Yahoo's acquisition of Maktoob.com this year encourages start-ups and investors to work on online content and services for the world's 300 million Arabic speakers.
By Meris Lutz
Reporting from Beirut - When Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury started Maktoob.com as an Arabic e-mail service 10 years ago, they had a modest office in Amman, Jordan, and little support from friends and family who could not imagine anyone using the Internet in Arabic.
"We were a typical start-up; I remember the day we got air conditioning we had a party," Toukan recalled.
In August, Yahoo Inc. acquired Maktoob, now the largest Arabic portal, for a reported $80 million -- a milestone in the evolution of the Arabic Internet.
"When we started, there were barely a few thousand users," Toukan said. "Today we can say that the Internet has become a form of mass media with 50 to 60 million [Arabic speakers] online."
Though ubiquitous in the U.S. and many other parts of the world, the Internet has been slower to take hold in Arabic-speaking countries stymied by dictatorships, occupations and wars. Censorship, corruption, weak infrastructure and a scarcity of investors have also threatened to squash innovation and drive entrepreneurs away from the region.
Still, Arab start-ups are encouraged by the Yahoo-Maktoob deal. Investors seem to be taking notice as well, attracted by the relatively untapped market of some 300 million Arabic speakers who are increasingly logging on to the Internet but finding a dearth of content in their language.
The day after the Yahoo-Maktoob deal was announced, Habib Haddad, a Lebanese entrepreneur based in Boston, was contacted by four venture capital firms expressing interest in his transliterated Arabic search engine Yamli.
Yamli, which means "dictate" in Arabic, converts Latin letters into Arabic script. Queries can be entered in an alternative alphabet, made popular by mobile technology in the 1990s, of English letters with numbers and apostrophes standing in for Arabic letters that have no approximation in English. Search results include the keyword in Arabic or any possible English spelling.
For example, a search for Egyptian diva Oum Kalthoum in Arabic using Google’s Arabic search engine returns only pages containing her name in Arabic characters.
The same search using Yamli yields results in Arabic and English, neatly divided into two columns, including alternative spellings such as "2om Klthoum." (The "2" represents the Arabic character hamza, which indicates a glottal stop.)
"This is an example of innovation based on local culture, local understanding and local language. It's not a variation of western technologies," Haddad said. Still, he added, "you can have the smartest search engine in the world, but if you don't have content, it's useless."
Content is growing -- in proportion to popular interest, in some cases. Wikeez, a gossip site in English and Arabic, saw a huge spike in traffic after the death of Michael Jackson. Although most users searched for the pop superstar's name in English, Herve Cuviliez, the French venture capitalist overseeing the site, saw a chance to corner the Arabic market.
"You had a huge number of people who were looking for information on him in Arabic, so we really worked to fill that gap," Cuviliez said.
In addition to running Wikeez, Cuviliez is coordinating with France-based Euratechnologies to open Beirut Media City in Lebanon. The venture would provide office space and a support network for emerging IT companies.
Many challenges still face Internet entrepreneurs in the Arabic-speaking world. Funding structures are weak, and foreign investors are wary. Many countries lack the basic infrastructure to support local e-commerce, including a reliable Internet connection for electronic payment systems and a functioning door-to-door postal service. Corruption is endemic, and most Arab governments censor not only content but also services -- such as Skype, a program for making calls online -- that threaten a state monopoly.
But some Arab entrepreneurs are adapting and even flourishing despite tight government controls.
Saleh Al-Ziad, a 24-year-old Saudi programmer, said he created the popular URL-conversion service Untiny after the Saudi government blocked URL-shrinking site TinyURL.com, reportedly for security reasons. When given a shrunken Web address, Untiny retrieves the original so users can access it.
This kind of resourcefulness piqued the interest of Web entrepreneur Joichi Ito, chief executive of Creative Commons. Ito, an early investor in Internet start-ups including the Flickr photo-sharing site, recently moved his base of operations from Japan to Dubai, an Arab emirate.
"There is a lot of ingenuity and creativity in a resource-constrained environment, and that . . . can be tapped," he said. "There are businesses that can be created here that people in the U.S. or Japan would never think of."
