"Queering the otherness in the Middle East"

Some people who have known me for some time will immediately understand the subtle sarcasm in the title of this post, and hence the quotation marks in which they were enclosed. In February of 2005 I attended, along with my friends Jeff and Michael Friener, and my boyfriend at the time Keith, American University's annual conference on Lavender Language and Linguistics. Together we invented our ironic little sub-language drawing from the titles of some of the talks we had heard, in which adjectives like 'queer' and 'other' took the morphological forms and syntactic roles of verbs, gerunds, nouns and other unexpected parts of speech. I think that in addition to our astonishment at the perceived linguistic novelty of these usages, we were also somewhat confused as to the true meanings of some of what we had heard at the conference. Since I have no clear idea of my ideological goals, if any, in reporting what I am about to report, I thought this would be a good way to begin. Perhaps this linguistic vagueness will help disentangle the vagueness of the situations I will be describing below.

Between May 27 and May 31 of this year, I had the following exchange with Danielle Briscoe, a former student of mine at UT Austin, who was furthering her study of Arabic in Cairo at the time.

Danielle wrote to me with the following query:

ok, what is the best way for me to express "gay" in arabic? anything simple? stick with "a man who loves men" or "woman who loves women"? my teacher was giving us some words, but i wasn't sure if what i was repeating was anything i'd ever say the equivalent of in english, especially when she said something about "half-man, half-woman" and that hetero men were "natural men."

help!

Since the answer was not obvious even to me, a gay linguist specializing in Arabic, I responded at some length as follows:

Well, first of all, it was nice of your teacher to raise the issue. Or did you just ask her about it?

Secondly, how did you know that I of all people would have the following page bookmarked: http://www.bintelnas.org/10muqadeema/transl-eng.html?

As you'll see, the table at the top of the page provides what the author calls "positive expressions," though what they really are is non-negative ones. At the bottom there's a narrative listing some of the more pejorative phrases that are in common use in the Arab World.

The basic term for 'gay' (or literally, homosexual) is مثلي الجنس, which can be shortened to just مثلي. Add a taa' marbuuTa, and it means 'lesbian.'

If you want something really really simple, what the cab driver who tried to hook up with me in Cairo a couple of months ago said was simply اولاد بيحبوا اولاد. A simplistic way of looking at things, or an idiosyncratic euphemism? Time will tell.

Help! indeed...

To which Danielle responded:

Thanks! This is great.

Basically, the conversation came up when my classmate Rob was talking about his visit to the Florida Keys, which involved going to his (gay) friend's birthday party at a drag club, and getting called on stage and taking his shirt off. So we were trying to explain that drag shows are not about having sex, that Rob does not feel like his gay friend is trying to date him, that he felt it was humorous and not scary that he got called on stage, that the US gay rights movement is considered to have started in 1969 (her comment: "Such a long time...!"), and that some reasons she might be able to understand for gays to have the right to marry in the US relate to inheritance, hospital visitation rights, and health insurance (beyond that, she was having a hard time). Naturally, I can't say we convinced her of anything, but she found it "very interesting" and she was glad to have the chance to ask us questions, since we "know many gay people." She also shared that her friend's boss is gay, and she likes going there because he is a man she doesn't have to feel uncomfortable with in that molestation/harassment way. alhamdulillah for small blessings.

Some of my more cynical readers will surely comment along the lines of, "See? That's what you get from these backward Arab countries! In Israel, gays live a life of milk & honey (oops, no sexual pun was intended)."

Now I'm not claiming that gays in Israel are in many (if not most/all) aspects better off today than they are in Egypt or Jordan, the two Arab countries I have visited in the past few years. But there were a few things I read and saw today that gave me some hope. In essence they show that some thirty years ago, lesbians and gays in Israel were as oppressed and shunned by society as they are in some of the "darker" countries today.

