🇦🇪 Amnah Al Mansoori

A shared title

The Arab Reading Challenge normally produces one champion. In 2023 it produced two: Al Mansoori and Al Berri were declared joint winners, each taking Dhs500,000, with second place shared by Naema Jehad Rajoub of Syria and Mohammad Walid Abdullatif of Egypt, who received Dhs100,000 each.

A tie at the top of a competition this large is not a formality. It means the judging could not separate two finalists drawn from tens of millions of entrants, which is the most compressed statement of how close the final round must have been.

The size of the field

The numbers are the reason this prize is unlike a school competition. The seventh edition registered 24.8 million students across 46 countries and 188,000 schools, supervised by roughly 150,000 educators.

That participation total is larger than the population of most of the countries taking part. Reaching a shared first place in it means passing school, district and national rounds before arriving at a final staged in an opera house.

The supervision figure is the other half of the machinery. Roughly 150,000 educators across those 188,000 schools registered pupils, checked their reading and moved them through the early rounds, which makes the challenge an administrative operation as much as a competition.

The night at Dubai Opera

The awards were presented on 31 October 2023 at Dubai Opera by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who framed the prize in a single line: “Future welcomes those armed with knowledge. It resides inside of books. Those who read today will get to write chapters in the book of tomorrow.”

Other categories were settled the same evening. King Abdullah II School for Excellence in Jordan was named best school and received Dhs1 million; Samaher Al Sawaei, also of Jordan, was named outstanding supervisor and received Dhs300,000; and Yousuf Bin Dawoud of Tunisia won the People of Determination category with Dhs200,000.

A name recorded two ways

The report used here carries her name in two forms: Amnah Mohammad Al Mansoori in the headline, and Amina Al Mansoori in the article's web address. Transliteration from Arabic routinely produces such variants, and both forms circulate.

This page uses Amnah, the form the publication's own headline used, and records the alternative rather than quietly choosing between them.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the joint championship, the date and venue, the prize of Dhs500,000, the identity of her co-champion, the runners-up and the other category winners, and the scale of the seventh edition.

Open: the report does not give her age, her school year, her school or her emirate. It does not describe the books she read, how the final round was judged, or what she said on the night. The challenge asks its entrants to read widely and then be examined on what they read, but the specifics of her own reading are not documented in the source used here, and are not invented for this page.