The Arabic Language: A Weapon against Islam?1

In the United States, language study has always been motivated by practical reasons. The number of students interested in the Arabic language grew spectacularly after September 11th, 2001, with record numbers of students enrolling in Arabic courses at American universities at the dozen or so language institutes located in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Yemen.

The University of Utah offered an intensive language program in the summer of 2000 with eighty students. In the summer of 2003, there were 300 students enrolled in the program, most of them studying Arabic, while a few focused on Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew. At Middlebury College, where intensive summer courses attracted 60 to 70 students, the amount of students increased to 130 during the summer of 2002.

According to Michael Katz, the Dean at the School of Languages at Middlebury College, “Typical American higher education is a reactive process. Something happens like the Cold War and gosh, we better start studying Russian. Then there’s 9/11 and everybody starts studying Arabic.” As he acknowledges, “Arabic has blossomed since September 11, 2001. The demand for Arabic is enormous.”

As a result of increased interest in studying Arabic, Middlebury College, as well as most universities with similar programs, was obliged to hire many new instructors to satisfy the demand. In 2002, for the first time since its foundation in 1982, Middlebury had to start accepting applications as early as the month of April. In many institutions of higher learning, the demand for Arabic is greater than the demand for Spanish, the second most important language in the United States after English.

Although Katz avoids giving precise details, he admits that many of the new students are members of the secret service and the armed forces. Kate Swearengen, who attended the intensive Arabic program at Middlebury in the summer of 2002, relates that:

There were the State Department types who, in the short term, are aiming to pass the Foreign Service examination. In the long term, they want ambassadorships and houses in Georgetown. There were the academics - anthropology and comparative literature doctorate students who want to learn Arabic to conduct independent research. Rounding out the group were the military people, fresh out of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey and service duty in Bahrain, who stoically awaited the arrival of the dormitory’s elevator so they could descend the two floors to the lobby en masse.

On the basis of my experiences studying Arabic in the U.S. and abroad, I can confirm that many of the Americans who are studying the language are members of the military, aspiring Orientalists, CIA spies, mercenaries, and Christian missionaries. While many Arabic students in the U.S. are undergraduates, most of the students studying at language institutes in the Arab world are graduate and post-graduate students. A minute percentage of Arabic students are highly secularized Arab Americans or cultural Muslims in search of their roots, as well as the rare committed Muslim who is studying the language for religious reasons.

Many of the students who started to study Arabic after September 11th were seeking immediate benefits. It is evident that they believed that knowledge of Arabic would “open doors” for them after the lamentable and deplorable attack against the Twin Towers and the World Trade Center, and that they wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. Prior to 9/11, the few students who studied Arabic tended to have a direct interest in the language and culture. After the tragic events of 2001, however, the atmosphere in Arabic language classes changed to a great degree with enmity and even open hostility being expressed against Arabs, Islam, and Muslims.

Insulting the Islamic faith became the order of the day, as well as mocking Muslim beliefs and practices. Students started to openly express their hatred of Arabs and asserting that the Arabic language was “sexist” because are masculine or feminine as opposed to neuter. Some expressed their desire to “change” Arabic culture, expressing supremacist ideas that would give a stroke to Claude Levy-Strauss. Not only was the cultural richness of the Arabic world not appreciated, it was viewed with contempt. The concept of cultural relativity is ignored or rejected, perhaps because students believe it has something to do with Levi Strauss, the Bavarian immigrant who invented jeans in 1873.

This attitude of contempt towards Arabs and Muslims, combined with perfidious ambitions, has converted Arabic students into perfect targets for intelligence agencies. As Swearengen does not hesitate to reveal:

The CIA recruiters were also at Middlebury, in full force. They courted the Chinese and Russian school students, but the students in the Arabic program were the big game. Arabic specialists get $30,000 a year for the privilege of sitting behind a desk and translating foreign newspapers. Because, you know, Osama bin Laden publishes all his top-secret plans on the front page of al-Watan.