A dear dear man named Nitzan Aviv, whose résumé as an activist puts many other veteran activists to shame, both on the Palestinian-Israeli peace movement front and the queer rights front, to mention but two domains of political activism, recently wrote a guest column in Israel's foremost LGBTQ web portal gogay.co.il. If you read Hebrew, I recommend that you take a break from reading my blog and go here for a few minutes: http://www.gogay.co.il/content/article.asp?id=8320

Nitzan tells us of the first pride parade held in Israel in 1979 and of a group who put together what was probably the first Israeli queer theater performance. If you take a few more moments to read the comments at the bottom of the page, you'll see how some dude who hides behind the handle "the historian" accuses Nitzan and the left – in particular communists and Palestinians – of all sorts of things that Nitzan, in his online responses, demonstrates are completely false.

One online commentator (only identified as "the Tel Avivian") refers us to some footage from an Israeli TV news story from 1979 about the group mentioned in Nitzan's article: http://www.glbt.org.il/contentItems.php?sectionID=670&itemID=828. Nitzan himself, by the way, appears (in a mischievous Jewfro and open-buttoned shirt) in the second segment, which is part Hebrew, part English).

Finally, and back to present-day politics, I recommend that you watch the video in http://makore.6tzvaim.com/node/403, where we see excerpts of the June 2009 parasession if the Israeli Knesset commemorating Pride Month. The session was convened by MK Nitzan Horowitz (don't worry; not all Israeli gay men are named Nitzan), after a few years of hiatus, before which former MK Yael Dayan (featured in the video speaking following Horowitz) used to convene it annually in June, despite outcries from some of the Knesset's extreme religious members (both Orthodox Jewish and Muslim). The discussion is in Hebrew, but I think even a non-Hebrew speaker can appreciate the 4-odd minutes of parliamentary discussion on LGBT rights.

I am still unsure what my goal is here. One goal, I suppose, is exposing an audience (albeit, I admit, a minuscule one) to some facts and opinions others, not I, have expressed in the short history of LGBTQ visibility in this region. I also think that it shows how unstable things are. Not to say that homophobia is an issue of the past in Israel, but we have come a long way in a not-so-long period of time. And while it needn't be the case elsewhere, it also needn't be the opposite. At least one of my readers will surely accuse me of unjustly expecting non-Western societies in the region to adopt Western definitions of fairness and equality. I don't. Though I do believe some such values ought to be universal.

Another thing that bugs me about the Israeli case is that far too many in this country's LGBT (I hesitate to include Q here; you'll see why) community are so proud of things like "Israeli gays are allowed to serve in the military," that they forget that in fact Israeli gays are required to serve in the military (if they're Jewish and so on and so forth), where they are expected to (a) forfeit 2-3 years of their lives (and sometimes sacrifice their lives altogether), often in order to (b) engage in horrendous crimes against humanity.

I'll end here and allow you to ponder the complexity of all this.

To the women and men of St. Louis

I was just informed that Hannah Chervitz's grandmother (sorry, she didn't mention your name) and perhaps other members of the St. Louis Ethical Society an/or the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom were among my readers, so I'd like to devote this post to them.

Now my own grandparents spoke Yiddish. Sure, they also spoke Hebrew (at least the three I got to know, but I assume the fourth, who died in Jerusalem in 1941 also at least dabbled in it). They were also fluent in Russian on one side and Polish on the other. And there is some evidence that German, Romanian and English were also within their collective repertoire.

I never really cared for the Slavic languages they spoke. Of course, this was before I became a professional linguist. But with Yiddish I had sort of a love-hate relationship. I was never taught the language. Moreover, I was socialized to believe that I shouldn't know it. It may have been my paranoia, but apart from terms of endearment, such as ingale 'boy', ziser bukher 'sweet guy' and royte bekalakh 'red cheeks' (of course they're red, grandma; you just pinched them with all your might!), I felt that Yiddish was only spoken around me as a secret language. Only grownups (and not even all grownups) could speak and understand it. Being the smartass – or uberxuxem - that I was, in hindsight I would have expected myself to force myself to learn it and be my own little intelligence agency. But I guess I was too lazy. And too pissed. You don't want me to understand? Well I don't wanna understand you anyway!