Lutz is a special correspondent.
Times staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo contributed to this report.
Source: LA Times: Arabic-language Internet is coming of age
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Friday, 15 January 2010
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Dutch department store gives Arabic letters a sweet twist
In the Netherlands, the name day celebration of the children’s patron saint, Nicholas (Sinterklaas), on December 5, is more important than Christmas. It is thought that Santa Claus has his roots in Sinterklaas, who was known for his secret gift-giving. The theory is that it all started in the former Dutch colonial town of New Amsterdam, currently known as New York City. Either way, Sinterklaas is an important national holiday for 16 million people in the north of Europe and has its own traditional candied goodies to go with it.
One of the must-have sweets for the Dutch is a chocolate version of their initial. Children will leave carrots and hay in their shoes next to the chimney when they go to bed, hoping Sinterklaas, who rides around the rooftops on a white stallion, will exchange them for a small present and some sweets – this is where the chocolate letter comes in.
This year for the first time, the Dutch department store HEMA has offered something special for children from Arabic backgrounds – Arabic chocolate letters. The store offered two milk chocolate letters: the “S” and the “M”. The design department picked the “M” because many first names start with it and the “S” for Sinterklaas. Both weigh 125g and cost €2.95 (Dh16) a piece.
The HEMA (an acronym for Hollandse Eenheidsprijzen Maatschappij Amsterdam or Dutch Standard Prices Company Amsterdam) is well known for its contemporary design, decent products and ever-changing assortment. “Actually, our store is a small version of society,” Marianne Noordanus, a spokeswoman for the company, said. “Young and old, rich and poor, men and women. Our employees and our customers are a reflection of that. When our chocolate buyer suggested an Arabic chocolate letter, we decided to try it out.”
And it looks like it’s a hit. Although the company does not want to give out sales numbers, the HEMA website confirmed the “S” had sold out before December 5 and reactions were positive.
Strangely, it isn’t the first time that chocolate Arabic letters have been in the limelight in the small country, which has a population that includes nearly 20 per cent non-western immigrants. Two years ago, the cultural institution Mediamatic initiated a project with young local designers to fuel the public debate on mutual understanding between cultures.
They did this by creating an Arabic version of HEMA, said Willem Velthoven, a concept developer and project manager at Mediamatic. “We wanted to make an exhibition that would appeal to a wide audience and came up with the HEMA because it’s the temple of Dutch culture. It’s value for money, everything you need, clean, fresh, great design and very contemporary.”
El Hema, as the installation was named, whipped up a flurry of media attention. It sold the whole Arabic alphabet in chocolate, halal sausages, affordable high-quality headscarves, school notebooks with lining for Arabic from right to left and duvet covers with Arabic poetry. “The HEMA wasn’t very pleased that we went behind their backs,” Velthoven admitted. “But we managed to work things out, because it made a lot of people very happy.”
Source: The National: Dutch department store gives Arabic letters a sweet twist
Sunday, 23 August 2009
Arabic and friendship studies in Syria
The Syrian capital, Damascus, is becoming a popular destination for foreigners who want to learn Arabic. The BBC's Paul Moss, who spent time there earlier this year, was inspired to study hard by his encounters with the city's people.
Alex sent a text message to say he had been bitten by a snake. Perhaps I was unfair, but I reckoned he was making it up.
Among the great pantheon of excuses people have made for missing an exam, "attack by snake" must rate as one of the more implausible.
But Alex had sent the text message to several of my classmates, asking them to inform the authorities at Damascus University.
He would be absent, he said, from the final test for "Arabic level one" as he was still recovering from the venomous injury.
I doubt whether Alex's story will put many people off coming here.
Studying Arabic in Damascus is increasingly popular.
For anyone wanting to learn the language the city has become a Mecca, if you will pardon a somewhat inappropriate metaphor.
Continue reading: BBC-Arabic and friendship studies in Syria
Alex sent a text message to say he had been bitten by a snake. Perhaps I was unfair, but I reckoned he was making it up.
