The Mohammed bin Rashid Library in Dubai is the biggest library of the Arab world. With over a million of square meters the building hosts over 4 millions of books.
Announced in 2016 – the Year of Reading in Dubai, the iconic Mohammed bin Rashid Library was expected to open within the next couple of years. With a seven floors structure the library’s architecture imitates ‘the Rehal’ or ‘Rehl’ which is a Turkish word for a foldable wooden book rest used by Muslims to place the holy book.
The library is expected to have a museum that focuses on preserving the Arab Cultural Heritage as well as human civilization, in general. Moreover, it will also work to protect the Arabic language by serving as the headquarters of The International Council for the Arabic Language. It will serve a restoration center for historic books; it will host the private book collections of Al-Maktum. Furthermore the library will be the venue of several artistic and leterary expositions. It will be one of the most importannt hubs for science and culture of the Arabic world.
Moreover, the library's management will undertake a prosses which will lead to print more than 10 Millions books and they will be ditributed in the Arabic World during the following years; they will also bestow the "Mohammed bin Rashid price for Arab lenguage", which will amount to 2.4 Mio of dirham and in the same time they will lanch and organize the translation of more than 25 thousand books.