Years later, when I only had one living grandparent left, I decided to take interest in Yiddish. I audited a Yiddish class at Penn, and in a dialectology class with Bill Labov, Hannah and I did a little research project based on Weinreich et al.'s Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (there was no serious web site then; we used the actual hard copy). I then presented it and a version of it was published by the Berkeley Linguistics Society. I remember my father not quite understanding how I could write a paper about a language I didn't really speak. And my grandmother was already in her last days, so I never really got to speak any Yiddish with her. Not that I can hold conversation in it really.

Hannah's note to me about her grandmother reminded me of my "missed opportunity" to learn a language. It was also timely, because on Sunday I'll be visiting the National Museum of Language in College Park, MD, where Miriam Isaacs will be speaking about "[her] story with Yiddish." 

Two and half films

Despite the war and the need to protest, and before traveling to Jordan, I had a few opportunities to spend some quality time with my mother. That usually means driving her to the doctor (and in one case, the ER; she’s all right now), going with her to IKEA – and other furniture stores – and an occasional trip to the movies. If memory serves me right, we saw three films. The first was a new Israeli feature called hakol matxil bayam ‘It All Begins at Sea.’ It is a tender family drama, which could have been set anywhere in the world really, except it is set in Ashkelon, one of the cities at which – a day or two after we saw the film – Hamas began aiming some of its rockets in retaliation for the criminal acts of the Israeli government. I actually remember the chills I felt when they announced these firings on the news. Ashkelon has usually been a quiet town, far from the spotlights, and here I was, within days, watching a movie set there and then hearing about it on the news.

But I really wanted to write about two other films we saw in Tel Aviv. One of them I had wanted to see as soon as I saw the previews for it at one of the Ritz theaters in Philadelphia. The original title is Entre les murs ‘Between the Walls’, though in English it’s distributed as The Class. The second is an American film called The Visitor.

I knew much more about the premise of the French film than about the American one. It’s set in an inner-city Paris school, in which immigrants and offspring of immigrants outnumber ethnic French kids. It follows their homeroom and French teacher, an attractive thirty-something single guy (of course both the students and yours truly wondered whether he was gay; I won’t spoil it for you with an answer to that question), who was not really trained or mentally prepared for such a diverse – and critical – audience. What I didn’t know about The Visitor was that it, too, revolved around a teacher, or rather a professor in a small college, and that there was some (a lot, in fact) of Middle Eastern content in it.

So both Entre les murs and The Visitor turned out to be very relevant to my own life. And while the protagonists of both films were very different from one another, I couldn’t help but finding bits and pieces of myself in both of them.

At first glance, Entre les murs promises to be yet another To Sir, with Love or Lean on Me. I, however, was relieved to see very little trace of Sidney Poitier or Morgan Freeman in the character of François (actor/co-writer François Bégaudeau). I have nothing against either of the two educational maverick precursor movies, but To Sir is a classic that was good for its time and place, and one Lean was enough. What we see in Entre is the real deal. My mother commented after the credits were over – virtually all the characters share the first names of their respective actors – that it was almost a documentary. We’ve all heard about racial and ethnic tensions in Western Europe, but few of us – in Israel or the US – have had the chance to be the flies on the walls of these tense communities. Entre allowed us a shot at that.

Entre also “keeps it real” by depicting a non-heroic teacher. Some kids like and respect him; others hate his guts; many others couldn’t give a damn. He’s intelligent, has good instincts and responds with wit and respect to his students’ mischief and skepticism, but also gets himself and others in trouble doing the clumsy things that most of us might easily find ourselves doing under pressure. Watching him, I kept waiting for the magic moment in which he’d shine in all his glory and win the proverbial Teacher-of-the-year trophy, but was delighted never to witness such a development.

