Where there are readers, there is hope.

Statue of a reader, entrance plaza of Telok Ayer MRT Station

The love of learning has been the hallmark of this Umma ever since that momentous Ramadan of almost 1,500 years ago when the first word of the Quran was revealed to the Praised Oneﷺ and Iqra (Read!) reverberated across the universe. In Singapore, we know that literacy had been a feature of the Muslim community because we have evidence that the island — and specifically Kampong Gelam — was the hub of Muslim print and intellectual exchange for the entire Malay world from around the middle of the 19th century to around the post-War period. Bussorah Street itself has been the home of a near-unbroken succession of Muslim-run bookshops since the mid-1800s.

I believe bookshops are barometers that measure the literacy and intellectual vibrancy of a community. Literacy can be defined as the ability to understand, use, and reflect on (also extrapolate from) written texts. If bookshops decline in a community, it is an indication that literacy in the community is diminishing. While public libraries are propped up by the state (and well they should), I propose that communities that do not support bookshops, are communities that do not place a high value on literacy and the power of the written word.

Today, there has been a lot of concern about the future of bookshops in Singapore. Many reasons have been offered to explain the spate of bookshop closures — from high rents to a scapegoating of the public library. I believe these reasons miss the point. The underlying reason is more sinister: Singapore adults have low literacy skills. In December 2024, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a report on the population's performance in three areas: literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem solving. Singapore's adult literacy, scored against the ability to understand increasingly complex and lengthly text, is below the global average. And this is despite the fact that Singapore is currently ranked top (TOP!) in student reading performance according to OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We can quibble about the specificity of the numbers but in essence we can draw the conclusion that student reading performance is good and adult literacy is bad. Singaporeans are losing their reading and comprehension skills as they enter into adulthood, and crucially, as they enter into a world menaced by climate change, state violence, and economic uncertainty which would absolutely require the ability to understand, use, and reflect on texts that discuss scientific findings, ethical and moral positions, sociological disruptions, to say nothing of drawing on the corpus of religious texts to find novel solutions in scripturally authentic ways.

Something significant is happening that devastatingly affects literacy when Singaporeans leave school and enter early adulthood. Clearly, the expectation that once taught, people will continue to remain functionally literate throughout their lives with little or no sustained, systematic, self-directed reading of long-form texts is a fallacy.

Adult Singaporeans need to come home to reading, otherwise they will lose the skills they honed at school. Change is possible. We only have to look to Islamic history to see how the moment of Iqra brought about an efflorescence of learning and literacy to a culture that had not placed that much value on learning and knowledge during the Jahili Period. A more recent example of positive action, this time in a modern nation state, is that of the Netherlands that saw a whopping 80% reduction in the number of cyclists killed in road accidents over the last thirty years. Now one of the safest places in the world to cycle, the Dutch brought about this change in Holland by reshaping policy, education, culture, legislation and infrastructure. Perhaps we can do the same for literacy. But this requires some new thinking on adult literacy promotion, which unlike school-based literacy education, has to be decentralised, informal, and embedded in community. A good bookshop is one such decentralised, informal, and community-embedded institution. The catch is that there may be too few bookshops in Singapore now to be able to move the needle.

That said, there is cause for hope that a rejuvenation of Singapore's adult literacy is possible, especially since we have the capacity to hit the ground running — remember the PISA scores mentioned above. We must ensure that our young adults do not let their literacy skills waste away. The best way to do this is to keep reading books — either acquired from bookshops or loaned from the public library, it does not matter. What is important is that this cultivation of adult literacy needs to be focused on solutions that would work for Singapore.

So what I am saying is this: we should be putting our efforts not in saving bookshops per se, but in cultivating a culture of reading well into adulthood. Only then can bookshops be sustainable. We must cultivate readers wherever they may be.

Where there are readers who return to the Quran as a source of moral and spiritual guidance, there is hope.

Where there are readers who come together to discuss viewpoints and encourage each other to pursue interests, there is hope.

Where there are readers who value working through hypotheses for themselves instead of relying on generative-AI summaries, there is hope.

Where there are readers who come into libraries and bookshops to encounter new thinking and stories, there is hope.

Where there are readers who develop empathy for the characters in a story, there is hope.

Where there are readers who devote time and energy to big ideas, there is hope.

Where there are readers, there is hope.