Ten moons take from the book as a friend and the best companion for them, each one of them is a library of knowledge and knowledge, the most beautiful of them are their words and expressions, and their spirit that reading made a mirror that reflects the magnificence of the words they stored.. The heroes of the Arab reading challenge at the level of Syria for the past year who qualified for the finals of the competition in The United Arab Emirates received them, Mrs. Asma al-Assad with their families, and also received the first coordinators and supervisors of the competition in the presence of the Minister of Education and the general coordinator of the Arab Reading Challenge competition.
Mrs. Asma told them: “Today, you are a generation on which hope is established and hope grows with it. It preserves its language, reads and learns through it, and writes through it. It looks at the future with the eyes of civilization and modernity, and its roots lie deep in the ground.”
During the meeting, Mrs. Asma also stressed that holding on to this land means defending it with all its borders, language, identity, history and culture, and that the real challenge that we must always face, and not only in contests and competitions, is not how much we read? But how do we read? How do we make reading a bridge to enrich knowledge, communicate with heritage, and establish firm roots in history and the present, and thus in the future?
During the meeting, the students talked about their experience in this competition, how their relationship was with the book, and how their parents and coordinators were by their side at every step, encouraging them, helping them, and sharing with them the stages of the competition up to the finals. They talked about the difficulties they encountered during their participation in the Arab Reading Challenge and how they overcame them.
The coordinators also talked about their experience over a year in supporting and motivating students and securing the requirements for success and winning, despite the many challenges, and presented their ideas for the coming period regarding reading and the challenge of reading.
During the meeting, they talked about the dead books that Arab thought and heritage overflows with in various scientific and literary fields. Mrs. Asmaa said: “The challenge is how to draw from the dead of our books, and read them in a reading befitting their cognitive, scientific and moral richness, and befitting their beauty and splendor of creativity in them. How do we learn from them? Through it, we transform the thought contained in its pages to a deeper awareness in the minds and higher morals in the souls. This is the challenge before you and your generation, which was and will be contrary to what our enemies expected and drew for it to be a generation that abandoned its legacy, alienated from its language, history and belonging.
