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KG: What Would Khalil Gibran Do?

by KufiGirl :: posted 20 June 07

credit: Mark Wilson, EmpireWire.com

New York City has proposed building the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public high school that will teach classes in both English and Arabic, and some folks are none too happy about it. Good ol’ Daniel Pipes showed up, to warn us that “a madrassa grows in Brooklyn.”

* cue screeching theme from Psycho *

First of all, I think it’s funny that the word “madrassa” has been co-opted so thoroughly. Like the words fatwa and jihad, this one has been wrenched out of its original context and thrown around so carelessly that even I have trouble hearing it anymore without picturing rows of boys in the mountains of Pakistan rocking back and forth, thrashing their heads against their Qur’an racks in unison, training to become suicide bombers. (The word, of course, simply means “school” in Arabic. Where it has an Islamic connotation, it’s because mosques were early promoters of literacy, and the “madrassa” was known as the section of the mosque devoted to education, as opposed to the sections devoted to prayers, ablutions, charity, and so forth. “Radical madrassas” do exist, but the term is not redundant.)

Secondly, I’d like to note that Khalil Gibran himself was a Christian. Just like the majority of native Arabic-speakers in the United States.

Call it what you will, however: this school is certainly pushing some buttons. The terrorists are coming for our children! And they are doing it by expecting them to learn Arabic morphology, verb tenses, and the triconsonantal root system! My, those jihadis are clever! Can’t get nuthin’ past them.

To be fair, many of the complaints against the school centered not around its subject matter, but its physical placement. It was originally to be housed in an existing public elementary school, and parents of students already attending that school legitimately worried that their own children’s resources would be sapped to make room for new students, and that the match between an elementary school and a high school was a poor fit. Presumably due to parental pressure, the school has been moved to another location, where it will share space with the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, and the Math & Science Exploratory School.

So that should be the end of it, right? Yeah not so much.

I hate to call women shrill – I think it’s sexist – but this woman? Shrill. A regular writer for the Sun, she calls the “madrassa” plan “insane,” “a disastrous endeavor,” and says that “[w]hen I first heard of this proposed school, I thought it was a joke.” She’s not concerned with kindergarteners sharing bathrooms with ninth-graders, or the prospect of fifth-graders losing their library: she says she’s outraged because “we’re bending over backwards to appease those sympathetic to individuals who would destroy us again,” and invites her readers to “break out the torches and surround City Hall to stop this monstrosity.”

If that’s not enough to get your eyebrows muddled, she recounts the story of her daughter receiving an Arabic message on her cell phone’s voice mail, from Michigan (p.s. Michigan is where the terrorists live), the result of a wrong number. Quickly realizing that she was the unintentional recipient of Al-Qaeda’s launch codes, she did what any patriotic American would do upon hearing Arabic unexpectedly, and turned the message over to the FBI. To her dismay, the FBI was uninterested in her intelligence. (Quote: “Fools!”)

But I don’t want to pick on this particular woman, because there’s nothing especially extraordinary about her worldview. Yet that’s the point. I talk to folks, I read the news, I listen to the radio, I follow politics, and while I think we can agree her opinions aren’t representative of all America, they do represent a large portion of it. (If that weren’t the case, we’d have someone else in the White House by now.)

“During World War II,” she asks, in a misguided attempt to be rhetorical, “did we open a German public school to explain the Third Reich?”

She calls the idea preposterous, but in a way that’s exactly what we did. Not a single school to indoctrinate high school students into Nazi propaganda – there’s a difference between the words explain and defend – but, following World War II, we made learning European languages, including Russian, a priority, an overdue recognition of the fact that students who’d grown up in immigrant households weren’t the only ones in need of this particular form of expertise. In the 1980’s, as Japan’s influence grew on the world stage, more and more high schools and colleges offered Japanese language classes. In this light there should be nothing unusual or surprising about the recent push for Arabic (and, while we’re at it, Chinese). Currently there are 60 other dual-language schools in New York.

And as anyone who’s taken even a single semester of foreign language knows, learning a language goes hand-in-hand with learning about the civilization that developed it. Hell, my 13-year-old daughter was up until 10:30 last night banging out a report about ancient Rome – not because she’s taking history, but because she’s taking first-year Latin. Do I fear that this newfound knowledge of hers will turn her into a Jupiter-worshipper? Not really, though I try to keep an open mind.