The Visitor is perhaps a bit more complex. Just this week I had brief discussions about it with two colleagues. With Susan Dicklitch, who teaches a course at F&M titled Human Rights/Human Wrongs, dealing extensively with the issue of political asylum, the title of the movie came up, since it, too, has asylum at its core (or one of its cores). Alan Caniglia, who is a senior associate dean of the faculty at F&M, brought the movie up while we were riding a van from a workshop we attended last weekend at Gettysburg College. The focus of the discussion with him was the personality of the professor (played exquisitely by Richard Jenkins of Six Feet Under fame; he was the dead father).

One of the opening scenes reminded me how ridiculous we can be with all our rules and regulations. A timid student enters the professor’s office with a late paper. The professor refuses to accept it. The student “reminds” the professor that he has yet to distribute the syllabus for the class. “I know,” replies the professor. Plagiarism comes up, at least covertly, when the professor reluctantly agrees to present a paper that carries his name as a co-author, even though his junior colleague had written it all by herself. Somehow we (well, not all of us) allow ourselves the luxury of this double standard. Until we realize we’re hurting ourselves as much as we’re hurting our students. Hmm, do I see an analogy to the war on Gaza? The war in Iraq?

Here, too, immigrants are part of the picture –  “illegal” immigrants, in this case. I’d like to say undocumented, but it is precisely because they chose a certain form of documenting their presence in this country that poses a problem. I’ll say no more. Go rent the DVD (Alan tells me it’s on Netflix).

So there you go, two films (three if you count the prologue). If you’re a teacher or a professor or a linguist or care about human rights, I recommend you watch them. They’re both complex in their simplicity and will leave you thinking – but also feeling (my shrink would be proud of me for making this distinction) – for a long time.

Just a couple more words on translation:

1. I would have preferred that the first film be translated ‘It All Begins at the Beach,’ though there is some merit to the current translation.
2. I find it curious that the Israeli distributors decided to give the French film a Hebrew title faithful to the original: ben ha-kirot.
3. The Visitor: who is visiting whom? The answer is up for grabs. Of the four main characters, any and all could be deemed as such. Hebrew suffers from a deficit in that it is a gendered language. Thus, the Hebrew ha-oreax (literally, ‘the visitor/guest–masc.’) inherently misses the point and precludes at least the two female characters from being candidates for the title role.

Languages have no "letters"

Okay, this is mostly for those of you who are students of mine, who have found this blog while stalking me.

I am elaborating here on an issue that has come up in both my classes this semester, and was exacerbated (eh, that may be too harsh a word, but I like it) by a question I was asked today, namely, "what's the difference between Yiddish and Hebrew?"

So this is the blog-level answer, i.e., don't cite this in any sort of formal writing assignment (even if I assign it).

Yiddish is a language very similar to German. In fact, some might argue it is a dialect of German. Others might argue it's actually closer to Dutch, but then an argue can be made that Dutch is, too, a dialect of German, or that Dutch and Deutsch (=German) are both dialects of something... West Germanic perhaps. At any rate, they are both Germanic languages (or dialects; linguists don't really care about that distinction all that much). Other examples of Germanic languages are Swedish, English, Icelandic.

Hebrew, OTOH, is a Semitic language. Some other Semitic languages spoken today are Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya and neo-Aramaic.

One of the sources of confusion is that Hebrew and Yiddish are both conventionally written using what we typically refer to as the Hebrew alphabet. Actually, if you look at the history of writing, the so-called Hebrew alphabet (e.g., אבגדה) was really used for Aramaic before it was used for Hebrew. But the Christian dialects of Aramaic (aka Syriac) were written in three different scripts (different from one another and from the Hebrew/Aramaic script). 

But here's the shocking part: Languages don't have letters. Yes, yes, call me a radical (thanks for that btw). But for real, language is first and foremost an oral/spoken entity. Writing is secondary to speaking. We can fill an entire semester talking about that, so for now just trust me (or better, do some research).

