The Importance of the Humanities

Introduction: Why the Humanities Matter Now

Why do the humanities matter? At their core, disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy, languages, and the arts equip societies to navigate moral, political, and technological change with greater clarity and ethical awareness. In the 21st century, this task has become urgent. The rapid deployment of artificial intelligence after 2020, the polarization accelerated by social media platforms since the 2010s, and global crises including the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022 and ongoing climate emergencies have exposed the limits of purely technical solutions.

These pressures demand not only data and engineering but also the interpretive capacities that humanities education uniquely provides. At “Ali Alhajji | Reading the World,” this conviction shapes our approach: rooted in world literature, postcolonial studies, and translation, we engage both Arabic and English readers in conversations that treat reading as a practice of understanding our shared human condition.

What Are the Humanities? Defining a Field of Human Understanding

The humanities encompass disciplines dedicated to exploring human experience, meaning, value, and culture through interpretive rather than strictly empirical methods. Humanities fields include disciplines such as fine arts, history, literature, communication, and performing arts. The humanities involve the study of humans from individual, cultural, societal, and experiential perspectives. The humanities cover the whole spectrum of human cultures across the entire span of human history.

Where STEM fields prioritize measurement and prediction, humanities scholarship asks how human beings make sense of their lives, their societies, and their pasts. This distinction does not create opposition but rather complementarity:

STEM Fields	Humanities Fields
Measurement & Prediction	Interpretation & Meaning
Technical Replication	Context, Ethics, and Cultural Awareness
Data & Engineering	Human Experience, Value, and Culture

Core disciplines include:

• History, which reconstructs past events through archives and narratives
• Philosophy, which examines fundamental questions of existence and ethics
• Literary studies, which analyzes texts for themes of identity and power
• Languages and translation, which facilitate cross-cultural communication
• Religious studies
• Art history
• Cultural studies
• Classics

A humanities course might examine pre-Islamic Arabic poetry like the Mu’allaqat to understand tribal ethics and oral traditions, Renaissance European art to trace humanism’s emergence, or postcolonial novels like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to critique imperial legacies. Each humanities subject emphasizes context, interpretation, and ethical implications rather than technical replication.

Why Are the Humanities Important in the 21st Century?

Navigating Global Transformations

Since 2000, the world has witnessed transformations that demand humanistic understanding: digital revolutions, post-9/11 geopolitical shifts, the 2011 Arab uprisings, and ongoing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. Critical thinking—the capacity to evaluate evidence, question assumptions, and recognize complexity—becomes essential for citizens navigating surveillance states and migration crises.

Humanizing Conflict and Shaping Perceptions

Humanities students develop these capacities through sustained engagement with texts, archives, and cultural artifacts. Consider how reading Palestinian narratives like Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail or Syrian accounts in Khaled Khalifa’s work humanizes conflict and challenges media stereotypes, reshaping public perceptions among decision makers and ordinary readers alike.

Informing Policy and Ethical Reflection

Studying colonial archives during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests reframed debates over statue removals in the UK and US, highlighting how cultural memory shapes reconciliation. These examples demonstrate that humanities research directly informs policy on heritage preservation, language planning, and education reform.

Ethical reflection emerges through this work. When humanities scholars examine how narratives distribute attention and shape perception, they cultivate the historical awareness necessary for understanding how present conflicts connect to deeper patterns of inequality and empire. This is knowledge that informs not only scholarship but also citizenship.

Core Skills You Gain from Studying the Humanities

Studying the humanities builds transferable skills applicable across careers, countering perceptions of impracticality that have intensified amid post-2008 tuition pressures. A humanities major develops capacities that employer surveys consistently rank among the most valued:

• Communication
• Analytical reasoning
• Intercultural literacy

Critical Reading

• Dissecting complex texts—such as Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy—for subtext on urban poverty and power
• Honing the detection of nuance applicable to policy briefs or user research interviews

Argumentative Writing

• Forged through essays on philosophical dilemmas
• Enables persuasive reports in business, NGOs, or journalism

Public Communication Skills

• Analyzing speeches like those of Gamal Abdel Nasser
• Preparing graduates for content strategies or multicultural negotiations

Research Design

• Blending archival investigation with digital tools
• Supporting data-driven inquiry in any workplace

Cross-Cultural Literacy

• Cultivated through translation work
• Fosters empathy essential for global teams

These soft skills—emotional intelligence, relationship building, interpersonal skills—prove indispensable in real world applications where technical competence alone cannot solve problems involving human values.

