Saleh Al-Turigee Okaz Hearing about a parentless child is not surprising. They are not the product of the contemporary age, as history books are full of their stories. However, what is really surprising is when you hear about a parentless library. History did not tell us any such story. I have never heard about a parentless library before. We do, however, have one of them in our very country. There is a library near King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Though it is named “King Fahd Library”, it does not have a known father or mother. Until today, this library has not been recognized by the Ministry of Higher Education, the Ministry of Culture and Information or the university itself. The library was shifted from its previous location alongside Palestine Road overlooking the Red Sea from the east to its present location in the Al-Jamea district. The foundation stone of the library was laid in 1995. King Fahd, may his soul rest in peace, donated SR15 million to the library while businessmen collected SR10 million. In the beginning, the two ministries pressured the library to shift from near the sea to its present location close to the university so that university students would benefit from it. This happened and a three-story building was constructed, but the library remained empty of books and employees. The two ministries washed their hands of the library, claiming that they had no budget for it. Why then did you intervene in deciding its location if you did not want to be involved in running its affairs? Years passed. A committee was formed to run the library. Every year the local newspapers used to write that the university would be operational in three months time. Nothing of the sort had happened. The problem is that society does not care for knowledge and is only focusing on consumer goods. I do not know who is responsible for guiding society toward adopting reading as a daily habit. Is it the officials or the institutions that spend billions of riyals on sending its staff on missions abroad to learn, while refusing to recognize an existing library?