So the fact that two languages use the same alphabet says very little, if anything, about the languages being related or similar to one another. Consider English and Swahili. Both use the Roman alphabet, but have VERY little in common. 

The Hebrew/Yiddish connection is slightly less arbitrary than that. Both languages are/were spoken primarily by Jews, and the Yiddish vocabulary is sprinkled with words of Hebrew origin that have been borrowed due to the cultural and religious overlap. Similar cases are those of Ladino (or more precisely, Judeo-Spanish), which is written in Hebrew characters and has some Hebrew loanwords, and even some varieties of Judeo-Arabic, i.e., Arabic spoken and documented by Jews from the Middle Ages onward, written with the same Hebrew alphabet.

Similarly, the Arabic alphabet is used nowadays to write two major non-Semitic languages: Persian (aka Farsi) and Urdu. Both are Indo-European languages, and are really more closely related to English and German than to Arabic. But the fact that they're written in Arabic characters, and the presence of many Arabic loanwords in them create the illusion that they are close relatives of Arabic. But listen to Arabic and Hebrew vs. Farsi and Yiddish, or better, analyze their grammars, and you'll discover that the former two are related to one another, and the latter two are related to one another. So that the languages are classified by criteria other than the alphabets people have decided to adopt for graphically representing them centuries (if not millennia) after they began speaking them.

Okay, I can go on and on, but y'all are already yawnin'.

salaam - shalom - peace

One person's rationale for learning a foreign language: Why and how to teach & learn Arabic

The following article was originally submitted to a student-edited publication titled The Liberal Arts Review at Franklin & Marshall College, where I teach. The editors told me my format and style were "too informal" for their publication and decided not to print it. Here it is for your perusal.

What could be more boring than a professor writing about her or his field of study, research and teaching, in a publication catering primarily to an audience in that professor’s own institution? Hell, you’re probably yawning already, moistening your right index finger, contemplating to flip several pages ahead to the next article. Oh, and I teach Arabic. I admit; much has been said in the media over the past few years about how the events of September 11, 2001 have ignited a rise in the demand for Arabic courses in North America. The press, which rarely troubles itself with mundane issues such as education – let alone higher education – has given this “shocking” phenomenon quite some attention. Even a local Lancaster newspaper featured Franklin & Marshall College (and to a lesser extent, a few other area schools) in a recent article about the emerging interest in Arabic, Chinese and other presumably exotic languages. I read these articles, because I sort of have to. Sometimes (as is the case in the recent Intelligencer article), I’m even quoted in them (See http://www.academia.edu/1742718/From_the_Lancaster_Penna._Intelligencer_Journal for an article by Madelyn Pennino in the October 6, 2008 Lancaster Intelligencer Journal and http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/01/arabic for an article by Elizabeth Redden in Inside Higher Ed.). Yet for this and other reasons I wish to deviate from this routine course of writing, and offer you something different.

Hopefully, the phrase “something different” caught your eye and you’ve continued reading.

That the attack on the World Trade Center, on the Pentagon and on a plane in Western Pennsylvania by Saudi nationals, as well as the United States-led occupation of Iraq has reminded people in this region of the world that Arabs speak Arabic is of no surprise. One of my concerns, however, is that the United States might exploit recent violent events and the subsequent scholarly interest in the Middle East, in the same cynical way as my native Israel has been doing practically since its establishment as an independent state in 1948, and given the history of Zionism dating back to 1882, probably even earlier than that. This concern of mine has led me to write this essay, in which I attempt to explain why I believe it is important to learn languages of other peoples, as well as how I believe languages ought to be taught and learned. Some of my remarks will be of a broader, cosmopolitan nature, while others will reflect directly on the study of Arabic.

