THE ARABIC LANGUAGE

Does it Encourage Radical Islam?

 

In its long evolution under the kings of Arabia since the eighth century, the Arabic language has become the means for molding persons by framing all experiences of the world, thus giving religion and its dogmas primacy over all activities of life.

 

The Arabic language is the language of Islam and of monarchy, the language of the Qur’an, insisting that it is the language chosen by God to speak to all mankind, and indeed providing the potent means and symbols for the maintenance and transmission of Arab-Islamic culture, its doctrines, hierarchy, precepts, values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, its prescribed laws, rewards and punishments. 

Thus, Arabic and Islam are complementary and mutually reinforcing, inseparable parts of a single cultural ideal which pervades the Arab world.  The spreading of this cultural ideal throughout the world is incumbent as a function of religious obligation on all Arabs who are Muslims.  Thus, does Arabization inevitably result in the adoption of this mandate for expansion, because Arabic as language serves as a highly-charged religious symbol. 

 

Understanding the dynamics at work, Islamist leaders in Algeria have made Arabization of the school system a primary goal since 1977.  By 1989 when the first class of twelfth-graders completed its transition to Arabic, Arabized students were seeing the world in a far more Islamic fashion than did their French-oriented peers, and the differences between them were many and profound.

 

How does the Arabic language encourage radical Islam (Islamism)?  The referenced 1989-90 study of Arabized Algerian schools found that “cultural-religious orientation is more closely tied to language than to sex, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, geographic origin, or field of study.”

 

The Arabic pedagogical method is based on memorization and repetition and the teachers are seen as traditional, austere, authoritarian, less approachable and more likely to beat students physically; the result is increased conservatism, religious-orientation and narrow-mindedness, as well as increased social isolation from non-Arabized students and problems resulting from Arabic being incapable of transmitting modern science.  The Francophone technocratic elite in Algeria's modern sectors fears Arab-Islamic traditionalism-Arabization will send Algeria "back to the Middle Ages."

 

Every professor indicated seeing a serious drop in the level of student competencies in all domains, including self-expression, creativity and analytical skills.   Arabized students show decidedly greater support for the Islamist movement and distrust for the West, repeating uncritically the simplistic discourse, stories, opinions and rumors abounding in the Arabic-language press. 

 

Western education promotes observation, critical awakening and active participation, compared with Arabic insistence on memorization of the Qur’an, a text never to be questioned, resulting in a “knowledge” which is merely a corpus deposited by rote learning and unquestioning obedience to a dogmatic belief system, rather than by a critical and active approach to acquiring knowledge.

 

The symbolic categories thus imposed by Arabic, a language resistant to change and accretions, force individuals into a particular symbolic order in thinking, communicating and ordering their experiences.  Arabic’s charged, sacred character as a “truth-language” increases its coercive power, making it the only true emanation of reality and the only access to that reality, the only reality, the World of Qur'an.

Thus does the Arabic language impregnate and imprison the mind.  “Why is it so hard for a teenager to tell his girlfriend, ‘I love you’ in Arabic?” asks a linguist, “In French it’s so easy.”  His colleague replies, “The Arabic language has a memory that atrophies it: it has gone through the funnel of Islamic thought … Arabic is a prisoner of Islam … sacred, it remains the language of modesty.”

 

It is also the language of authoritarian Islamic discourse directed toward the supra nationalizing of the Arabic-Islamic religious tradition – toward a world hijacked by the power of the Arabic language.

 

Text extracted from Middle East Quarterly article by James Coffman, December, 1995

Read the published study

 

 

Under the Arabic words

"Our Country Palestine",

the map shows all of

Israel as Palestine