DUBAI, October 29, 2026 — Egypt’s Mayar Mohammed Ragab Othman was crowned champion of the 10th Arab Reading Challenge on Thursday, winning the Arab world’s largest reading competition after beating more than 40 million students from 60 countries.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, presented the title to Mayar at the closing ceremony held at the Dubai World Trade Centre, state media reported. The young Egyptian, who read more than 70 books on her road to the title, received a prize of AED 500,000.
Palestine’s Ghazal Rashad Adel Tayyem finished second and received AED 100,000, while Saudi Arabia’s Rayan bin Adeeb Ali Al Zakeri took third place with a prize of AED 70,000, organisers said.
A record-breaking tenth edition
The tenth edition drew the largest participation in the competition’s history, with 40,286,428 students taking part, including 74,062 students in the People of Determination category, according to the Emirates News Agency. The figures mark a 24 percent increase on last year’s edition and represent nearly half of all school students across the Arab world.
A total of 138,426 schools and 161,507 supervisors joined this year’s challenge, which is organised by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives. With AED 11 million awarded each year, the total value of prizes across the competition’s ten editions has now reached AED 110 million.
The podium and the other champions
Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, awarded the Outstanding Supervisor title to Jordan’s Fakhri Mahmoud Mayyas, who received AED 300,000. Kuwait’s Budoor Faleh Meteb Al Asqa came second, while Bahrain’s Aysha Al Atawi finished third.
The Best School title went to Sidi Amer School in Tunisia, which received AED 1 million. Egypt’s Martyr Mahmoud Al-Maghrabi Primary School took second place, and Al Yarmouk High School for Girls in Kuwait finished third.
New Zealand’s Sohaib Majd Mohammed was named Community Champion, a category for students from Arab communities abroad and non-Arabs learning Arabic, while Syria’s Mahmoud Imran won the People of Determination Champion title with a prize of AED 200,000.
What the finalists had to read
Country-level winners from across the Arab world travelled to Dubai for the final round, where they faced an oral examination summarising the key themes of the 25 books they had read, demonstrating their command of Standard Arabic. Judges assessed each student’s vocabulary and ability to express ideas in their own words, organisers said.
A decade of reading
Launched by Sheikh Mohammed in 2015, the Arab Reading Challenge aims to promote reading among students across the Arab world, strengthen Arabic language skills and nurture a lasting love of knowledge in new generations.
Across its ten editions, the initiative has drawn more than 203 million students, over 1.065 million schools and 1.193 million reading supervisors, organisers said. A joint study by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives and UNESCO found that participating students’ out-of-school reading time rose from under an hour a week to more than four hours, while average annual books read per student climbed from eight to more than 40.
