Arabic-L:LING:Response to New Republic article

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 09 Mar  2005
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1) Subject:Response to New Republic article
2) Subject:Another Response to New Republic article

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1)
Date: 09 Mar  2005
From:dwilmsen at aucegypt.edu
Subject:Response to New Republic article

This guy strikes me as something of a mountebank.  Check out this  
review of his book on Salon:   
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2003/03/26/braude/.  Even more  
telling, check out this little tidbit:   
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F65A006B-EB57-45D1-A1EE 
-37BBC63EAA72.htm.  

I wonder where he gets his figures?  Only 70 million Arabic speakers  
can't read?  A much larger number can't understand fusha?  How much  
larger?  And if they can’t read fusha, what are the 75% (by Mr Braude’s  
reckoning) of literate Arabic speakers reading?  Mickey? And, more to  
the point, How does he know?  For example, the 250,000 or so milling in  
Riad El Solh square yesterday seemed to understand the eloquent Arabic  
of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah perfectly well, to judge by their immediate  
and appropriate responses to his words. 

Then in his reply to Antony Sullivan, he flings about quotes with  
abandon without really reflecting on what they might actually mean in  
context.  For instance, he quotes my translation of an interview  
with Yusuf al-Qaradawy commenting upon Sheikh El Shaarawi, implying  
that Qaradawy is endorsing Shaarawi's style of exegesis.  My own  
opinion is that Qaradawi was damning Shaarawi with faint praise.   He  
could not very well allow himself to been seen to be disagreeing with  
him openly.  To be fair, Mr Braude wasn't able to consult the Arabic  
text, and so he might have missed the subtlet irony.  But I think I  
managed to capture a bit of it in my translation.  The entire interview  
can be seen here.   
 http://www.tbsjournal.com/interviewyusufqaradawi.htm 

Meanwhile, he quotes Legassik's translation of Midaq Alley in which  
Hamida worries about listening to speeches in incomprehensible  
classical Arabic.  Of course, that reference could indicate any number  
of things, including Hamida's distate for meaningless political  
rhetoric.  I wonder how she might have reacted to Nasrallah's much more  
meaningful and rousing rhetoric of last night?  I also wonder why Mr  
Braude always relies upon translations.  Why doesn’t he go to the  
original work?  Midaq Alley is surely available to him in almost any  
good university library.  Check out this disclaimer in his latest rant  
in the New Republic  
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=ykd%2B2YUQTIRmkcItf9JFjQ%3D%3D:   
Translated quotes from Abd Al Halim Qandil, Muhammad Farid Hassanein,  
and Mustafa Bakri were taken from the website of the Middle East Media  
Research Institute. All other translations are mine.   I wonder.  He  
quotes Ayman Nour, but Nour is quoted a lot in the English press  
lately. 

So the guy knows how to Google and he utilizes MEMRI.  It's very  
uncomfortable to me for Mr Braude to be using my work to buttress his  
own misguided arguments, but I suppose that is the price one  
must pay for hanging one’s shingle out in the blogsphere.   
Any self-serving kook can come along at any time and quote one out of  
context. 

All of this says nothing about the naïveté of Mr Braude’s proposal.   
Newscasts or other somber pronouncements of an official nature coming  
from US sources (or anywhere else for that matter) and couched in  
vernacular Arabic would be considered highly inappropriate.  In any  
case, Arabic speakers, whether literate or not, know pretty well what  
the US is trying to say to them; if, for the sake of Mr Braude’s  
argument, they don’t quite get the point in fusha the first time round,  
they will get it on the second time when discussing it amongst  
themselves in the vernacular—in a forum where the use of the vernacular  
is appropriate.  And they don’t need the elites to explain it to them.   
I would guess that most people in the cities who are under the age of  
fifty can read, and in Egypt at least, those from the middle and lower  
classes often have a better productive capacity in fusha, having  
undergone state-sponsored education, than do those of the upper  
classes, who send their children to language schools, where European  
languages dominate the curriculum.

David Wilmsen
Arabic and Translation Studies
The American University in Cairo  


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Date: 09 Mar  2005
From:dwilmsen at aucegypt.edu
Subject:Another Response to New Republic article

Im wondering if we should craft a reply?  It seems to me that true  
scholars don't really get much of a hearing in the press.  And yet this  
guy who styles himself as a scholar can shoot his mouth off all over  
the place and foster as many wrong impressions as he can dream up. 
   
David Wilmsen

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End of Arabic-L:  09 Mar  2005