RIYADH — The Ministry of Culture announced a project to develop the street named after the late Saudi writer Abdul Maqsoud Khoja in Al-Rawda neighborhood in Jeddah. The project, which will be developed in cooperation with the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and Housing, is scheduled to open in the third quarter of 2023. Under the project plan, the central area of the street would be converted to a temporary square where there would be no movement of vehicles during weekend, and the traffic would return to normal in the middle of the week. The project will be designed in a creative way inspired by the famous Ithnainiyah Literary Cultural Forum organized by Khoja for a period spanning over four decades. Under the ministry's initiative, the street will witness a wide variety of cultural activities that include interactive plays, live artistic and cultural performances, in addition to hosting literary and cultural activities and interactive artworks. This aims to stimulate community participation through arts, mobile library activities, and book for all, apart from carrying out literature-related initiatives such as the Literary Partner initiative and the Literary Cloud Initiative, the ministry sources pointed out. Abdul-Maqsoud Khoja Khoja, an eminent Saudi writer and businessman died on Aug. 20 this year. He is regarded as one of the most important symbols of the cultural movement in the Kingdom. He has led several cultural and social activities in Saudi Arabia, most notably the establishment of Ithnainiyah Literary Cultural Forum in Jeddah in 1982. He was also the founder and chairman of the Khojah Group, a Jeddah-based real estate development company. Khoja's cultural activities vary under the umbrella of Ithnainiyah Forum, which is held every Monday evening in Darati in Jeddah, which he founded to celebrate the prominent figures in the fields of literature, poetry and thought 40 years ago, through which he honored prominent literary figures and intellectuals within Saudi Arabia and various other countries around the world.