But we should also be careful. It’s easy to look at the goofy, over-the-top hysteria of conservatives who believe an Arabic high school will produce a graduating class of wild-eyed Qur’an thumpers, and to respond by saying Arabic is important from a national security standpoint: after all, “we must learn the language of our enemy!” I’ve had plenty of friends whose parents pressured them into studying Russian for this reason, friends who wore baggy trousers and unconventional hair-dos and who were really more the Gaelic-by-correspondence type.

What we need to recognize is that teaching Arabic language and literature is important because Arabic language and literature are important. Imagine, for a moment, that – ha! – the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, the Palestine Question is settled to the universal satisfaction of everyone involved, all the corrupt dictators in the Middle East are replaced with democracies exquisitely attentive to human rights and international law, and mosques around the world announce that they will, from here on out, be giving their sermons in their native tongues. Does the need for Americans to learn about the Middle East magically disappear?

No. Because Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization, because the Holy Lands figure prominently in European history, and because there is a thousand-year-plus history of interaction between Christian and Muslim countries, resulting in countless futile deaths, true enough, but also countless advances in the arts and sciences. Americans might have misinterpreted the word “madrassa,” but there are other words imported from Muslim cultures that, historically, we’ve accepted without prejudice – “algebra,” to name just one example. Learning this isn’t important because we’re at war with an Arab country, or because we want to make Arab American students feel included in the curriculum. It’s important because it’s important. Full stop.

—kufigirl

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1. The Imugi at 21 June 07 :: #

   The point about Arab Christians is very well stated. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard American fundamentalist Christian wackos going on about how “Allah is not God”, while over in churches throughout the Middle East Christians are singing the praises of Allah. The sheer ignorance of the average American can be staggering…

   It’s funny you should write this now, because I’m starting Arabic classes in a week or two. :)

2. Purvis The Muslim at 21 June 07 :: #

   Lady, you are brilliant. There’s nothing more to say. I would almost say that you should submit this to the aforementioned NY Sun, but I’m sure that trying to communicate to a person like Alicia Colon in a publication that would employ a person such as she would be as useful as trying to get my cat to flush the toilet.

3. HijabMan at 21 June 07 :: #

   I should retire and leave you in charge :)

4. The Jolly Bengali at 21 June 07 :: #

   While we’re at it, we should eliminate Spanish classes from our schools since the language contains thousands of words of Arabic origin. Those terrorists are sneaky! They’re trying to infiltrate our country using the Spanish language!

5. fathima at 25 June 07 :: #

   Dear KufiGirl,
   I put off reading this post for so long, because I have no desire to waste brainspace on the likes of Daniel Pipe, but I was reading your interview with Hanne Blank and having finished that, decided to take the plunge and read this too.
   I am commenting now not just to say that I whole-heartedly agree with you, but also to thank you for writing so calmly. I find it myself very difficult to write about Pipe & Co, because I can’t find the requisite peace of mind in the midst of their clamouring to take on each of their points – without losing a little of myself. And I think this happens with most people who try to take on that kind of hate. And so I avoid reading pieces that directly respond to Pipe’s kind of ideocy, but instead try to approach these topics through byways.
   So it was nice for change to read an article like this without ending feeling that, despite all the intelligent, well read people out there, the world is fundamentally screwed.
   Thank you.

6. Shahbaz at 26 June 07 :: #

   I really enjoy reading your posts, and %100 agree with you on this issue. Keep em coming, they’re really interesting.

7. Raiyán at 8 July 07 :: #

   The fact that Khalil Gibran was not only a Arabic speaking Christian but also specifically did much to attempt to bridge the gap between Christianity and Islam is a puzzling irony in this case, this sort of bigotry is really sad, and beyond that it is astounding when it comes from a Harvard graduate and historian such as Daniel Pipes, but then again his situation is eerily similar to that of his father’s, who headed the notorious Team B during the Cold War, and was one of the “experts” on Russia who grossly miscalculated the power of the mythical Soviet military machine. The fact that so many pay credence to the this man’s fallacies is truly disconcerting.