At the Congress of Arabic and Creative Industries, organized by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Center, speakers explored what Arabic needs to thrive across the creative industries.

By Carlo Carrenho, Contributor

The recently inaugurated Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi tells the story of the United Arab Emirates through the life and legacy of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the country’s founding father. From the desert world of Al Ain, he rose to lead Abu Dhabi and, through diplomacy, unite seven emirates. In little more than half a century, a society rooted in herding, pearling, and fishing became an economic power, with Abu Dhabi driving that transformation and, increasingly, shaping the wider Arab region.

On September 20, at Manarat Al Saadiyat—a cultural center less than two miles from the impressive museum—the Congress of Arabic and Creative Industries suggested a cultural parallel.

For publishers, the discussions were relevant in a broader conversation about language, intellectual property and the challenges facing the creative industries. Organized by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, the event was one expression of the center’s broader mission: to become an engine for Arabic itself, promoting the language as a vehicle for knowledge, culture and creativity, not merely as heritage to be protected.

The congress host, Egyptian actor and writer Ahmed Amin, made the case personally when opening the event. Arabic, he argued, carries emotional and cultural meanings that do not always travel intact. Take silat al-rahim, the idea of maintaining family bonds. “Keeping in touch with relatives” conveys the basics, he said, but loses the warmth of family gatherings, food, affection, obligation, memory and even the small tensions of kinship. “Language is not merely a vessel,” Amin said. “It is part of the operating system inside the brain.”

For Arabic, he reminded the audience, that system is shared by some 450 million speakers.

HE Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism of Abu Dhabi, took up the practical consequences in a conversation with HE Dr Ali Bin Tamim, chairman of the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre. Arabic has not disappeared, Al Mubarak argued, but “the balance has shifted.”

For many young Arabs, school, phones, social platforms and streaming services are dominated by English or other languages. Arabic need not account for 100% of what they consume, he said, but the balance should move closer to “50-50.” That requires Arabic books, audiovisual media, games, social platforms, AI, and other technologies. “Just because the technology is foreign,” he said, “it does not mean we have to speak in a foreign voice.”

Congress ACI was not a book event. Arabic’s place across the creative industries was its subject, with audiovisual media often drawing the conversation toward itself. Publishing had a light presence onstage and in the audience. That might seem to make the congress less relevant to the book business. The opposite may be closer to the truth.

Publishing has stood apart from other creative industries for too long. As books enter wider conversations about IP, platforms, games, screen adaptation, AI and cultural policy, events beyond publishing may have more to teach the industry than another publishing conference.

‘The Connection With Reading’

Books did, however, take the spotlight at several points.

In “Arabic Language and Identity in a Changing World,” Bin Tamim discussed the center’s partnership with Amazon on the Digital Arabic Library. It has digitized 42,000 books, he said, and aims for 62,000 by the end of 2026 and 100,000 by the end of 2027. The project is part of a wider effort spanning translation, technology, authorship, digitization, book fairs and reading initiatives. “Abu Dhabi wants to change the book and reading industry,” he said.

“The connection with reading and the reading movement is what matters.” Anne-Claire Legendre, president of the Arab World Institute in Paris, pointed to a distribution problem: in France, Arabic books can be hard to find and buy, leaving readers dependent on book fairs even to discover what has been published.

One of the few publishing presences in the audience was Ali Abdel Moneim, co-founder of Arabookverse. Speaking after the panel, Abdel Moneim agreed that getting print books abroad remains costly and cumbersome. Digital demand, though, is already there. “Between 80% and 85% of our income in Arabookverse comes from the United States and Europe,” he said.

The Digital Arabic Library’s catalogue is funded by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Center and operated by Arabookverse. Abdel Moneim said the company contacts publishers, collects metadata and files, makes rights arrangements, converts books into accessible digital formats, distributes them globally—including through Amazon Kindle—and returns the converted assets to publishers for use beyond its network. Alongside the ebook targets Bin Tamim cited, the project expects to produce 1,000 audiobooks. Its aim, Abdel Moneim said, is to make “the Arab publishing industry sustainable” by generating ebook and audiobook revenue for publishers.

The “When Does Content Become IP?” panel brought books back into focus. Kinda Ibrahim, TikTok’s regional general manager of operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, described BookTok as participatory culture.

“BookTok has changed book reading from a solitary experience to a celebration of reading,” she said. The community has generated more than 80 million creations globally, she added, while Arabic BookTok in Saudi Arabia produced more than half a million in the previous three months.

Rana Idriss, general manager of Lebanon’s Dar Al Adab and the only publisher on the main programme, brought the conversation back to the editorial core. Asked what she looks for in manuscripts, Idriss said the house focuses on renewal in language, coherent storytelling and convincing characters. “We also focus on whether the text carries within it a universal human issue that everyone can care about, including the possibility of the text reaching the world in different languages, while preserving the locality of the story,” she said.

The rest of the program widened the frame, moving through financing, Arabic NLP, gamification, government policy and audiovisual production, while a parallel professional track offered practical workshops on TikTok content, mobile journalism, AI and Arabic, animation pitching, film and television storytelling, and social media coverage.

In the day’s final professional session, Andy Pratt, UNESCO Chair of Global Creative Economy, described the creative economy as a sector built on both economic and intrinsic cultural value, and one that governments and banks still often struggle to understand. Its risk structure, he said, is unlike that of most industries: “something only like two out of 10 will be successful. The rest will be failures. That’s normal.” The challenge, he added, is for creative businesses to organize themselves so they can survive “this low hit rate.”

For publishing, which knows that equation perhaps better than most, the message was familiar but still useful. It showed that, although books were not at the center of the Congress of Arabic and Creative Industries, the questions asked there were directly relevant to the future of books. Inshallah, more publishing professionals will be among the audience and the speaker lineup in 2027.