Milton, Stephen Hawking and Haruki Murakami are to be translated into Arabic as part of a ground-breaking programme to spread foreign learning and literature across the Middle East.

Where once Arabic scholars led the world in seeking out knowledge from other cultures, the paucity of leading works rendered into Arabic since the Middle Ages has left gaping holes on the region’s bookshelves.

The United Nations estimates that the entire number of books translated into Arabic in the past 1,000 years is the same as that translated into Spanish every year.

Now Paradise Regained, A Briefer History of Time and Murakami’s baffling, sexually frank fantasy novel Kafka on the Shore are among 100 translations announced yesterday in Abu Dhabi in the first step towards redressing that balance.

Karim Nagy, the chief executive of project Kalima (or “word” in Arabic), said: “We can start putting Arabic readers in touch with great works of world literature and academia and begin filling the gaps in the Arabic library.”

At present many of the greatest works of literature and science are available in Arab countries only in their original languages, making them inaccessible to most readers.

In 2002 a highly critical UN Development Programme report, compiled by Arabs, bracketed this cultural void alongside absent democracy and poor levels of female empowerment as a primary reason why the Arab world was developing slower than comparable regions.

Kalima, seeded by a generous grant from the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, will fund the translation, publication and distribution throughout the Arab world of classic and contemporary writing.

The project has been hailed as one of the boldest and most significant cultural initiatives to come out of the Arab world in years: one also that will help the West repay a big historical debt to the region.

“In past centuries, Arabic learning was a source of great riches for the Western intellectual tradition. It is a cause for celebration that this major translation initiative is able to offer riches in return,” Ian McEwan, the British novelist, said.

One hundred books in 16 languages, just over half of them in English, are to be translated in Kalima’s first year. Classics on the list to be published in Arabic in coming months include works as diverse as Virgil’s The Aeneid, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, John Milton’s Paradise Regained – and the beloved children’s favourite, Pippi Longstocking by the Swedish author, Astrid Lindgren.

Ten of the best

— The Aeneid Virgil

— Paradise Regained John Milton

— Logic Hegel

— Middlemarch George Eliot

— The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money John Maynard Keynes

— The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner

— The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World Alan Greenspan

— A Briefer History of Time Stephen Hawking

— The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 Lawrence Wright

— Kafka on the Shore Haruki Murakami

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