fa3lan waheeda

who knew that maha could be the source of so much anger? she must be feeling pretty popular right about now.

the washington post (come on now, washington post. shame.) published Teaching Arabic and Propaganda a couple of days ago, written by some kid from harvard law school (because that makes you credible).

seriously.

the bad thing is that for awhile i was kind of right there along with him. why is it that we first learn things like "i'm very lonely" and "my mother died in a car accident." then again, my friends here and i have been talking about how we didn't learn how to say any of the negative words for a long time (we could say we were doing well when asked how are you, but didn't know how to say we were doing badly).

anyway, yes, it's a legitimate criticism of arabic teaching that the characters are just so depressing, but i don't think that needs to be taken quite as seriously as he is taking it. and, perhaps in reality this sad picture points to something a little bit accurate about the sorry economic and social state of a lot of the arab world.

but THEN. then pollak started complaining about the inclusion of a speech by gamal abd al-nasser, an "anti-Western hero," and of footage of rallies for the nasser with narration about the "dreams of my youth." additionally, he talks about the last lesson in al-kitab part one, where we meet maha's mother, a palestinian who grew up in jerusalem and left after the 1967 war. pollak complains that al-kitab ignores "egypt's defeat in the six-day war" and paints a picture of maha's mother as a "refugee, but the images suggest that she left voluntarily after the Six-Day War, when Israel offered citizenship to the Arab residents of East Jerusalem."

according to pollak, these materials should not have been included because they are propaganda. so rather than learning through the original sources about nasser and the people who lived under his rule, we should only pay attention to sanitized, translated versions of these stories. and we should never learn a palestinian's perspective on leaving jerusalem in 1967.

this is ridiculous. al-kitab isn't making this stuff up. that "mournful music" in the jerusalem chapter is an actual song by fairuz (al-quds). to deny these stories would be denying people the ability to speak for themselves. yes, it's a perspective, and you don't have to agree with it, but you have to see all the perspectives.

pollak goes on and on and makes an ass of himself for two pages. he says that most language classes take care to avoid politically sensitive topics, but there are two important problems with this argument. first of all, that's a total lie. i've also taken french and spanish, and in both of those classes we learned about historical and political topics through articles, literature, and discussions. you have to learn about that stuff if you expect to get a realistic view of the culture that speaks the language you're learning (and if you aren't going to learn about the culture, why are you learning the language? oh right. terrorists. duh.).

second of all, if you're going to learn arabic, ESPECIALLY in a post 9/11, war on terror, scary scary world, you HAVE TO learn about politics. regardless of whether you agree with the arab perspective on things like the 1967 war, you have to understand the arab perspective in order to understand arabs. and you have to understand arabs in order to get what you want. so there you go, you don't have to actually care about them - you just have to understand them so you can manipulate them. if you can't bring yourself to be an actual human being who cares about other human beings, that argument at least should work for you.

and this argument about feeling like early language courses should not have any political perspective is actually very much at odds with what pollak says at the beginning of his article.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the number of Americans studying Arabic has more than doubled. Nearly 24,000 U.S. students enrolled in Arabic classes in the fall of 2006, the Modern Language Association reported in November. In 2002, 264 colleges offered Arabic; as of the 2006-07 academic year, 466 did.
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Young, ambitious Americans are responding constructively to our country's new challenges by demanding Arabic classes. But there are not enough teachers to meet this demand, and the available textbooks are suffused with the stale prejudices and preoccupations of the pre-Sept. 11 Middle East.

what are these "stale prejudices and preoccupations?" if they're stale, then what are the new prejudices and preoccupations? you can't ignore pre-9/11 history when trying to understand the arab world. that's absolutely ridiculous. you can't understand 9/11 without pre-9/11 (if you can even understand 9/11). pollak implies that the majority of students who are learning arabic today are learning it out of a concern for history and politics - so how does it make sense to leave history and politics out of teaching the language?

one of the very first words in the first chapter in al-kitab part 1 is "united nations." we asked our teacher why it was like that, and she told us that it's because the majority of people learning arabic are learning it because of the role of the arabic language in world politics. yes, you learn the arab perspective when you're learning arabic; of course you do (show me a hebrew text book that pretends that hebrew is not closely tied in with the idea of zionism and the protection of the state of israel; show me a german text book that doesn't apologize for the holocaust; show me a french textbook that doesn't mention charles de gaulle). but al-kitab absolutely reminds its students that the arab world is tied into the rest of the world with that very first set of vocabulary words.

plus, maha and khalid are both pretty hot.