Among the great pantheon of excuses people have made for missing an exam, "attack by snake" must rate as one of the more implausible.
But Alex had sent the text message to several of my classmates, asking them to inform the authorities at Damascus University.
He would be absent, he said, from the final test for "Arabic level one" as he was still recovering from the venomous injury.
I doubt whether Alex's story will put many people off coming here.
Studying Arabic in Damascus is increasingly popular.
For anyone wanting to learn the language the city has become a Mecca, if you will pardon a somewhat inappropriate metaphor.
Continue reading: BBC-Arabic and friendship studies in Syria
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Language no barrier for Moroccan author
RABAT // In the room where she writes, Laila Lalami keeps a small stone with the Arabic word for “nation” painted on one end and “foreigner” painted on the other.
“But according to the root, you could also take it to mean ‘outsider’,” said Lalami, whose novel Secret Son comes out this month, speaking by telephone from her home in Santa Monica, California.
That word describes Lalami, a Moroccan novelist living outside her native country and working outside its main literary vehicles, French and Arabic. Writing in English, she is crashing through linguistic barriers that have long hindered Moroccan authors from reaching a world audience – and winning critical acclaim in the process.
Secret Son, Lalami’s second book, cements her place in the vanguard of a generation of Moroccan writers influenced less by the colonialism of the 20th century than by the globalisation of the 21st.
Modern literature in Morocco blossomed during 20th-century French rule that introduced the novel and brought foreign writers to the country. Many settled in Tangier, for decades under international administration, drawn by its cocktail of nationalities and partying lifestyle.
“It was a cultural gateway,” said Khalid Amine, professor of performance studies at the Abdelmalek Essaadi University in the nearby city of Tetouan. “Modernity came to Moroccan through Tangier.”
Tangier remained an artistic hub after Morocco gained independence in 1956. Moroccan writers mixed with sojourning foreigners such as Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams and William S Burroughs, and with the American writer Paul Bowles, who lived in Tangier from 1947 until his death in 1999.
It was Bowles who mentored a poor young Moroccan named Mohammed Choukri and translated his autobiographical For Bread Alone into English in 1973.
Choukri became a star of Morocco’s early literary scene. Some writers, including Choukri, wrote in Arabic. Others used French, a colonial legacy that still dominates much of Moroccan cultural life, business and education.
“I grew up with books in the house,” said Lalami, who developed a taste for writing as a child in the 1970s in Rabat, the capital. “Most bookstores carried children’s literature in French, so when I started writing it was in French.”
English came in high school and university. Armed with a grant from the British Council, Lalami decamped for postgraduate studies at University College London, eventually earning a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Southern California.
In the midst of writing her dissertation, she decided to try her hand at composing fiction in English.
“I felt that there was too much of a colonial relationship with French,” she said. “It’s used in Morocco to indicate social class and educational level – it’s not neutral.”
Secret Son tells the story of Youssef, a poor young Casablancan who discovers that the father he believed dead is very much alive, and a member of the country’s glossy elite. Youssef embarks on a quest for identity in Casablanca’s messy confluence of westernisation and conservative Islam, “with disastrous consequences”, Lalami said.
“Most of our problems emanate from the compromise between East and West, tradition and modernity, religion and secularism,” said Mr Amine, from the Abdelmalek Essaadi University. “These are the main questions reflected in our arts.”
“Globalisation is not just a concept for the average Moroccan, it’s a reality,” Lalami said. “If you are in Morocco, you see how much the rest of the world penetrates the country.”
Lalami has come of age as Morocco has opened economically, seeking to position itself as major tourist destination and regional hub of business and commerce. That puts her among a young generation of Moroccan artists who are both products and chroniclers of globalisation.
University reading lists are reflecting the change, said Mr Amine. “Ten years ago we taught almost exclusively French literature, but now students are reading Moroccan writers.”
Some critics have portrayed Lalami as an emerging national voice.
Only some three per cent of books published in the US are translated foreign works. That makes Lalami one of a handful of Moroccan authors appearing in the language of globalisation.
“I am aware of an enormous responsibility, because many books written in English get translated into other languages,” she said. But she is not interested in serving as “a spokesperson for any kind of idea about Morocco”.