I began writing this essay a few weeks prior to the 2008 presidential elections in the United States. I wholeheartedly hope that by the time you pick up this issue, Sarah Palin will have become “Sarah who?” for most of you. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it is important to etch into memory that a potential second-in-line to lead the so-called free world responded, when asked whether her refraining from obtaining a passport until after she was elected to be the governor of Alaska was an indication of her “lack of interest and curiosity in the world” with the following words:

“I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say, ‘go off and travel the world.’ No, I've worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture. The way that I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world.”

(See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/25/eveningnews/main4479062.shtml for a transcript of Katie Couric’s interview with Gov. Palin on the CBS Evening News.)

Reluctantly, I must give the governor some credit. Learning through books and other educational media is definitely a goal worth pursuing, and probably no one in this institution would ever advocate against it. One may find Ms. Palin’s comment somewhat inconsistent with her attempt to ban books from a public library, in her capacity as mayor of Wasilla, but much has been written about that matter as well. What is troubling about the governor’s reaction to CBS’s Katie Couric’s question, was that she dismissed the very notion that a leader of a country that has prided itself on having some of the best and well-funded institutes of higher learning in the world may benefit from some degree of curiosity as to how other peoples lead their lives. She in essence tried to delegitimize Couric’s very legitimate concern.

Traveling abroad does not have to be a sole criterion for worldly curiosity. New sources report that as recently as 2006 fewer than thirty percent of Americans had a valid passport (See, e.g., http://www.ezilon.com/information/article_17024.shtml for a report by KVOA in Tucson). This number may be on the rise since then, as travel to Canada, Mexico and some Caribbean nations that did not require passports for travel now do. In an ideal situation, we would all have both the intellectual curiosity and the financial means to travel around the globe and experience the cultures, foods, climates and of course languages of our fellow humans worldwide.

I recently asked a subset of my Elementary Arabic class at F&M to discuss why they chose to study Arabic. Some of the answers were typical and expected. One student wants to work for the FBI, another envisions a career in diplomacy, some see the financial opportunities in the oil market. Finally, one student had a different answer. “I don’t want to sound like some kind of hippie,” she said, “but I just want to know how other people live.” I was on the verge of ecstasy (the emotion, not the street-drug). I am in no position to dictate to my students what their motivation to study what they do should be, but I am entitled to some satisfaction when their rationales are consistent with mine.

A colleague of mine, Ali Issa, who happens to be fluent in the Arabic dialect of Baghdad, was asked not too long ago to assist a student. The student was studying Arabic at the University of Texas at Austin, and Ali was a teaching assistant in one of her classes. The curriculum at UT, as well as here at F&M, includes Modern Standard Arabic, a largely artificial variety of Arabic used mostly in formal situations, as well as a good deal of more naturally-occurring dialectal features of Arabic, mostly based on the dialects of Cairo and the Syrian/Lebanese/Palestinian region (also known as the Levant). However, the student in question was a member of the US Armed Forces and was about to be deployed to Iraq. Given her TA’s command of Iraqi Arabic, the student found him to be a perfect candidate to tutor her in the dialect. Given his strong opposition to the student’s prospective role in Iraq as part of a foreign army invading an Arab country, he refused to tutor her.

I subscribe to the Sunday edition of The New Tork Times. I rarely find myself reading most sections of the paper, but I try never to skip two sections of The New York Times Magazine: “On Language” by William Safire (with whose conservative notions about linguistic norms I rarely concur) and “The Ethicist” by Randy Cohen. The latter entertains, week after week, readers’ questions about, well, ethics. Is it okay for a teacher to lower a student’s grade because she lost the student’s assignment (or did she?)? May a physician reveal confidential medical information about a patient who lied to her school about having a terminal disease she doesn’t have? Must a language instructor teach a soldier how to speak a foreign language in order to assist the soldiers in committing war crimes? Of course, I made the last one up (the former two were paraphrased from recent columns).

I believe my colleague was right to act according to his conscious. The chance that his actions would lead to the loss of life of an innocent Iraqi civilian was – at least in his mind – greater than the chance of the student-soldier being deprived of the benefits of knowledge. The student can seek other tutors, or conversely obtain the knowledge she seeks while pledging not to use it in a way that would harm anyone (e.g., by assisting a group like Doctors Without Borders rather than going to fight a futile war).

