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Fellowship-Winning Dagestani Alumnus Promotes Tolerance Through Library Programs
December 1, 2008
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| Alumnus Elmir Yakubov (right) works on perfecting his English while on a Ford Foundation fellowship at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. | Open World 2003 alum Elmir Yakubov has exchanged the library stacks for a student’s desk, and the Caucasus Mountains of Dagestan, Russia, for the Ozark Mountains of northwestern Arkansas. Yakubov, who heads the Khasvyurt City Central Library System, is spending the fall studying English at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville through the Ford Foundation’s International Fellowship Program. Yakubov says, “I decided to take advantage of this opportunity to gain competency in oral English because schools and universities in Russia only teach English passively, through reading and writing. This practice goes back to the 1960s, when it never occurred to anyone that we would converse with foreigners.”
How to improve communication across cultural and linguistic divides is something that Yakubov thinks about a lot. The small majority-Muslim republic of Dagestan is home to Avars, Dargins, Kumyks, Laks, Tabasarans, and more than 30 other ethnic groups, as well as a significant refugee population from neighboring Chechnya. Many of these peoples still use their own mostly mutually unintelligible languages. Yakubov says his Open World exchange on “Library Leadership in Community Development,” hosted by the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, IL, helped convince him that his library system could pursue the dual mission of helping preserve these languages while encouraging greater interethnic tolerance and understanding. A half-day workshop on “Using Public Libraries to Promote Civil Discourse” was one of the activities that inspired Yakubov.
In the spirit of tolerance, Khasvyurt’s main library, where Yakubov is usually based, now sponsors a summer reading program designed to make children interested in—and comfortable with—other cultures. A 2006 program devoted to Native Americans was a big hit. The library’s cultural calendar also marks not only the many holidays important to the multiethnic local population, but also festivals as diverse as Martishor, Moldovans’ celebration of the arrival of spring, and Sabantuy, a Tatar summer festival. Both the multicultural calendar and the summer reading program are part of a larger project called “Dialogue Reading as the Most Important Tool of Overcoming Ethnic Intolerance.” Through the project, the main library’s interior spaces and adult book programs have been revamped to bring together—both literally and figuratively—patrons with very diverse traditions. So whereas absolute quiet is the ideal in an American library, Yakubov sees his library as “an open platform for dialogue on different cultures.”
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