“I just want readers to journey with the characters and get to know their lives.”
“But according to the root, you could also take it to mean ‘outsider’,” said Lalami, whose novel Secret Son comes out this month, speaking by telephone from her home in Santa Monica, California.
That word describes Lalami, a Moroccan novelist living outside her native country and working outside its main literary vehicles, French and Arabic. Writing in English, she is crashing through linguistic barriers that have long hindered Moroccan authors from reaching a world audience – and winning critical acclaim in the process.
Secret Son, Lalami’s second book, cements her place in the vanguard of a generation of Moroccan writers influenced less by the colonialism of the 20th century than by the globalisation of the 21st.
Modern literature in Morocco blossomed during 20th-century French rule that introduced the novel and brought foreign writers to the country. Many settled in Tangier, for decades under international administration, drawn by its cocktail of nationalities and partying lifestyle.
“It was a cultural gateway,” said Khalid Amine, professor of performance studies at the Abdelmalek Essaadi University in the nearby city of Tetouan. “Modernity came to Moroccan through Tangier.”
Tangier remained an artistic hub after Morocco gained independence in 1956. Moroccan writers mixed with sojourning foreigners such as Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams and William S Burroughs, and with the American writer Paul Bowles, who lived in Tangier from 1947 until his death in 1999.
It was Bowles who mentored a poor young Moroccan named Mohammed Choukri and translated his autobiographical For Bread Alone into English in 1973.
Choukri became a star of Morocco’s early literary scene. Some writers, including Choukri, wrote in Arabic. Others used French, a colonial legacy that still dominates much of Moroccan cultural life, business and education.
“I grew up with books in the house,” said Lalami, who developed a taste for writing as a child in the 1970s in Rabat, the capital. “Most bookstores carried children’s literature in French, so when I started writing it was in French.”
English came in high school and university. Armed with a grant from the British Council, Lalami decamped for postgraduate studies at University College London, eventually earning a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Southern California.
In the midst of writing her dissertation, she decided to try her hand at composing fiction in English.
“I felt that there was too much of a colonial relationship with French,” she said. “It’s used in Morocco to indicate social class and educational level – it’s not neutral.”
Secret Son tells the story of Youssef, a poor young Casablancan who discovers that the father he believed dead is very much alive, and a member of the country’s glossy elite. Youssef embarks on a quest for identity in Casablanca’s messy confluence of westernisation and conservative Islam, “with disastrous consequences”, Lalami said.
“Most of our problems emanate from the compromise between East and West, tradition and modernity, religion and secularism,” said Mr Amine, from the Abdelmalek Essaadi University. “These are the main questions reflected in our arts.”
“Globalisation is not just a concept for the average Moroccan, it’s a reality,” Lalami said. “If you are in Morocco, you see how much the rest of the world penetrates the country.”
Lalami has come of age as Morocco has opened economically, seeking to position itself as major tourist destination and regional hub of business and commerce. That puts her among a young generation of Moroccan artists who are both products and chroniclers of globalisation.
University reading lists are reflecting the change, said Mr Amine. “Ten years ago we taught almost exclusively French literature, but now students are reading Moroccan writers.”
Some critics have portrayed Lalami as an emerging national voice.
Only some three per cent of books published in the US are translated foreign works. That makes Lalami one of a handful of Moroccan authors appearing in the language of globalisation.
“I am aware of an enormous responsibility, because many books written in English get translated into other languages,” she said. But she is not interested in serving as “a spokesperson for any kind of idea about Morocco”.
“I just want readers to journey with the characters and get to know their lives.”
Sunday, 22 March 2009
Classical Arabic makes a comeback
ABU DHABI // Classical Arabic is catching on as a spoken language, thanks to interactive news media, and shedding its aura as the preserve of religious and official circles, according to a leading linguistics professor.
Dr Ahmed Abdullah Ferhadi, the director of the Arabic language programme at New York University, said in Abu Dhabi last week that people were not merely recipients of news any more, but could make their own contributions via internet forums and television and radio programmes that invited audience participation.
