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Arabic is now a major language post-9/11
There can be few subjects that unite Norwegian army officers, Uzbek religious students, Korean contractors and would-be CIA agents. A perhaps unintended consequence of the September 11 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington is that the Arabic language has become one.For different reasons the events triggered by September 11 have sparked an upsurge in the numbers of students learning Arabic across the world. This in turn has translated into booming business for Cairo, traditionally the centre of learning in the Middle East for both religious students and foreign diplomatic services. Language schools and university departments in Cairo that were considering closure five years ago are now struggling to keep up with an exponential rise in demand. "I couldn't have imagined when we opened that we would have all these students. I feared we would close in six months. But, praise Allah, George W. Bush has been doing our business well," said Raafat Amin, director of Kalimat, a school formed by a group of teachers after the British Council closed its own Arabic course. Several teachers and students said the biggest driver of demand had been the reality US and other western countries only recently woke up to: that the world was not as unipolar as they had believed it might be in the aftermath of the cold war. In the new world order, Arabic has joined Mandarin to become what Russian was to the cold war. The CIA at one point had to advertise its own embarrassing deficit by appealing for Arabic- language speakers on its website. Army officers from countries that sent troops to Iraq alongside the US in 2003 are still mostly ill-equipped to speak to Iraqi hearts and minds in a language that can take five years of study to master. They form some of the droves of students enrolling in immersion courses in Cairo language schools. Administrators at Cairo's burgeoning language schools sniff an opportunity to consolidate the trend in the recent US shift to "transformational diplomacy" announced by Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, and heralding a new proactive, hands-on kind of diplomat. But it is not only diplomats and would-be CIA agents, driven by a steep increase in US government funding for language students and the near certainty of employment afterwards, who are turning up in numbers. A group of Norwegian officers at Kalimat, who had studied for two years at home before spending an intensive two months in Cairo, said they could find themselves using their Arabic in a UN peace- keeping operation in Sudan. Barbara Hassib, managing director of Cairo's International Language Institute, where enrolment numbers have been rising 25 per cent each year, says demand from western countries has been accompanied by a steady increase in students from Korea and Japan. Other colleges said the Chinese are also turning up in small but growing numbers as Chinese business, energy and diplomatic interests in the Middle East expand. Alongside the established institutions are now a good number of charlatan outfits, as well as private tutors who have specialised in training expatriate spouses to haggle for vegetables and direct Cairo taxis. Just as spectacular is the rise in demand derived from the Islamic revival that has accompanied America's more aggressive foreign policy in the Muslim world. This has drawn back growing numbers of students from non-Arab parts of the Muslim world, from Indonesia, Africa and such central Asian republics as Uzbekistan. Waleed al-Gohary, the founder of Fajr, one of only two schools with govern- ment authorisation, says the number of students passing through his three schools in Cairo has risen from below 500 in 2000 to nearly 3,000 last year. Unlike the other schools, which tend to mix colloquial and standard Arabic, Fajr, meaning dawn, teaches only the classical language of the Koran. As such it tends, although not exclusively, to cater for religious students preparing to attend Cairo's Al Azhar university, the centre of religious learning in the Sunni Muslim world. Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-03-21 |
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