Contemporary Issues

Prophecies – The Publication of Books

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‘And when books are spread.’ (The Holy Qur’an, 81:11)

1400 years ago in Arabia, nobody could imagine a society marked by the wondrous abundance of literature we see today.

The modern world’s unprecedented access to literature is eclipsed by another amazing global growth: literacy. At the time of the advent of the Promised Messiah as, the world literacy rate was roughly 20%. In only 130 years, the world literacy rate is now 87%.

By 2022, The Global Books Market Revenue was valued at 137.12 billion US dollars and is expected to grow to 165 billion US dollars by 2031.

According to Google, between the invention of the Gutenberg Press and 2010, the number of unique books published is 129,864,880.

Today, between 500,000 to 1,000,000 books are published each year. If we include self-published books, this number rises to four million.

Ancient Islamic scholars are responsible for the survival of many classical Greek works available today. In the centuries after the Holy Prophet (sa), a movement to translate Greek works into Arabic built the foundation for translation of intellectual greats like Plato and Aristotle – among others– into Latin, which later fuelled the European Renaissance.

In the 1450s, the Bible being printed en masse marked a turning point of bookmaking in human history, catapulting western civilisation from the Middle Ages into the modern world.

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