When His Royal Highness Prince Hassan visited the National Library Department last week, he delivered a message that was anything but ceremonial.

 

Prince Hassan reminded staff that a national library is not merely a repository of books but the nation's memory. In the age of artificial intelligence, he warned, preserving Arab heritage means ensuring it is represented in the digital databases on which tomorrow's knowledge systems will rely. Otherwise, the region risks allowing outside platforms and algorithms to shape its history instead.

 

He also introduced a concept that deserves far wider discussion: memoricide, the deliberate erasure of historical memory through renamed places, confiscated archives, or the replacement of one narrative with another. He concluded by calling for a comprehensive framework to preserve, digitize, and make Arab archives accessible to future generations.

 

That appeal should be understood not as a ceremonial observation but as the beginning of a serious policy conversation.

 

A nation's documentary record is what allows it to tell its own story, particularly in a region where borders, governments, and political narratives have often changed faster than the paperwork recording them. Archives are not simply collections of old documents; they are evidence of continuity, sovereignty and identity.

 

Jordan does not need to build this capacity from scratch. The National Documents Law of 2017 already requires public institutions to deposit their records and obliges private holders of nationally significant documents to preserve them. Jordan's Access to Information Law, enacted in 2007, was the first of its kind in the Arab world and remains one of the region's most ambitious transparency initiatives.

 

The National Library has also created Watheq, an online platform through which citizens can upload photographs, documents, recordings and other historical material for permanent preservation. Prince Hassan is not asking Jordan to invent new institutions; he is asking it to make the ones already built work at the scale the country's history deserves.

 

The challenge is not institutional neglect. During the visit, Director-General Firas Darabah described a library that continues to expand its digital preservation work despite limited resources. Yet a 2019 study of Jordan's records management found that ministries still operate disconnected archival systems, despite legal requirements to coordinate them, because the National Library has never been given the authority or resources to fully enforce those standards. The gap is one of capacity, not commitment.

 

Some of Jordan's history does not physically reside in Jordan at all. The Mesha Stele—the ninth-century B.C. inscription documenting the Kingdom of Moab, discovered near Dhiban in 1868—has been housed in the Louvre for more than a century. Nabataean inscriptions, Roman-era collections, and centuries of Ottoman provincial records relating to today's Jordan remain dispersed across Istanbul, Paris, London, and elsewhere.

 

That is a gap in custody, not in history.

 

It also illustrates precisely what Prince Hassan meant by memoricide: the historical record survives, but too often beyond the reach of the society whose past it documents.

 

The immediate priority begins at home. Providing the National Library with modern digitisation equipment, integrated cataloguing systems, and adequate staffing is a governmental responsibility.

 

Promoting Watheq is a broader national one. Most Jordanians have likely never heard of the platform. International experience demonstrates what is possible when public participation is actively encouraged. The US National Archives' Citizen Archivist program enlisted volunteers to digitize hundreds of thousands of pages, while Wales paired its People's Collection with universities that trained students to help preserve community archives.

 

Jordan already possesses both ingredients: universities capable of training volunteers and a digital platform ready to receive material. What remains is to connect them through formal, credit-bearing partnerships that can rescue family papers, photographs, oral histories, and private collections before they disappear with the generation that still holds them.

 

Completeness also requires participation from the Royal Court, the Armed Forces, and the security services. That does not mean opening classified files. Every mature archival system protects information with current security value while transferring historical records into the public domain on a predictable timetable rather than leaving them closed indefinitely.

 

Italy offers one useful model. By law, government records are transferred to the Central Archives after forty years according to a fixed schedule. A similar approach would allow every Jordanian institution to contribute its chapter to the national story when the appropriate time arrives while ensuring that none of it is permanently lost.

 

Jordan should also look beyond its borders. Türkiye's State Archives preserve extensive Ottoman records relating to the territories that now comprise Jordan. British repositories, including The National Archives at Kew and the Middle East Centre Archive at Oxford, contain thousands of files documenting the Emirate and Mandate periods. Building formal digitisation partnerships with these institutions would allow Jordan to bring copies of its documentary heritage home without moving a single original document.

 

Prince Hassan's own record of institution-building—from the Royal Scientific Society to the Arab Thought Forum and decades of scholarship devoted to Jordan's history—demonstrates that the country's intellectual and civil-society foundations already exist. The institutional capacity is there. The legal framework is there. The expertise is there.

 

What is missing is sustained investment.

 

Jordan already recognizes roads, water, and borders as critical national infrastructure. Its documentary memory deserves to be treated no differently. Archives rarely compete with more immediate priorities, which is precisely why Prince Hassan chose to make the case himself. A nation that does not preserve its documentary memory eventually finds others writing its history for it.

 

Malik AboRashid is an advisor specialising in US–Middle East policy, business and security issues