Intellectual Freedom defined:
“Intellectual Freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored. Intellectual freedom encompasses the freedom to hold, receive and disseminate ideas.”

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The Kuwait International Book Fair started yesterday at arth alma3arith. Personally, I remember going 2 years ago and getting depressed. It was basically a ma3rath of religious books, books on tafseer a7lam, and filtered political books. I did end up buying a couple of books which were interesting….but the lack of selection is still depressing!

According to the BBC, this year, 130 books have been banned! Thats alot u say, right?? Apparently, this is the lowest number of books to be banned in the history of the Kuwait Book Fair! LOL!
Two of the books banned were by the Kuwaiti author Laila Al-Othman, so we’re not talking pornography or blasphemy!

Earlier this century, banning books was an issue in places like the US, with classics such as The Wizard of Oz, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, all being banned at one time or another, which led to books such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s 1984. Attempts to ban books by fundamentalists and idiots still go on today, with books such as the Harry Potter series being boycotted and so on, but they are never banned on a national level.
For us, many great Arabic books of our time have been banned, such as Najeeb Mahfouz’s (Nobel Prize winner) Awlad 7aritna and AbdulRahman Al-Muneef’s Mudun AlMil7. Im sure there are many more writers and books but these two pop up in my head at the moment. Its sad that we have such great writers in our time but cannot have the pleasure of reading their writings because of the powers of darkness in our society.

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All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)