Mahmoud Abdalla, the director of Middlebury’s Arabic school, is more forthcoming than his dean, Michael Katz, and admits that a number of government agencies visit the campus to recruit Arabic students. According to Abdalla, there has been a big turnout of recruiters coming primarily from the CIA, FBI, and other government offices.

The Arabic students from the universities of Texas, Utah, and Kansas, all confirmed to me that, without exception, they had all received letters from the CIA after completing their first year of studies. I found it quite odd that no such letters were ever mailed to the few practicing Muslims who were studying Arabic. It may be that a healthy attraction for Islam, or even simple respect for the Muslim faith, disqualifies a potential candidate.

In reality, it is a shame that American interest in the Arabic language is so superficial, and that it is intrinsically tied to political, economic, and military motives. Although the United States is a great country in which to live and work, with many liberties and job opportunities, it does not pay sufficient attention to cultural matters. In fact, the US does not even have a Ministry of Culture as Canada and many of the poorest nations of the world possess.

In general, Americans prefer to spend their money on sports rather than a play, a spectacular musical, a concert of classical music or a good museum. In some cities, they have to offer free admission to museum in order to draw visitors. Many people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to see a football game, but they are not willing to spend five dollars to enter an excellent art gallery. Americans travel little outside of their country. Most of them are monolingual and their newscasts contain little to no international news. As a result, American are a provincial, even parochial, people, many of whom believe they are the center of the universe and that the entire world revolves around them.

Although the U.S. is one of the countries with the highest level of literacy in the world, it paradoxically possesses one of the lowest levels of culture in the world. Although the country has great institutions, universities, and libraries, there remains a vast void in the cultural arena. Despite its advances in science and technology, many cultured people view the United States as the Mecca of Ignorance, something which is quite serious, since ignorance engenders intolerance. If the U.S. is both ignorant and arrogant, and lacks the tact that the French and the English demonstrated in the past, it will never have long term success in the Arabic-Islamic world.

When the French and the English commenced their imperialistic adventures, they reasoned perfectly well that in order to control a people, and to dominate a people, one had to understand them. Consequently, they placed a great deal of interest in the languages, literatures, religions, and cultures of those they were colonizing. In 1798, Napoleon brought a large group of learned people to Egypt, including botanists, zoologists, geologists, sculptors, painters, poets, linguists, chemists, mathematicians, architects, sketch artists, and geographers, and many others. As a result of the research conducted by this group of scholars and scientists, a twenty-volumes report, titled Description de l’Égypte, was redacted. One of the main goals of French Orientalists was to build cultural bridges and ties of solidarity with the Egyptians. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they published books on Arabic grammar, produced courses on colloquial Arabic dialects, compiled bilingual dictionaries, and even developed courses in various Berber languages. French Orientalists exhibited an insatiable thirst for knowledge about the Near East and translated a multitude of classical Arabic works into the French language. The magnitude of the work that they accomplished was so monumental that it would take various volumes to simply provide a cursory glance. There is no question that contemporary American Orientalists pale in comparison with the French and English Orientalists from the colonial period.

Napoleon, with great cunning, identified his interests as those of the Egyptians. When he invaded Egypt in 1798, he told them that he had arrived to implement the Shari‘ah, namely, the Islamic legal system. He used to read the Qur’an, and even wrote that “There is no god but Allah” in his personal copy. He covered Cairo with flyers that said that Allah is the Greatest and that he had come to liberate the Muslim people from the Mamelukes. In Cairo, during a meeting with dignitaries and religious leaders at the University of al-Azhar in July of 1798, he publicly professed to be a Muslim. After embracing Islam, he adopted the Muslim name ‘Ali. Napoleon’s conversion to Islam was featured in page 61 of Le Moniteur, the official French newspaper of the period. Acting as a Muslim, he prohibited French officers from drinking alcohol in public; he prohibited them from harassing women; and forbade them to enter mosques. All of the decrees made by French administrators commenced with the words, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” His council even passed a fatwa (or religious edict) declaring that Napoleon was the Mahdi, the Awaited Savior, and affirmed that there were twenty Qur’anic verses which referred implicitly to him. He explained his concept of government in the following terms:

My policy is to govern people as they majority wish. By becoming Catholic, I put an end to the War of Vendée; by becoming a Muslim, I established myself in Egypt; by becoming ultramontane, I won the sympathy of Italy. If I ruled a nation of Jews, I would reestablish the Temple of Solomon.

