Maison de la Morte Certaine' (House of the Dead, 1944) a revolutionary character of communist influence fighting greedy landlords, poor men scheming to overturn oppression. But with time, even that dissipates." Indeed, by the time of 'The Lazy Ones' (Les Fainéants dans la vallée fertile, 1948), Cossery had perfected his paradox: a fiction in which no plot moves forward, because to act is to be complicit. "The more you struggle and push back through enticing an act, the more you submit to the farce of social order," as his characters imply. "Better to sit back and enjoy the sunshine." Born in 1913 to a wealthy Syro-Lebanese family in Cairo, Cossery emigrated to Paris at 17, where he remained for the rest of his life, living most of it in the same small room at the Hotel La Louisiane in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He published seven novels and one collection of short stories (Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu), and one collection of poetry (Les Morsures, no longer edited) over six decades - always in French, but with a vocabulary so infused with Egyptian vernacular that scholars like Frédéric Lagrange have debated whether Cossery was writing in "Arabic disguised as French." "His language," Lagrange observes in his seminal essay 'Albert Cossery écrit-il arabe?', "has an imaginative syntax that feels Egyptian, even though the words are French." His characters speak in certain metaphors, their insults drenched in the improvisational sharpness of Cairo's tongue. Yet the literary establishment placed him squarely within the French canon, if only on its margins. "He erases almost any historical reference point to his novels," Polverini adds, "and this refusal is telling. His work is not Egyptian in the historical sense, nor French in the cultural one. His settings are not necessarily depictions of a certain place but stylized archetypes of power, sloth, and futility." If Camus's Algeria was a tortured pentimento of colonial guilt, Cossery's Semi-Mythical Cairo is timeless in its corruption. In Cossery's 'The Lazy Ones', a family of aristocrats idle away their days in a decaying villa, each finding new ways to avoid work, responsibility, or even thought. The characters of 'The Lazy Ones' live this credo to the letter. They have no ambitions, no goals, not even real desires. And yet they are not entirely unhappy. Their inertia is almost erotic, their indolence bordering on a mystical state of grace. The conflict, such as it is, revolves around a character named Serag's half-hearted attempts to break out of this life of idleness. He briefly thinks about joining a political movement, tries to seduce a woman, considers starting a business, but every time, his own cynicism defeats him. The family's shared philosophy always pulls him back into inaction. In the end, nothing changes. The family remains in its comfortable bubble of laziness, detached from the city's wider poverty, oppression, and political turmoil. The villa, like their existence, quietly rots in the sun. "At first glance, it seems like political satire," Polverini says. "But in truth, Cossery believed that nothing mattered enough to deserve struggle. His passivity was devoid of any care for ethics, because for him, even witnessing atrocities was not sufficient cause for moral indignation - he fosters a radical indifference that 'resolves' everything with unconcerned laughter.' Here lies the essential divergence from Camus. Both recognised the absurdity of existence: life's refusal to yield meaning, the universe's indifference to human suffering. But while Camus made this his moral starting point, proclaiming that rebellion is the only dignified response while Cossery took it as permission to withdraw entirely. "For Cossery, you exhaust yourself if you try to change anything," Léa remarked. "If nothing can be changed, one might as well enjoy the futile pleasures of life." And yet, Cossery's characters are not simple hedonists. They are ambiguous figures, convinced that their very refusal elevates them above the mediocrity they despise and mock. "They think by rejecting work and ambition they have transcended society," Polverini explains, "but in truth, they become trapped within their own inertia. They they simply play a different score of this very mediocrity they claim to escape." This ambiguity gives Cossery's work a strange resonance today, as younger generations confront their own version of paralyzed rebellion: the climate crisis too vast to reverse, late capitalism too entrenched to dismantle, political regimes too demonic to confront directly. The temptation of Cossery's passive nihilism, its chic disavowal, its knowing smirk, feels dangerously seductive. When Andrew Gallix profiled Cossery for The Guardian in 2008, shortly after his death, he called him a man whose lifestyle amounts to a "mummified existence", a self-styled voluptuous idler. In an era that fetishises hustle culture and productivity metrics, Cossery's contempt for work reads almost radical. 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One insists that meaning must be constructed, even if the universe is deaf; the other simply leans back and watches the spectacle collapse under its own weight. There is, of course, an unsettling edge to Cossery's serenity. "At some point," Polverini reflects, "his indifference risks becoming complicity. If nothing matters, if no atrocity deserves indignation, then at what point does passivity enable unmorality?" In 2008, Cossery died in Paris at the age of 94, still living in his tiny hotel room. And yet, as his novels quietly endure on the fringes of literary conversation, one suspects he maybe knew better.
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Al-Ahram Weekly
4 days ago
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