For example, the Doha-based Al Jazeera network, one of the leading Arabic news channels, had made its airwaves available for Arabic speakers to comment on political and social issues.
In most such cases, he said, the participants used a form of classical Arabic in order to be understood as widely as possible across the Arab world.
“Classical Arabic is no longer the language of discourse whose usage is confined to formal occasions and limited to lecturers, religious leaders and news anchors,” Dr Ferhadi told an audience at the Emirates Centre for Strategic Research and Studies last week. It has now also become the language of the ordinary person.”
Classical Arabic is considered an inseparable part of the Arab identity, the only language, according to some, that ultimately unifies the Arab world, which is made up of populations from different ethnicities and religions.
It has also been argued historically that there is a religious duty to protect the language of the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed.
Dr Ferhadi noted that in the UAE, Arabic faced a particular challenge from the make-up of the population.
“The citizen to non-citizen ratio is one to seven, which is the highest in the world,” he said. “There are 200 nationalities, 150 ethnicities and 100 languages spoken in the UAE.”
He urged the Government to tackle the issue by offering incentives for people to learn the language rather than forcing them to. Incentives could include benefits for new employees with better language skills.
The debate over the dangers facing Arabic were usually focused on its formal or classical form, also known as al fus-ha. Most specialists who spoke and wrote on the issue expressed no concern over dangers facing everyday Arabic.
On the contrary, attempts to read news bulletins in colloquial Arabic in some Lebanese and Egyptian channels were fiercely criticised and sometimes accused of being part of a conspiracy against classical Arabic.
Although Dr Ferhadi viewed the interactive mass communication media favourably he still questioned the type of language used in these forums.
He gave examples of broken classical Arabic from a sample that he gathered from comments made on an interview with US President Barack Obama on Al Arabiya news network in January.
“Interacting with radio and TV made classical Arabic more common, but is it really classical Arabic? Classical Arabic is being slaughtered,” he said.
“The correct use of classical Arabic depends on the extent of the speaker’s commitment to, or rather awareness of, its grammar and morphology.”
Dr Ferhadi made it clear that preserving classical Arabic did not mean that the language should not change and develop.
“Language is democratic and it will change whether we like it or not,” he said, challenging some conservative theories that view the Arabic language as a holy lexicon that is inherently connected with Islam.
No one knew the Arabic word for “fridge” 100 years ago, he said, illustrating the language’s ability to accommodate newly coined words. He said even a word of internet blogs had already been coined.
He suggested that one way to make learning classical Arabic easier was through simplifying its grammar.
“We need some reasoning for grammar, rather than giving old examples to say that is why it’s the right way to say things,” he said, adding that examples of modern Arabic music using classical Arabic lyrics could be one way to stimulate interest in the learning process.
Dr Ahmed Abdullah Ferhadi, the director of the Arabic language programme at New York University, said in Abu Dhabi last week that people were not merely recipients of news any more, but could make their own contributions via internet forums and television and radio programmes that invited audience participation.
For example, the Doha-based Al Jazeera network, one of the leading Arabic news channels, had made its airwaves available for Arabic speakers to comment on political and social issues.
In most such cases, he said, the participants used a form of classical Arabic in order to be understood as widely as possible across the Arab world.
“Classical Arabic is no longer the language of discourse whose usage is confined to formal occasions and limited to lecturers, religious leaders and news anchors,” Dr Ferhadi told an audience at the Emirates Centre for Strategic Research and Studies last week. It has now also become the language of the ordinary person.”
Classical Arabic is considered an inseparable part of the Arab identity, the only language, according to some, that ultimately unifies the Arab world, which is made up of populations from different ethnicities and religions.
It has also been argued historically that there is a religious duty to protect the language of the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed.
Dr Ferhadi noted that in the UAE, Arabic faced a particular challenge from the make-up of the population.
“The citizen to non-citizen ratio is one to seven, which is the highest in the world,” he said. “There are 200 nationalities, 150 ethnicities and 100 languages spoken in the UAE.”
He urged the Government to tackle the issue by offering incentives for people to learn the language rather than forcing them to. Incentives could include benefits for new employees with better language skills.
