[EDLING:235] The role of language in Arab reforms

[Francis M. Hult]

The role of language in Arab reforms
By Shaheen Chughtai

Sunday 20 June 2004, 18:04 Makka Time, 15:04 GMT


"The war is language," wrote American beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg, in
his Wichita Vortex Sutra. "Language used like magic for power on the planet."

Ginsberg's Vietnam-war-era concerns about the manipulation of language during
times of conflict finds an echo in today's Middle East, where Arab governments
have come under increasing pressure from Western centres of power to reform
not only their political systems but their educational curricula.

This pressure springs partly from a belief that the Middle East's schools and
universities have nurtured a world view that helped motivate those responsible
for the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US.

Following those plane attacks, Saudi Arabia - home to 15 of the alleged
hijackers - began a review of schoolbooks for evidence of extremism. About
five per cent of the material has been deemed objectionable and purged.

Some Arabs have welcomed such changes. The editor-in-chief of Saudi newspaper
al-Riyadh, Turki al-Sudairi, recently blamed "our education system, which does
not stress tolerance of other faiths" for encouraging terrorism.

During a recent Aljazeera interview US Secretary of State Colin Powell said he
sensed that "the people of the Middle East are asking for reform. It's not
just a question the United States wants it [sic]." But the notion of
ideologically-driven reform of curricula has also stirred controversy and
criticism.

"Do you have a new religion you want to teach students? Is it the Western
religion? Is it the new American religion?" demanded Islamist MP Abd Allah
Okash during a Kuwaiti parliamentary debate last December after the government
said it wanted to alter textbooks to promote tolerance.

War of words

For those who believe traditional curricula help to breed extremists, Arabic
is a key culprit. In the battle for tongues and minds, English has been
deployed as a weapon to counter the militancy allegedly fostered by Arabic-
medium education.

Saudi authorities announced last month that English will be taught as a core
subject alongside Arabic and maths beginning this coming school year.

After 9/11, there emerged a troubling view that teaching Arabic and Islam
encouraged militant tendencies," says Sohail Karmani, an English language
teaching (ELT) professional based in the UAE, "whereas English was seen as
promoting the values of freedom, tolerance and democracy."

Karmani is the founder of TESOL Islamia, an organisation based in Abu Dhabi
that aims to raise ideological awareness of issues in English language
education in Arab and Muslim countries and to promote ELT in ways that best
serve the socio-political and socio-cultural interests of Arabs and Muslims.

"Some Muslims will naturally feel that there is a conspiracy to destroy Arabic
because of its obvious proximity to Islam," says Karmani. "But I think this is
far too sophisticated for the Bush administration, although it probably does
have this crude vision of Arabic as being somehow specially endowed in
nurturing a militant mindset."

Mujahidin training

The Afghan experience may have helped shape these associations between
education and behaviour. Islamist-oriented madrassas were encouraged to
produce combat-minded mujahidin to fight the atheistic Soviet occupiers in the
1980s.

"Afghanistan is a good example," says Karmani. "During the Soviet years, the
US actively promoted a jihadist worldview through Dari and Pashto [the two
main Afghan languages] along with US-produced school textbooks which contained
explicit references to war and hatred. After 9/11, it seems to have reversed
the paradigm, using English now to promote tolerance and democracy."

But critics such as Karmani ridicule the premise that Arabic-medium and
Islamic-oriented education act as some kind of cultural poison to susceptible
students, for which English is the antidote.

"It's an absurd idea," says Karmani, who has more than 15 years ELT experience
in his native Britain, Italy and, for the last eight years, in the Gulf.

"Usama bin Ladin, like most of the 19 hijackers [blamed for the 9/11 attacks],
is probably well versed in English. In fact, the attacks would have been
virtually impossible if the hijackers hadn't known English. In a sense, it was
a crucial part of their cover."

Nevertheless, the concept of English as a modern Trojan horse carrying a
different set of beliefs and views into hostile territory has reared its head
in Iraq, where ELT intertwined with missionary work has enjoyed a post-war
surge.

Mission Iraq

American evangelical Christian organisations, including Voice of the Martyrs,
the Southern Baptist Convention and the Association of Baptists for World
Evangelism, have declared Muslims in Iraq as priority targets for
proselytising.

