Al-Kitaab Revisited

I did a sarcastic post on The Washington Post running an op-ed denouncing an Arabic textbook and the comment thread revealed a lot of substantive problems with the column. One commenter, for example, takes issue with the claim that there was anti-Israel cartography in the book:

I learned Arabic at Columbia using that same curriculum. From what I recall, they didn't "eliminate" Israel from the map in the book, but wrote "Israel and Palestine" over Israel and the Occupied Territories. I am pro-Israel, and think that Israel should exist alongside Palestine, and I think that the book was being reasonable just putting both on the map, without delineating the borders of each, which are tough to determine until a treaty is reached.

Brian Ulrich had these insights:

In fairness, Maha's constant whining got really damned annoying, and could drive anyone over the edge.

He should take Persian, in which our book had some sort of pro-monarchist slant that talked endlessly about Nawruz and Zoroastrianism while almost totally ignoring Islam. Then there are the Hebrew texts which have sample sentences like, "We only want to live in peace."

Good times.

Comments

Of course it's not about textbooks. The author of the piece was Harvard Law School's leading AIPAC force. Fred Hiatt of the Post, who published it, shares that bias.
The default position on anything related to the Middle East is reflexively pro-Israel. Accordingly, any deviation is cause for hysteria.
Every Hebrew text book I've ever used has been propagandistic. So what? Hebrew is the language of Israel and one studies Hebrew understanding that Hebrew study will reflect that.
So Arabic textbooks are the same? Big deal.
The author of the Post story is a true hero for refusing to recite text from Nasser. Talk about messing with the Zohan!

Posted by MJ Rosenberg | July 6, 2008 1:47 PM

I am studying Arabic right now using Al-Kitaab and anyone who is worried that it's some kind of propaganda tool needs to step back and choose their battles more carefully. There's nothing wrong with al-Kitaab and I was kind of shocked to see it in a headline which is how I ended up here.

Posted by Brandon | July 6, 2008 1:55 PM

New Maha, though whiny, is some serious eye candy. Old Maha looked like the kind of girl you might see hanging out in a New Jersey food court circa 1985.

That aside, of course Al Kitaab has some limitations-- which is to be expected for any language that's only been widely taught in the US for such a short amount of time. These issues belong in course evals, not so much the Washington Post.

Posted by Tim | July 6, 2008 1:56 PM

Don't forget the second half of that first quote:

"And the reading he bravely refused to read informs us that Nasser was born as the son of a post office worker, led the revolution in 1952, become president in 1954, and died in 1970. This guy must have been such an unbelievable whiny pain in the ass in class for refusing to read something like this."

It nicely illustrates certain ideologues on the right's aversion to so-called "facts."

Posted by David | July 6, 2008 1:59 PM

Noz posted about this yesterday, and as he's actually has used the textbook in question to learn arabic, it's a rather interesting perspective.

Regarding those maps:

other parts of his critique aren't much stronger. pollak says "Most maps of the Middle East in 'Al-Kitaab' do not include Israel, though a substantial minority of Israelis, both Jews and Arabs, are native Arabic speakers" actually, i think there's only one map in that entire book that covers that part of the middle east and the country names are not labeled. in a nearby page, there is a list of the names of "all arab countries" which does list "palestine" but not israel. then again, the list also doesn't include, turkey, iran, chad, or michigan, all places with a "substantial minority" of arabic-speakers.

Pollack apparently considers acknowledging arab opinions as anti-israeli.

Posted by John | July 6, 2008 2:22 PM

Noz posted about this yesterday, and as he's actually has used the textbook in question to learn arabic, it's a rather interesting perspective.

Regarding those maps:

other parts of his critique aren't much stronger. pollak says "Most maps of the Middle East in 'Al-Kitaab' do not include Israel, though a substantial minority of Israelis, both Jews and Arabs, are native Arabic speakers" actually, i think there's only one map in that entire book that covers that part of the middle east and the country names are not labeled. in a nearby page, there is a list of the names of "all arab countries" which does list "palestine" but not israel. then again, the list also doesn't include, turkey, iran, chad, or michigan, all places with a "substantial minority" of arabic-speakers.

Pollack apparently considers acknowledging arab opinions as anti-israeli.

Posted by John | July 6, 2008 2:22 PM

One of my textbooks when I studied Chinese was written during the Cultural Revolution, so it was full of propaganda. Our professor was anti-communist, so we just skipped the propaganda. What really matters is if the professor is jamming anti-Semitic propaganda down students' throats. Unless the Washington Post can prove that any professors in question were doing that, they are just masochistically masturbating in public.

Posted by Reality Man | July 6, 2008 2:54 PM

Pollak's mischaracterization of the three films he watched amused me more than anything else, as I've seen two of them in a Middle East on Film class.

In the article Pollak claims that West Beirut "cast Christians as the prime bad guys in Lebanon's civil war." Now, as the main character, Tarek, is Muslim and the film is set during a civil war, obviously our protagonist is going to have to be careful around Christian militias. But perhaps it's also worth noting that his love interest is a Christian girl named May. West Beirut is a stylish homage to Francois Truffaut's 400 Blows, and follows the adventures of three very westernized, secular youngsters as they turn a war zone into their playground. The climax of their journey takes them to a legendary brothel -- the only place in Beirut where sectarian strife does not reach. The message is clear. The film is a fantastic anti-sectarian piece about how extremism and war can destroy a community. It is highly Western and secular in character, style, and ideology.

