The Nightingale

However one looks at it, these schools still matter; even to those who never went to the schools. They matter because they represent our cultural aspiration and actualisation.

We should not think of reading as a hobby or something you do during your spare time – no one has spare time – but as a habit that has to be cultivated daily. The benefits of reading for the individual are enormous. It is a gymnasium of the mind, and the mind needs daily exercise.

Were it not for books and historical record, it would be hard to fathom the lengths human beings have gone to eradicate not just the lives of individuals but whole ethnic and religious groups. And we have to know this because it keeps happening.

The impact of technology in our homes we see now is unprecedented. It has affected the way parents interact with their kids, the way spouses are with each other, and even how adults are with their own elderly parents. The older we get, and the more life experience we accumulate, the more we notice these impacts and thus our concern about remedying them.

Reading is much more than mere literacy: it is a cultural accomplishment through which meaning is gained.

An increase in the public display of Muslim identity (not just in uniform groups) need not be cast as something to be feared, or indeed as something trivial, rather it could instead be a pathway towards healing Muslim self-hate as well as healing stigmatisation.

The child’s narrative voice and innocent internal logic is captured perfectly by Onjali Q. Rauf, and adults reading the book are given a glimpse of what life used to be, before they became world-weary (ok, cynical) grownups. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of refugees spread across the whole continent, but if we all try very hard and ask the people in charge, we can maybe find Ahmet’s parents.

People share articles they don’t read, they enjoin ‘praying for’ something even as they continue to scroll their social media feed, they comment without understanding or context; because there is no time for reading, no time for ‘prayer’, no time for context in the all-consuming attention economy.

Osman Sidek and Enon Mansor is a husband-and-wife writing team with decades of experience in marital counselling, sex-enrichment workshops, marriage preparation talks and explaining Islam to discerning adult audiences with various cultural and religious backgrounds.