The Humanities and Technology: Human Judgment in an Age of AI

The Need for Humanistic Judgment

The widespread release of large language models after 2020 increases rather than diminishes the need for humanistic judgment. Artificial intelligence systems can generate text, analyze data, and automate tasks, but they cannot evaluate their own biases or weigh competing ethical claims. Humanities provide the frameworks to question algorithmic bias, surveillance capitalism, and what postcolonial theorists critique as data colonialism—the extraction of Global South data by dominant platforms.

Detecting Bias and Shaping Technology

• Literary and discourse analysis can detect bias in machine-translated Arabic-English news coverage, where AI often amplifies Western framings of conflicts in Gaza or Yemen.
• Narrative thinking and empathy, cultivated through humanities education, guide technologists in designing user-centered products.

As Steve Jobs observed, Apple’s innovations emerged from the intersection of technology and liberal arts, producing intuitive products attentive to human needs.

Navigating Social Media and Digital Culture

Social media platforms like Twitter/X and TikTok demand humanistic critique. Studies show that humanities training enhances detection of emotional manipulation in viral content, helping young people and adults alike navigate echo chambers. “Ali Alhajji | Reading the World” approaches AI and digital media through world literature and cultural criticism, inviting bilingual readers into conversations about how technology shapes human culture.

Humanities, World Literature, and Postcolonial Perspectives

Expanding Global Empathy

Studying world literature expands our sense of who “we” are beyond national borders. Comparative reading fosters global empathy by placing texts from different traditions in dialogue.

Dissecting Empire’s Legacies

Postcolonial studies dissects empire’s legacies through works like:

• Chinua Achebe’s critiques of British colonialism
• Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North on Sudanese-English tensions
• Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things on Indian caste and imperialism

Power Imbalances in Translation

Translation studies has long treated translation as a site of unequal cultural power. Although Arabic literature in English translation expanded in the 2010s, it remained marginal relative to dominant source languages and publishing centers: Literature Across Frontiers counted 596 translations of Arabic literature into English in the UK and Ireland between 2010 and 2020, while U.S.-focused research shows that French, Spanish, and German together make up 45 percent of translations published in the United States. This asymmetry helps determine which stories circulate widely in English and which remain less visible.

Bilingual Scholarship and Crossing Borders

Bilingual scholarship, exemplified by Anglophone Arab writers like Ghassan Kanafani or Hisham Matar, opens dialogue between different readerships. “Reading the World” as a practice means crossing borders, questioning Eurocentric canons, and making Arabic intellectual work visible in English. This work exemplifies how humanities scholarship can reshape understanding across linguistic divides.

Humanities Education, Careers, and the Job Market

Addressing Student Concerns

Students face concrete pressures today: high college costs and student-debt concerns, a policy environment that strongly emphasizes STEM, and a shrinking humanities pipeline. In the United States, humanities bachelor’s degrees fell below 200,000 in 2020 for the first time since 2002, and by 2022 they were 24% below their 2012 peak.¹ Yet employer surveys continue to show strong demand for humanities-associated skills: in AAC&U’s 2021 survey, 93% of employers rated oral communication as somewhat or very important, 90% did so for written communication, and 95% for critical thinking; in AAC&U’s 2023 survey, 81% rated oral communication and 79% critical thinking as very important.²

• 93% of employers value communication
• 95% prioritize critical thinking

Diverse Career Paths

Humanities graduates pursue diverse careers in:

• Education
• Cultural institutions
• Publishing
• Journalism
• NGOs
• Policy analysis
• UX research
• Creative industries

An associate professor of philosophy might pivot to UX research at a technology firm, using ethical reasoning to design inclusive AI. A literature graduate at a consulting firm leverages narrative analysis for strategy development. Senior executives increasingly recognize that problem solving in complex organizations requires deep understanding of human nature and interpersonal relationships.

Interdisciplinary and Flexible Careers

Interdisciplinary paths—combining humanities with computer science or medicine—create flexible career profiles suited to volatile job markets. The importance of the humanities lies partly in this adaptability: graduates demonstrate resilience and creativity that serve them across changing workplace demands.

Global and Regional Challenges: Why the Arab World Needs the Humanities

Regional Transformations

Since the early 2000s, the Arab region has witnessed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2011 uprisings, persistent censorship, and rapid expansion of private universities in the Gulf. These transformations make humanities education vital for debates over language policy—especially Arabic versus English instruction, with English now a common medium of instruction across GCC universities—curriculum reform, and decolonizing knowledge production.³

Concrete Controversies

Concrete controversies illustrate this necessity:

• Bans on books like Salman Rushdie’s works spark free speech debates
• Translation of political texts after the Arab Spring raises questions about who controls interpretation
• Heritage sites like Palmyra face destruction

University humanities departments, including those at King Saud University, shape public discourse through teacher training and policy input.