"Right now there are scores of rightwing Christian missionaries flooding into
Iraq," says Karmani. "Many have no moral qualms about using English as a tool
to reach Muslims often under the false pretence of offering free English
lessons and thereby establishing intimate contact with local communities,
particularly Muslim women."

Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham - both senior American Christian
leaders who are close to the Bush administration - has planned a major
proselytising operation in Iraq through his organisation Samaritan's Purse.

Such US evangelicals see their mission in Iraq in the context of a clash
between superior and inferior belief systems. The younger Graham has a history
of anti-Islam comments, including his description of it as "a very evil and
wicked religion" that encourages terrorism.

Organisations such as the Billy Graham Center and Christian Educators in TESOL
offer advice to Christians wishing to teach English to foreign unbelievers.
And websites such as Missionfinder.org carry adverts for English-teaching
missionaries in Iraq.

Promoting English

The US State Department promotes the spread of English overseas through the
Office of English Language Programmes (OELP), which has 16 regional English
language officers (RELOs) - four of them in the Middle East - as well project
specialists and support staff.

The OELP aims to create and support targeted English language projects "to
promote mutual understanding between the United States and other countries" -
drawing a clear link between English language and diplomacy.

The OELP's work is administered through embassies and consulates and includes
the development of English teaching curricula, textbooks, and teacher-training
workshops. US embassies in Jordan, Syria and Yemen conduct their own English
training programmes while those in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia give support to
affiliated projects.

The US aid agency USAID is also involved in English teacher training
programmes, most notably in Egypt.

In addition, Powell launched the Middle East Partnership Initiative at the end
of 2002 to promote political, economic and educational reforms in the region.

"The drive for reform is being increasingly stepped up by Washington," says
Karmani. "And what's worrying is that there seems to be no moral debate about
introducing secular reforms into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world."

Regional reforms

With or without that impetus, curricular reforms and the spread of English
have continued apace in the Middle East, especially in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia
has implemented well publicised changes but the regional pace-setter is Qatar,
where a major revamp of school curricula, educational facilities and teaching
methods is under way.

This autumn, Carnegie Mellon University joins fellow American institutions
Weill Cornell Medical College, Texas A&M University and Virginia Commonwealth
University who have already set up English-medium branches in Qatar.

But according to Cairo-based RELO Robert Lindsey, the US promotion of English
has always been "extremely modest and peripheral to our mainstream public
diplomacy and economic development policies".

"If there is in fact a correlation between the spread and use of English and
the spread of democratic values, then our public diplomacy has missed - and
continues to miss - a big opportunity," Lindsey told Aljazeera.net.

And Darwish al-Emadi, director of the Educational Institute at the Supreme
Educational Council that oversees the reforms, dismisses suggestions that
Qatar has succumbed to external pressure. The current reform campaign began
three months before the 9/11 attacks took place, he says, and only serves
educational purposes.

Nevertheless, many Western observers view the relationship between imported
subjects and native ones as essentially competitive. Writing in the Washington
Post last year, journalist Susan Glasser said Qatar's educational reforms
meant "students are learning more English and less Islam".

Coexistence

But are English and Arabic necessarily locked into a zero-sum contest? And
does an English education not empower students in a world where that language
dominates global commerce, travel, diplomacy and the internet?

Karmani argues that the two can coexist but to meet students' needs, English
might be taught as a foreign, not second, language. Countries such as France,
Japan and Iceland cope well without having to resort to English-medium
education, he notes.

It is an indisputable fact that people learn better in their mother tongue,"
says Karmani. "But instead of being taught together, with English, Arabic has
been grotesquely marginalised.

"The result is that students leave universities with very poor levels of
English. The Arab Human Development Report for 2003 has found that ... young
people are leaving university with very poor language skills in both English
and Arabic. So, in a sense, these people are being disempowered by an English-
only approach to education."

Lindsey says that the US has no official position "other than a general
position in favour of freedom of choice: We would not like to see English as a
foreign language banned or severely hampered, or English-medium schools
closed." But he agrees that students normally learn better in their native
tongues.

The solution says Karmani, is "to promote more Arabic in ways that empower
young people and to explore ways of adding English as a means of building on
literacy in Arabic.

"There is a desperate need for a debate on language policy issues in the Arab
world, to determine just how much English we really need and why we need it
along with a parallel debate on the role of classical, modern and demotic
varieties of Arabic."

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/53E1EE06-C2BC-47A2-B28B-D49D609B89E4.htm