The other film I've seen is Destiny, a Bollywood-style musical spectacular that consists of a much more heavy-handed exposition on how fundamentalist Islam is awful and Muslims should be tolerant and secular. In this, our protagonists are the great Andalusian philosopher Averroes and his noble dancing, singing, and non-Muslim gypsy friends. The bad guys are the ones who would try to drive the gypsies out of Spain. To this Pollak can pretty much only complain that "the film omitted the fact that it was only through the Hebrew transcription of Averroes's writings by Jewish scholars in Egypt that his works were preserved for posterity." Of course, a) it's not really an omission if it's something completely unrelated to the story, and b) Pollak is pretty much wrong.

Posted by Gimmeliberty | July 6, 2008 2:59 PM

I have bad news for Pollack: get far enough with Arabic, and eventually you'll have to read texts from political perspectives you don't like. After you get done with the textbooks, and you want to ever get any good at this language, you'll have to start reading newspapers, magazines, books, poetry. And I don't want to alarm anyone, but, umm, a lot of those things will contain perspectives that you may not agree with.

So, yeah, al-Kitaab actually does have a bit of a political slant that gets more pronounced in the later books, though more of a nostalgic old-school vaguely-secular Arabist slant than anything else. Which means we get readings such as an article saying that Islamists need to be less extremist and more critical (horrors!).

But it also has endless discussion of social problems in the Arab world, and an article comparing Egyptian and ancient Greek theater traditions (Pollack will of course be horrified that Israeli theater isn't even mentioned). It's not like we're talking about an endless propaganda-fest.

And anyway, propaganda is great for learning purposes. You'll probably want to read some, eventually. It's how I learned words like "reactionary", "tyrannical", and "domination", and it's how I got the feel for the rhetorical flourishes that certain kinds of texts use.

I dunno, I guess my point is that unless you go out of your way to cloister yourself, you're going to encounter a lot of perspectives, about everything, in the course of using your Arabic. And that includes the danger of being persuaded by some of them. Why is Pollack (and some of the commentators here) talking as if language textbooks had this special power to just shut off your critical thought module and straight-up brainwash you with its verb charts and obnoxious dialogues? Do students really need to be protected from stuff they're going to encounter anyway? And does anyone really think that students' political convictions are so flimsy that they'll be turned into a bunch of Nasserists by a language textbook? I've studied with people who are all over the political map, and as far as I can tell Maha has yet to change anyone's mind, about anything.

Posted by some arabic student | July 6, 2008 3:49 PM

All the upper level spanish textbooks I had in college (in the early 90's) were socialist to the point of being almost objectively pro-communist. (save one by a iberian rather than a western hemisphere resident - and that one you could almost call pro-fascist).

I paid it no nevermind.

Posted by Kolohe | July 6, 2008 3:53 PM

We only want to live in peace. On your land.

Posted by SqueakyRat | July 6, 2008 5:47 PM

We should make sure that all foreign language textbooks stick healthfully to an anti-Communist, anti-Islamic agenda with a further healthy dose of anti-big-government libertarian ideology.

Nothing would ensure better that our children is learning.

Posted by El Cid | July 6, 2008 6:24 PM

That sounds like an awesome Persian textbook. Which one is it?

Posted by ERM | July 7, 2008 4:43 AM

It should be noted that this is a symptom of a wider and much more serious problem: the new tactic of pro-Israel extremists of monitoring teaching in our schools and exerting considerable financial pressure to try and suppress freedom of expression and a diversity of viewpoints they deem offensive to themselves. One can refer to Campus Watch and the flap over Michael Sells' book on the Qur'an, among others (just google them). What Pollack is doing is simply joining the ranks of these thought police who seek to disrupt classes and generally make martyrs of themselves so that they can claim to be "victims" rather than the oppressors that they are.

It's worth noting that some of these people are big donors to the schools and can use that as a stick with which to beat cowed administrative higher-ups who have no stake in the battle. I've seen it happen in my own institution. It is a real threat that requires a coordinated response that has so far been limited to a few tenured academics who do not have to worry about reprisals against them.

An excellent blog, Muzzlewatch, is very useful in tracking these and other problems. I would suggest that universities need to sit down at some point, perhaps under the aegis of the AAUP, and develop policies designed to respond to this type of unethical pressure on their highest ideals.

Posted by Academic Concerns | July 7, 2008 2:45 PM

I've gone through all three years/parts of the Al-Kitab series. Although I have some criticisms (mostly structural) of the series, I did not find the same faults with it that Mr. Pollak did. I feel he misrepresented some of the Maha and Khalid stories (IIRC, the only person unhappy with the proposed marriage between Maha and Khalid is Maha's mother, because she worries about the fact that Maha was born in America. Maha and Khalid hadn't heard the plan yet). These stories also only occur in the first book. The second and third books involve more cultural-political listening exercises, such as Ch.1, Book 2, which talks about the journeys of Ibn Battuta. I feel that the more personal nature of the stories in book 1 help the students to connect with the characters and certainly is a more engaging (and attention keeping) way to develop listening skills.

I agree with some of the above statements that note that eventually in studying a language, a student is going to come across political ideas that they don't like. But with a study of language must come a study of culture and politics or else the language loses a lot of nuance and meaning.

I think all-in-all it is a well executed series and clearly the majority of universities agree. I know of several universities (including University of Maryland, U. Texas at Austin, University of Washington in Seattle, etc), and at least one language study program, that judge their levels of their program (or estimated levels for incoming students) by completion of chapters/books of Al-Kitab. If the book were so flawed and biased as Mr. Pollak seems to think it is, I would think (and hope) that its use would not be so widespread.

Posted by Mushtashriqa | July 10, 2008 10:12 PM