Here at F&M we are in the process of establishing an Arabic language program. It is your humble servant, in particular, who bears the lion’s share of the responsibility for this emerging program. In our case, we do not have the luxury of choosing our students based on their ideologies, career goals or other non-academic standards. Nor do we want to. If I were Randy Cohen, and a student were to write to me asking whether the College or a professor were acting within their purview in denying her participation in an Arabic class because she had “the wrong motivation” for studying the language, I would resoundingly send her to hire a civil rights lawyer to represent her.

The ethics of disseminating knowledge are therefore not as neatly definable as one would like them to be. I am fairly positive that my attempt to illustrate some aspect of them will not fair well with many of this publication’s readership. Good. That’s what the educational experience is – or should be – all about: dialogue. And I don’t mean provocative, ill-spirited, presidential debate-like “dialogue”. I mean thought-provoking, respectful exchange of ideas, while expanding one’s horizons.

Now that we’ve toyed around with being pseudo-intellectual and throwing in the fashionably obligatory Sarah Palin mockery (under the guise of poignant academopolitical constructive criticism, of course), it is probably time to bring ourselves down to earth. And like on Google Earth, we are gradually descending onto the planet, zooming in on Lancaster, the F&M campus, my office in Keiper Hall and the classrooms that surround it.

My philosophy about teaching Arabic is simple. Implementing it can be trickier. Justifying it to others is part of that complexity. By “simple”, I mean something like this (this will look a bit like a handout for a linguistics class; that’s how I was trained):
(1) All persons are equal to one another.
(2) All persons speak a language or languages.
a. Speaking can be oral (e.g., English, Arabic).
b. Speaking can be manual (e.g., American Sign Language, Mozambican Sign Language).

From (1) and (2) we can draw the following conclusions:

(3) All languages (including dialects and other linguistic varieties) are equally legitimate.
(4) By learning a language or languages other than oneself’s one learns about the speakers of the other language or languages.
If we add to that a couple of axioms about learning, e.g.:
(5) Learning about other peoples renders the learner a better person.
(6) Learning expands one’s horizons.
we can draw a conclusion as follows:
(7) Learning languages leads to better people with expanded horizons.

But since I promised you simplicity, here’s the philosophy in a nutshell:

(7') Learning languages is a good thing.

The conclusion I presented above in (7') is both good and bad for my efforts to establish and expand the Arabic Language Program at F&M. Needless to say, Arabic is a language. So from (7') we may conclude the following:

(8) Learning Arabic is a good thing.

However, the following conclusions also must be true:

(9) Learning German is a good thing.
(10) Learning Spanish is a good thing.
(11) Learning French is a good thing.
(12) Learning Hebrew is a good thing.
(13) Learning Russian is a good thing.
(14) Learning Italian is a good thing.
(15) Learning Greek is a good thing.
(16) Learning Latin is a good thing.
(17) Learning Chinese is a good thing.
(18) Learning Japanese is a good thing.

These conclusions only include the languages currently taught at Franklin & Marshall College but the reader is free to insert the name of any language she or he pleases between the words “Learning” and “is” in (8) through (18). In fact, I am not just paying lip service to my colleagues who teach other languages. It is my true belief that as a general rule, there is no one language whose mastery is preferred. Furthermore, it is far from the purpose of this paper to serve as propaganda for the program under my direction. What I do want to do is to clarify why I think students who are considering to study Arabic ought to bear in mind when making their decision, and what I believe current students of Arabic should consider and look forward to in their studies.

