Juan Cole Informed Comment
After the Blue Tsunami, a MAGA influencer weighed in,
While the suggestion was not made in the right spirit, actually for Americans to learn Arabic is a good idea. Learning languages in general is good for you.
If Trump and his cabinet had known Arabic they might not have stumbled so badly in their Middle East policy, since they might have had some vague idea of what they were talking about. For instance, I know Arabic, and am known in policy circles as having generally gotten the Middle East right.
The British Academy writes, “It has been shown that people who speak other languages often exhibit more empathy and a global mindset.”
Gee, maybe if more US politicians knew languages, they might, like, object to actions like Israeli genocide in Gaza because they could imagine Palestinians as people. Being able to talk to people in their own language humanizes them. As for a global mindset, it is important in a leader. If you assume that everyplace is like the place you live, you will make mistakes. Iran isn’t like Queens, New York, for instance.
Only one sitting senator knows Arabic (and Swahili!), Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. She is about to be joined by Abdul El-Sayed. Michigan will be providing both Arabophone senators! One is Jewish and the other is a Muslim. By the way, the number of Jewish American Arabists is legion. S. D. Goitein, Franz Rosenthal, Mark R. Cohen and a host of other scholars have been essential to the academic understanding of Arabic and the Middle East.
Knowing Arabic opens you to a world of great literature, from the Thousand and One Nights to the prose poems of Kahlil Gibran to the novels of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and International Booker Prize winner Jokha Alharthi (a woman, like Scheherazade).
Moreover, there is already a good deal of Arabic in English, so learning the former will make you a better English-speaker, and surely that is the goal of everyone who wants to make America great again.
For instance, our lives are now being run by algorithms. These are steps you take to solve an equation, methodically and in order. As the “al” at the beginning indicates, this is an Arabic word.
It is named for Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His name is from a place in what is now Iran, but he lived in Baghdad and worked for the philosophical House of Wisdom in Baghdad of the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun, the son of Harun al-Rashid, whom many readers know from the Arabian Nights. It is named for him because he wrote a famed treatise on the subject, drawing on Babylonian, Sanskrit and other mathematicians, which was translated into Latin in the medieval period.
Algorithms are essential to Large Language Models or “artificial intelligence.” No al-Khwarizmi, no AI, or as the lexicographer-in-chief calls it, “super intelligence.” (He isn’t and it isn’t).
Al-Khwarizmi also wrote a book on algebra, and so named that discipline in English, too.
Right now Admiral Brad Cooper is attempting to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to shipping so that the global energy crisis doesn’t worsen. He bears an Arabic title. Our “admiral” comes from the Arabic amir al-bahr , commander of the sea.
Ms. Loomer may have at some point worn a dress with sequins. The word comes from the Arabic sikkah, a minting stamp used to coin money. Sequins were originally coins.
If you enjoy reading magazines, you’re using another Arabic word. Makhzan is a storehouse, and originally a magazine was a catalogue of goods to be bought.
In reining in Trump by electing large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Americans have avoided a hazard. That is another word from Arabic. It comes from al-zahr, the name for a die in the game of dice. Throwing the dice in games of chance is hazardous. So is voting a felon and insurrectionist with the attention span of a bumblebee to the hightest office in the land.
Of course, Arabic is worth learning in its own right.
And as I said, it is also just good for you. The British Academy writes, “there is strong evidence for a positive effect of learning a language on creativity in language use. Fluency, originality and creative flexibility are improved in one’s first language when learning a second language.”
Perhaps the gobbledygook character of Donald Trump’s English, which has all the coherence of spaghetti after a cafeteria food fight, is owing to his ignorance of other languages.
The BA adds, “Learning a new language through an immersive process does appear to improve functions like attention and mental alertness.” Washington, D.C., could use more attention and mental alertness, to say the least.
It notes, “Around 90% of studies looking at the effect learning a language has on achievement in other subjects of the school curriculum report a positive impact, across English language learning, literacy, maths and science.”
One piece of bad news for Donald Trump. Even if he were to take up Arabic, the evidence that language learning staves off dementia is so far weak, according to British Academy researchers.
Arabic actually has come up in the world in U.S. education, though it is slipping. In 1998, only 5,505 Americans were enrolled in Arabic language classes at colleges and universities. That was already thousands more than in 1972, when I started Arabic at Northwestern University. In 2009 it was over 35,000. By 2021 it had fallen back to less than 23,000.
Now, under the influence of Trumpian nativism and foolish overestimation of the teaching capabilities of LLMs, language programs around the country are being closed. At precisely the time when the fate of our nation hangs on an Arabic- and Persian-speaking part of the world, we are closing ourselves off and choosing ignorance and bigotry as our policy. It will make us lesser as a nation. It will make us lesser as human beings.
Juan Cole’s Informed Comment delivers independent, expert analysis of war, the Middle East, climate change, and U.S. foreign policy. Help sustain this work
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