Arabic Lessons from Iowa
It doesn't get much more American than Iowa. It's where "State Fair," that iconic picture of Norman Rockwell nostalgia, is set, where (in "Field of Dreams") the baseball great Shoeless Joe Jackson mistakes Iowa for heaven, and where, according to Jack Kerouac, live "the prettiest girls in the world live" (in Des Moines, to be specific). "Here," columnist David Shribman wrote eight years ago, "is the endless horizon that is Iowa's, and that stands as a metaphor for America, from pioneer days to the present." Curiously enough Shribman was writing from a place called Orient, not Kalona.
And there in Kalona is where children are learning to say "bakra" (Arabic for cow), "thura" (corn), "ouahad, tnein, talata" (one, two, three) and, of course, "hammam" (bathroom). It's all part of the federal Foreign Language Assistance Program, devised in 2001 as part of the Foreign Language Assistance Act and meant to foster foreign-language instruction throughout the country, especially in languages the government considers strategically important for its national-security future as it recruits special agents, spies, soldiers and analysts fluent in them: Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and so on.
Writing in today's Times, Samuel Freedman profiles Zahra Al-Attar, a Baghdad-born former banker and professional who teaches Arabic to 230 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, twice a week for 30 minutes in the Mid-Prairie School District. Parents have welcomed the program, but it's inevitably triggered the usual complaints from the usual xenophobes: "Some early foes of the Arabic program asked why Iowa children should be learning 'the language of the enemy.' Jim Cayton, the principal, heard complaints that Christians were being taught to be Muslims."
Logic has never been prejudice's strongest suit.
Comments
Well, as the saying goes, English was good enough for Jesus, so it’s good enough for me.
This portrait of Iowa is very interesting, especially seen through the Arabic learning program. In the wake of Obama’s early breakthrough in the primaries I let my imagination wander and I had this intuition: what if the fear mongering against Blacks and Muslims, added to an old culture of fear in the US, is producing exactly the contrary of what it is meant to produce; people getting tired from being fearful, and getting tired from hearing stories about this different mystified other, will elect a nice version of this other to lead them ? That’s a powerful antidote to fear. O.K. I am only being intuitive and irrational here…but today’s politics in the US is all about irrationality and in irrationality there is unpredictability of behaviour…For now, I like to think that this is what motivated the voters in Iowa.
I don’t think that’s an irrational perspective Sophia. What happened in Iowa was pretty astounding–I mean, a nearly all-white state chucking off the old norms and voting pretty decisively for a black man with an Arabic name. If that doesn’t spell blow-back against fear, what does?
I hope all visions about arabic world and Arabs will be changed in the western countries.
Best regards
Rehab Shahwan
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