When he left Egypt in 1799, he brought with him a variety of books on Islamic jurisprudence which would form the foundation of his famous Napoleonic Code, promulgated in 1804, and which now forms a fundamental part of the legal systems in various countries throughout the world. He never hesitated to adopt whatever was of benefit from Islamic civilization.

The English, on the other hand, manifested the same yearning to acquire cultural knowledge. English Orientalists focused their attention on language study, completing translations, and authoring half a dozen Arabic textbooks and grammars. They never attempted to replace the Islamic, Hindu or African legal systems. Rather, they sought to use them whenever possible. English tribunals in India were ordered to apply Islamic or Hindu law, depending on the religion of the parties, in such areas as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. In Africa, British law was only applied when local circumstances allowed for it.

The agents of European imperialism often went to the extreme of converting to Islam in order to be more convincing. One of the most famous of these agents was Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), the explorer, linguist, scholar, solider, anthropologist, and author. He spoke 25 to 30 languages and 40 dialects. He published more than 50 books about his journeys, three grammars of Oriental languages, five volumes on folklore, becoming especially famous for his translation of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Jacques Menou (1750-1810), a general in Napoleon’s army, converted to Islam, adopted the name Abdullah-Jacques Menou, and then married Sitti Zoubeida, an Egyptian Muslim woman who descended from the Prophet Muhammad.

As a result of the efforts they made to understand the people they were conquering, the French and the English were able to occupy foreign lands for over a century. The former dominated 65 million people in their colonies while the latter controlled 470 million in theirs. The French controlled Algeria from 1830 to 1962 and Tunisia from 1883 to 1956. The English, on the other hand, dominated India from 1776 to 1947. If the Europeans succeeded in dominating other nations for more than a century, it was because they had a certain degree of culture and capacity.

As a result of its arrogance attitude and cultural imposition, the United States manifests a lack of interest in Arabic-Islamic culture. When the U.S. government promotes the study of the Arabic language, it does so to fill its ranks with spies and militaries that can operate in regions where the language is spoken, and to train anti-Islamic Orientalists and Christian missionaries so that they can continue to weaken and subvert Islam. In other words, Americans have no interest in improving ties with the Muslim world, understanding its beliefs, way of life, knowledge, science, wisdom, and mode of thinking. For Americans, learning Arabic is something practical. Case in point: when American soldiers arrived to the Persian Gulf, they were armed with colloquial Arabic-English dictionaries which contained the most important vocabulary they would need: to kill, to interrogate, to torture…

The only way the United States can control the Muslim world is by means of force because it is devoid, in many regards, of culture and political maturity. The French and the English took the time needed to understand other cultures so that they could present themselves as “friends” with the object of controlling them. The brutal attitude and approach of the United States, however, undermines its objectives in the Arabic-Islamic world. Rather than draw people into its orbit, U.S. foreign policy incites them to turn away. Rather than win the friendship of Muslims, the U.S. seeks to dominate them. Rather than build bridges of understanding, they destroy the few existing ones as the carpet bomb entire countries while tossing spare change and scraps to the survivors as an act of Christian charity. As a result of U.S. foreign policy, Muslims receive Americans soldiers with hostility, rather than welcoming them with flowers. Rather than greeting them with marhaba (or welcome) for having “liberated” them, they seek refuge in God, and exclaim with tears in their eyes: “The Yankees have arrived!”

• 1. This article was originally published in Spanish as “El idioma árabe en camino de convertirse en un arma contra el Islam” in Revista Cultural Ariadna (Oct. 2003): http://www.ariadna.cjb.net. Its English translation is published here for the first time.