The debate over the dangers facing Arabic were usually focused on its formal or classical form, also known as al fus-ha. Most specialists who spoke and wrote on the issue expressed no concern over dangers facing everyday Arabic.
On the contrary, attempts to read news bulletins in colloquial Arabic in some Lebanese and Egyptian channels were fiercely criticised and sometimes accused of being part of a conspiracy against classical Arabic.
Although Dr Ferhadi viewed the interactive mass communication media favourably he still questioned the type of language used in these forums.
He gave examples of broken classical Arabic from a sample that he gathered from comments made on an interview with US President Barack Obama on Al Arabiya news network in January.
“Interacting with radio and TV made classical Arabic more common, but is it really classical Arabic? Classical Arabic is being slaughtered,” he said.
“The correct use of classical Arabic depends on the extent of the speaker’s commitment to, or rather awareness of, its grammar and morphology.”
Dr Ferhadi made it clear that preserving classical Arabic did not mean that the language should not change and develop.
“Language is democratic and it will change whether we like it or not,” he said, challenging some conservative theories that view the Arabic language as a holy lexicon that is inherently connected with Islam.
No one knew the Arabic word for “fridge” 100 years ago, he said, illustrating the language’s ability to accommodate newly coined words. He said even a word of internet blogs had already been coined.
He suggested that one way to make learning classical Arabic easier was through simplifying its grammar.
“We need some reasoning for grammar, rather than giving old examples to say that is why it’s the right way to say things,” he said, adding that examples of modern Arabic music using classical Arabic lyrics could be one way to stimulate interest in the learning process.
Saturday, 21 March 2009
Report Highlights Challenges of Expanding Study-Abroad Opportunities in the Middle East
Enrollment in Middle East studies and Arabic-language programs on American college campuses continues to rise, yet the number of American students who spend time studying in the Middle East remains low, according to a white paper issued this week by the Institute of International Education.
The report, "Expanding U.S. Study Abroad in the Arab World: Challenges and Opportunities," grew out of a workshop held last year for representatives of American and Middle Eastern universities that looked at ways to expand study-abroad opportunities in the Arab world.
Participants attributed the small presence of American students at Arab institutions to several key factors. They include deep concerns among American students over safety in the Middle East, questions among American administrators over the academic quality of many Arab institutions, and the challenges inherent in Arabic-language instruction.
Of the American students who enroll in for-credit study-abroad programs, only one percent of them—just 2,200 students—study at institutions based in the Arab world, the report notes. What’s more, 80 per cent of those students are concentrated in three countries: Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco.
The report says that most American colleges grant credit for relatively few study-abroad programs in the Middle East, usually only for those they manage or those that are closely affiliated with other American institutions.
The workshop, organized by the institute and the Hollings Center for International Dialogue, convened at Al Akhawayn University, in Ifrane, Morocco, last March. Representatives came from 19 universities in 11 Arab countries. There were also 14 representatives from American colleges and organizations that develop study-abroad programs.
In addition to looking at the causes of low enrollments, participants also tried to come up with some ways to encourage the growth in study-abroad programs in the Arab world. Among other things, they encouraged the development of a consortia of Arab-world institutions to share resources and advice, and to better market themselves to an American audience.
Although the quality of programs offered varies widely across institutions in the Middle East, the report concludes that American college administrators often have unrealistic expectations that a quality study-abroad program will exactly match American curricula. The academic culture at Arab institutions may be quite different—placing an emphasis on memorization over critical thinking—yet to reject partnerships because of that, the report states, defeats the larger goals of study abroad, such as exposing students to a different way of life.
Fears About Safety
Continue reading
The report, "Expanding U.S. Study Abroad in the Arab World: Challenges and Opportunities," grew out of a workshop held last year for representatives of American and Middle Eastern universities that looked at ways to expand study-abroad opportunities in the Arab world.
Participants attributed the small presence of American students at Arab institutions to several key factors. They include deep concerns among American students over safety in the Middle East, questions among American administrators over the academic quality of many Arab institutions, and the challenges inherent in Arabic-language instruction.
