Maitha Al Hajaj has always been top of the class when it comes to reading and now she has been picked as one of the top ten UAE finalists for the latest edition of the Arab Reading Challenge.
The Year 6 pupil at Brighton College Abu Dhabi read 50 books in five months and then had to write summaries and reviews.
“I used to finish two stories a day. As soon as I got back from school I started reading and whenever I had free time I just read,” explained the 11-year-old.
“And because I love to read, I decided to try something new and participated in the challenge.”
She was the only pupil from a British curriculum school to qualify as one of the finalists across the UAE. The contestant who ranks number one gets to participate in the final challenge that will gather winners from across the Arab world. Her teachers are confident that she will make it to the final stage.
“No one reads more than her in prep school, from year 3 to 8, and she topped the 'I read Arabic' challenge launched by our school,” said Abeer Barakeh, head of the prep school Arabic language programme at Brighton College Abu Dhabi. The school is participating in the challenge for the second year in a row.
The Arab Reading Challenge was launched by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, in 2016 to encourage students to read in Arabic. It is considered the largest-ever Arabic literacy initiative. It includes pupils from Years 1 to 12 from schools across the Arab world.
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Summer Reading Challenge: Could your child read 30 books this summer?
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At a time when leaders and officials are putting extra focus on fostering Arabic within young people, Brighton College’s staff have been finding creative ways to revive the language.
“As part of the 'I read Arabic' programme, we have a weekly lesson where the pupils compete to get more stars for their Arabic skills and the one who does, gets to pick an educational game to play with,” explained Ms Barakeh.
“And we have the regular reading lessons, where we give them books and stories that they have to summarise in their notebooks.”
The school has been holding an Arabic language week for the past five years.
“We do activities outside the classroom, like a treasure hunt in the playground, and we do an Arab World challenge in the amphitheatre.
“We also do Arabic calligraphy workshops and invite non-Arabs to have their names written in Arabic.”
Jigra
Starring: Alia Bhatt, Vedang Raina, Manoj Pahwa, Harsh Singh
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COMPANY PROFILE
Name: HyperSpace
Started: 2020
Founders: Alexander Heller, Rama Allen and Desi Gonzalez
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Entertainment
Number of staff: 210
Investment raised: $75 million from investors including Galaxy Interactive, Riyadh Season, Sega Ventures and Apis Venture Partners
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Power: 480kW
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Tree of Hell
Starring: Raed Zeno, Hadi Awada, Dr Mohammad Abdalla
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Fixtures
Opening day Premier League fixtures for August 9-11
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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
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COMPANY PROFILE
Founders: Alhaan Ahmed, Alyina Ahmed and Maximo Tettamanzi
Total funding: Self funded