Extending Humanities Beyond Campus

Platforms like “Ali Alhajji | Reading the World” extend this work beyond campus through podcasts, essays, and bilingual commentary, reaching generations of young people who seek to understand their societies and their place in human history.

Challenges Facing the Humanities Today

External Pressures

The humanities face substantial pressures: funding cuts, declining enrollments, narrow metrics of “employability,” and the dominance of STEM narratives in higher education policy. In the United States, the National Endowment for the Humanities faced repeated post-2016 proposals for termination, even though Congress ultimately increased appropriations. In the United Kingdom, austerity-era pressures sharply reduced public cultural support: grant-in-aid funding for arts and cultural organizations fell 18 percent between 2010 and 2023, while local government revenue funding for culture-related services in England fell 48 percent between 2009/10 and 2022/23.⁴ These developments affect both the Global North and the Arab world, though in different forms—censorship in one context, market logic in another.

Internal Challenges

Internal challenges compound external ones:

• Academic jargon limits public reach
• Specialist publishing risks irrelevance when knowledge remains inaccessible to wider communities

Post-2016 populist attacks framed universities as “elite” institutions detached from ordinary life, affecting public support for social sciences and humanities alike.

Yet these challenges do not diminish the crucial role humanities play. They demand adaptation: new forms of public engagement, interdisciplinary collaboration, and attention to making scholarship legible beyond academic circles.

Sustaining and Reimagining the Humanities

Collaboration and Interdisciplinary Programs

The humanities must adapt through collaboration, public scholarship, and digital tools. Interdisciplinary programs linking linguistics with AI research or literature with global health demonstrate how humanities disciplines enrich technical fields. Teaching creative writing alongside engineering, or philosophy alongside science, produces graduates capable of navigating complexity.

Public Engagement and Digital Access

Public-facing work expands humanities’ reach:

• Podcasts
• Open-access publishing
• Community partnerships for heritage digitization

Digital archives—online manuscript collections, open courses—democratize access to knowledge previously confined to research libraries.

“Ali Alhajji | Reading the World” embodies this reimagining, offering essays, curated reading lists, and conversations that cross languages and borders. Such platforms demonstrate that humanities scholarship can thrive beyond traditional academic formats, engaging students, researchers, and curious general readers in sustained inquiry.

Conclusion: Reading the World, Shaping the Future

The importance of the humanities remains indispensable for any society facing technological acceleration and political uncertainty. These disciplines cultivate self-knowledge, ethical imagination, historical awareness, and practical skills essential for navigating uncertain futures. They teach us to attend to what shapes human life: the narratives, archives, and cultural forms through which we understand ourselves and others.

For students, researchers, and culturally curious readers, engaging seriously with humanities study—whether formally at university or through independent reading—offers pathways to future success that transcend narrow metrics. The benefit lies not merely in career preparation but in becoming capable of reading the world critically and ethically.

“Ali Alhajji | Reading the World” invites you into this ongoing project: defending, renewing, and practicing the humanities across languages and borders, attending to what makes human experience legible and consequential.

Notes

1. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “Humanities Majors | Bachelor’s Degrees in Humanities,” Humanities Indicators, accessed April 1, 2026, https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/bachelors-degrees-humanities. ↩︎
2. Ashley Finley, How College Contributes to Workforce Success: Employer Views on What Matters Most (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2021), fig. 4; Ashley P. Finley, The Career-Ready Graduate: What Employers Say about the Difference College Makes (Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2023), 23. ↩︎
3. Sarah Hopkyns and Sara Hillman, “Translanguaging in GCC English-Medium Higher Education: A Scoping Review,” in Multilingual and Translingual Practices in English-Medium Instruction: Perspectives from Global Higher Education Contexts (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), 11–30, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350373273.ch-002; Hassan Belhiah and Maha Elhami, “English as a Medium of Instruction in the Gulf: When Students and Teachers Speak,” Language Policy 14 (2015): 3–23, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-014-9336-9. ↩︎
4. National Endowment for the Humanities, “NEH Appropriations History,” accessed April 2, 2026; National Endowment for the Humanities, “NEH Chairman William D. Adams Statement on the Proposed Elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities,” March 16, 2017; National Endowment for the Humanities, Appropriations Request for Fiscal Year 2019; National Endowment for the Humanities, Appropriations Request for Fiscal Year 2020; National Endowment for the Humanities, “FAQ on NEH Current Operations and Fiscal Year 2021 Budget”; House of Lords Library, “Budget 2024: Impact on the Cultural Sector,” and ibid., citing Campaign for the Arts data on local-government funding. ↩︎