Of the American students who enroll in for-credit study-abroad programs, only one percent of them—just 2,200 students—study at institutions based in the Arab world, the report notes. What’s more, 80 per cent of those students are concentrated in three countries: Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco.
The report says that most American colleges grant credit for relatively few study-abroad programs in the Middle East, usually only for those they manage or those that are closely affiliated with other American institutions.
The workshop, organized by the institute and the Hollings Center for International Dialogue, convened at Al Akhawayn University, in Ifrane, Morocco, last March. Representatives came from 19 universities in 11 Arab countries. There were also 14 representatives from American colleges and organizations that develop study-abroad programs.
In addition to looking at the causes of low enrollments, participants also tried to come up with some ways to encourage the growth in study-abroad programs in the Arab world. Among other things, they encouraged the development of a consortia of Arab-world institutions to share resources and advice, and to better market themselves to an American audience.
Although the quality of programs offered varies widely across institutions in the Middle East, the report concludes that American college administrators often have unrealistic expectations that a quality study-abroad program will exactly match American curricula. The academic culture at Arab institutions may be quite different—placing an emphasis on memorization over critical thinking—yet to reject partnerships because of that, the report states, defeats the larger goals of study abroad, such as exposing students to a different way of life.
Fears About Safety
Continue reading
Monday, 16 March 2009
Egyptian wins Arabic Booker prize
Yusuf Zeydan has won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) with his novel Beelzebub, it was announced at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi last night.
The Egyptian author was one of six writers to be shortlisted for the prize, otherwise known as the Arabic Booker, and wins a total of US$60,000 (Dh220,380) as well as an English translation of his work paid for by the Granta magazine owner, Sigrid Rausing. Beelzebub is a poetically told story of the religious and cultural schisms caused by the Roman Empire’s appropriation of Christianity in the fifth century in upper Egypt, Alexandria and northern Syria. Receiving his prize from Mohammed Ahmad al Bowardi, the Secretary General of the Executive Council and board member of the Emirates Foundation, Zeydan said: “This prize is indeed a landmark in my life that will make me deal with even more seriousness in my approach to writing, and will encourage me to surpass borders in creativity. This prize is distinguished by its integrity, its international calibre and the fact that it is closely related to the long-standing Booker Prize. There is no doubt that the precise work of analysing the novels will contribute to the interaction between Arabic and international literature.”
Each of the five other finalists receives US$10,000. The IPAF, an award for the best new novel in the Arabic language, was officially launched in 2007. It is a collaboration between the philanthropic Emirates Foundation and the British charity the Booker Foundation, which awards the Man Booker Prize. Dr Jonathan Taylor, the chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation and chairman of the board of trustees for the IPAF, said before the award: “I think what the two prizes have shown, with the enormous number of entries from all over the Arab world, is that there’s a huge wealth of high-quality fiction in Arabic. What this award will do is to make the literature available both in translation and to get it more widely read in the Arabic world.”
In a speech at the ceremony, Ahmed Ali al Sayegh, the managing director of the Emirates Foundation, commented: “The IPAF award is one of the best ways to support both new Arab creative writing and its translation into the world’s leading languages.” He emphasised that a key long-term aim for the prize was “to increase global readership of Arabic literature, through the widest possible publication and distribution of contemporary Arabic fiction in translation”
The Egyptian author was one of six writers to be shortlisted for the prize, otherwise known as the Arabic Booker, and wins a total of US$60,000 (Dh220,380) as well as an English translation of his work paid for by the Granta magazine owner, Sigrid Rausing. Beelzebub is a poetically told story of the religious and cultural schisms caused by the Roman Empire’s appropriation of Christianity in the fifth century in upper Egypt, Alexandria and northern Syria. Receiving his prize from Mohammed Ahmad al Bowardi, the Secretary General of the Executive Council and board member of the Emirates Foundation, Zeydan said: “This prize is indeed a landmark in my life that will make me deal with even more seriousness in my approach to writing, and will encourage me to surpass borders in creativity. This prize is distinguished by its integrity, its international calibre and the fact that it is closely related to the long-standing Booker Prize. There is no doubt that the precise work of analysing the novels will contribute to the interaction between Arabic and international literature.”
