The New Orientalism

I first realized the existence of a new Orientalism several years ago, when someone asked me my favorite color in Arabic.

At that time, after three years of study, I could have held my own in a conversation about politics, religion, or economics. I could have debated the relative merits of a Pan Arabic or single country approach to solving the Israeli Palestinian conflict or pontificated at length about multiculturalism in Islam’s history, but I could not tell this person that my favorite color was green.

The problem wasn’t me – though I spent a considerable amount of time in my dorm room at Lebanese American University in Beirut alternately berating myself and lamenting the past three years of hard word, all the while drinking quite heavily. The problem became evident as I perused my textbooks, looking for the chapter on colors.

There wasn’t one.

There wasn’t a chapter on pets either, or on sports, or parts of the body, hobbies, artwork, public transportation. In fact, the Arabic word for United Nations preceded any discussion of something as simple as food by several chapters. Vocabulary and expressions relating to daily life and commonplace events were scattered amongst chapters dedicated to politics, religion, and history. The word for “republic” (jumhurriyah) appeared before the word for “cat” (qittah). I was not learning a language from these textbooks. I wasn’t learning how to communicate with an Arab. I was learning how to talk to diplomats, government officials and businessmen.

Granted, Modern Standard Arabic is primarily used for political and religious matters. But since all dialects – the languages of the Arab street – derive from MSA, shouldn’t I have learned the word for “cat” before the word for “inflation?” After all, the dialects only change one letter (qittah becomes ‘ittah or gittah depending on where you are.) And in my experience – which, linguistically speaking, is long and varied – dialects prevail in every language. That didn’t stop my French teacher from getting me to talk about crepes before discussing Sartre. Even my Latin professor – Latin, people, only used to talk to the Pope! – didn’t prepare us for Cicero right off the bat; we started with basic expressions.

Hello. How are you? My favorite color is green.

Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978. His main argument was that Western perceptions of and interactions with the East – from Arabia to China – took place within a cultural framework that portrayed the “Oriental” as a lazy, lascivious, irrational deviant, controlled by an odd mixture of hedonism and religious fervor.

Judging from the Al Kitaab fii Ta’allum al Arabiyah series – the most widely used Arabic language textbooks in the USA – the old, stale image of the leering, fanatical Arab has been replaced by a new image; the Arab as a solely political being. This view is not only sad and false, it is also dangerous.

Imagine a person devoid of any characteristics, any social context. He has no friends, no family, no history, no future. All he has is a political stance, a set of beliefs, a commitment to an ideal. Imagine making a decision about how to deal with such a person – you would be like an amateur looking through a telescope, seeing what is in front of you and not understanding how it got to be that way. You yourself would make political decisions about this person, without taking circumstances, which by nature explain politics, into account. This naturally leads to poor decisions; for example, in spite of ample evidence that right-wing activists pose a greater threat to our society than radicalized Muslims, Representative Peter King is conducting hearings directed exclusively at investigating our Muslim population.

I was lucky enough to have teachers who supplemented our textbooks with movies, conversational excercises, and out-of-the-book vocabulary. I was even luckier to get the chance to study Arabic in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. But I’ve never quite escaped the sensation that our books taught us Arabic not with the goal of linguistic mastery, but with the goal of political clout. And that just won’t work – with Bush Jr, we saw what political clout looks like when it lacks eloquence.

The Al Kitaab series has gone through several editions and, to the editors’ credit, the treatment of Arabs as people rather than political playing pieces has improved with each revision. But until we start learning Arabic the way we’d learn German, French, or Spanish, don’t expect us to have the relationship with the Middle East that we do with our European friends.