The egalitarian view – of people as well as languages – as stated above, lends itself to an understanding that learning Arabic in my mind is a means to open a window into the Arabic-speaking world, spanning from Northwest Africa to the Persian Gulf. Very much like everything else we learn, I would urge students of Arabic to bring to the table (or in this case, desk) three crucial ingredients:

1. Curiosity
2. Appreciation of the subject matter
3. Critical thinking

Curiosity goes without saying. Appreciation of the subject matter, in this case, can be multifaceted. One can appreciate the beauty of the sounds of Arabic, the elaborate nature of the Arabic script, the glory of Arabic literature and poetry, and – most importantly – the complexity of the people whose native language Arabic is. Yet appreciating the language and its people does not preclude thinking of them critically. Nor does critical thinking preclude appreciation. As a matter of fact, it is part of the democratic tradition in which we take so much pride, to combine the two. We respect one another despite our differences, and we do not shy away from criticizing even our closest allies.

While I believe these guidelines for learning Arabic are universal, both for language learners and for learners in general, they seem to warrant some degree of justification in our post-9/11 world. I must admit I am somewhat reluctant to justify what I believe must be obvious to any enlightened, educated person, and I will therefore constrain my comments to a certain degree of brevity.

Most of us rely on mainstream media outlets for information on foreign lands. You may watch CNN, or read The New York Times or The Washington Post, or listen to NPR. For some of you the international pages of a local newspaper will suffice. But unless you familiarize yourself with independent media sources (usually on the World Wide Web) or read foreign newspapers – be it in the original language or in translation – you are typically deprived from obtaining information and learning of points of view, which can only become available through this kind of diversification of sources.

In the modern-day classroom, we go beyond the old-fashioned vocabulary–grammar–translation paradigm, which was the essence of language pedagogy for generations. While you may not be able to learn to read an editorial in Al-Ahram, Egypt’s largest and most significant daily newspaper, until you reach your third or fourth year of Arabic classes, you will have acquired familiarity with some of the basic notions in such an article by the end of your first semester. Your ability to watch a story from the popular Qatar-based Arabic-language satellite channel Aljazeera will be limited for a year or two, yet very early on you will be able to distinguish between a formal narrative in Modern Standard Arabic and a “person on the street” segment spoken in one of the many and diverse Arabic dialects.
Language and culture are intrinsically related. If you learn Arabic, you must learn about the foods, holidays, movies, music, art and hobbies of people who speak Arabic. It is also imperative that you learn something about the politics of the Middle East and its connections to the West, and the United States in particular. You may think you already know much about the latter, but how much do you know about the Arab perspective on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or about the war on Iraq or about the economic policies that govern the trade in crude oil and ultimately affect the prices at the local Turkey Hill gas station?

I am eager to reach the bottom line of this paper, and – admit it – so are you. Of course, each student and each teacher of Arabic will have their own bottom line or series of bottom lines. And that is the beauty of it all. We are not confined to one conclusion for all of us. If you choose to learn Arabic in order to “know thy enemy”, that saddens me, but also gives me hope that the enemy would eventually turn into a human, who may or may not remain an enemy after you learn about her or his customs, religion, songs and ideologies. Those of you who are more inclined to see the good in everybody may end up applying some of the critique you have for your own society to the societies whose languages you are studying.
Initially, I was going to devote several long paragraphs on emphasizing why Arabic should be taught as a complex linguistic entity, which includes a standard variety (sometimes known as Classical Arabic, or, as noted above, Modern Standard Arabic) and a multitude of regional dialects. I then would have explained how we teach the standard variety alongside “squirts” of dialectal forms, which eventually grow and form an inherent part of our discourse in the language. I’d tell you that we try to emulate how Arabic is used in the Arab World, where speakers intuitively know when to use the more formal manifestation of the language and when their native dialect is more suitable. Finally, I would have mentioned that several colleagues of mine (from various colleges and universities) and I have been discussing lately how to enhance our teaching resources to accomplish all of the above.

I think I ended up illuminating some of the more interesting, important underlying considerations in Arabic pedagogy. It also seems that dialect diversity in teaching follows from the philosophy I have presented in this paper. And since I am reaching my limit of 3,000 words, your curiosity will just have to wait.