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The US Should Encourage Arabic Language Students, Not Criminalise Them
In August of 2009, Nicholas George boarded a flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. He was on his way back to university at Pomona College. While he was going through airport security, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent discovered Arabic language flashcards in his carry-on luggage.
He was pulled aside, detained and interrogated for five hours – two of which were allegedly spent in handcuffs.
“Do you know who did 9/11?” one of the TSA agents allegedly asked.
“Osama bin Laden,” George responded.
“Do you know what language he spoke?”
“Arabic”
“Do you see why these cards are suspicious?”
Nicholas George was released when it became clear that neither he nor his flashcards posed a threat to US national security. George went on to try to sue the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for violating his first and fifth amendment rights. Last week –more than four years after the incident – the case was dismissed.
In other words, it is legal and legitimate to detain and interrogate a traveller on the grounds of suspicion from Arabic language flashcards alone.
As an Arab-American who came of age post-9/11, I am frustratingly resigned to the well-documented fact that airports are often hostile places for Arab and Muslim-Americans. Watching my white father effortlessly glide through airport security while my brown mother is frequently “randomly selected” to be stopped, searched and asked to show the contents of her bag is evidence of this in and of itself. However, detaining a traveller for Arabic language flashcards brings this flagrant racism and criminalization of all things Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim (as the three are often conflated) to a whole new level.
Nevertheless it is hardly surprising. Since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the official declaration of the war on terror, it has become more and more common for high schools to offer Arabic language elective courses instructed along the lines of “know your enemy” rather than as a means to foster a cultural connection.
Even this national security-based justification does not exempt these schools from the inevitable politicization of the class and accusations of fostering radical Islam and cultivating young terrorists. Most recently, Daphne High School in the suburbs of Mobile, Alabama came under fire after a group of parents claimed that an Arabic language elective course was an introduction to Islam and Sharia law.
For many former and current Arabic students, learning Arabic has helped destroy these very stereotypes. It’s the same as learning the language and culture of other parts of the world. As Rob McGillis, a graduate of New York University’s Arabic program, told me:
Prior to 9/11 I had absolutely no exposure to the Arab world or its culture. I was frankly afraid of the Middle East and its people and seeing Arabic script inspired a visceral discomfort.
However, after an impulse decision to switch his college language elective from Mandarin to Arabic, McGillis went on to study the language for two years, including a summer abroad in the Middle East.
“Studying Arabic brought me to Lebanon and Syria where I saw the friendly, fascinating culture first-hand, what many back home in the United States don’t even know exist,” he said.
Christopher Ibrahim, a Palestinian-American Arabic instructor based in Brooklyn, New York has witnessed this same desire to break stereotypes among his students. He said:
I have many journalists and Arab-Americans whose families have lived in the United States for a few generations who are trying to reconnect with their roots. But to my biggest surprise I have had many Jewish students who are trying to get past the Israel-Palestine or greater Jewish-Arab misunderstanding.
In Ibrahim’s eyes, these can be applied to other political conflicts and cultural misunderstandings as well.
“The more students who take it upon themselves to learn Arabic – or any language that carries a culture that is misjudged and stereotyped within American culture – the better off they will be in their understanding of the world,” he finishes. “In this case, they will be able to free their thoughts of stereotypes and come to their own conclusions about Arabic-speaking peoples.”
For me, the Arabic language is both a vital connection to my Lebanese heritage and essential to understanding how the United States – and US imperialism – sits in the world today.
Pouring over text, piecing sentences together and picking out, and learning new words is both my past as an Arab and my future as an American. Some of the words are not new at all, but rather uncover memories of relatives speaking to each other, Arabic words and phrases peppering how they express themselves in English. For me, these words are not learned as one learns a second language, but permanently imprinted in my brain as part of my first.
It makes me unspeakably sad that these words – words that my family uses to show love and compassion – have been distorted to inspire visceral discomfort amongst my peers and warrant suspicion of terrorism with authorities.
Because Arabic language and culture is far more than that. It is ancient yet modern, the intricate beauty of the calligraphy of religious texts and new sounds of the modern hipster street slang on the streets of Beirut. It is the mathematic precision of a Semetic root language and the emotional resonance of a culture that boasts a cadre of literature and poetry spanning centuries. It is logical yet poetic, rational yet sensual.
It is the past, the present and (particularly for Americans) future. Encouraging and enabling Americans to understand it – even in its simplest form – is essential to ensure that this future is peaceful.
Anna Lekas Miller
theguardian.com