Each of the five other finalists receives US$10,000. The IPAF, an award for the best new novel in the Arabic language, was officially launched in 2007. It is a collaboration between the philanthropic Emirates Foundation and the British charity the Booker Foundation, which awards the Man Booker Prize. Dr Jonathan Taylor, the chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation and chairman of the board of trustees for the IPAF, said before the award: “I think what the two prizes have shown, with the enormous number of entries from all over the Arab world, is that there’s a huge wealth of high-quality fiction in Arabic. What this award will do is to make the literature available both in translation and to get it more widely read in the Arabic world.”
In a speech at the ceremony, Ahmed Ali al Sayegh, the managing director of the Emirates Foundation, commented: “The IPAF award is one of the best ways to support both new Arab creative writing and its translation into the world’s leading languages.” He emphasised that a key long-term aim for the prize was “to increase global readership of Arabic literature, through the widest possible publication and distribution of contemporary Arabic fiction in translation”
Saturday, 7 March 2009
What Arabia lost in translation
When the Muslim armies were on the move, defeating their enemies in battle and giving birth to a glorious and widespread empire, it was the translator who brought home the greatest prize.As warriors overran foreign cities, he entered the libraries of earlier civilisations and redrafted in Arabic the wisdom found there, allowing Islamic scholars to absorb the knowledge of thinkers who had gone before.
His work laid the foundation for a golden age, strengthening the Islamic empire and making Arabic the global language of the time.
In this medieval period, the activity of translation had two clear objectives: to enrich the Arab world with what the rest of the world had to offer; and to enrich the rest of the world with what the Arab world had to offer.
Consequently, centres of learning and splendour, unrivalled in their time, were created in Baghdad in the east and in Cordoba in the west.
Today this tradition of translation has faltered. Modern Arabic translation fails to fulfil either of those early objectives in any comprehensive way.
For historical reasons, both colonial and postcolonial, there exist difficulties that are hard to reconcile. Today there is a lack of social awareness about the importance of translation, while trained and competent translators are few and far between. In addition there appears to be little political will to promote translation across the Arab world.
Arabic translation receives neither the same attention nor encouragement as it does in Europe and America, nor does it enjoy the prestige bestowed upon its medieval ancestor.
The reason appears to be that translation is viewed as having no independent identity. Rather it is assigned a secondary status within language departments and seen as auxiliary to allied curricula.
There is very little documentation about training or the books translated. Available data show the meek state and status of Arabic translation. Shahada al Khouri reports in Translation: Past and Present (published in Arabic), for example, that between 1970 and 1980 the Arab states together translated only 2,840 books into Arabic.
That such a small number of books should be translated over a decade for a population of some 200 million people demonstrates the low esteem in which the discipline is held.
Furthermore, the great majority of these books were for university students and most, if not all, were reworked by university teachers not properly trained as translators but chosen because of their expertise in their field.
Often this approach sacrifices quality for a quick return. University teachers and publishers profit because students are required to buy textbooks, but those who carry out the translations have little training, knowledge or appreciation of the discipline’s ethics or its mission as a bridging activity between cultures and as a catalyst of progress.
During Al-Mamoun’s Caliphate (813-833), some 386 books on philosophy, mathematics and medicine were translated into Arabic.
This was achieved despite the fact that acquisition of these books and the production of the translations were hugely laborious and time-consuming activities.
One might wonder why some 22 Arab nations with all the advantages of modern technology at their disposal could only manage 2,840 translations between them.
This compares with Spain, which translates some 10,000 books a year into Spanish, and Brazil, which translates the same number into Portuguese every four years or so.
Translation, involving as it does processing, decision-making, problem-solving, and other creative activities, falls outside the mainstream practice of education in most Arab countries.
The problems facing translation and the training of people to carry out the work cannot, therefore, be effectively resolved until the problems of education in general are addressed and clear policies for Arabicisation and the social realities of the Arab world are drawn up with sense and sensibility.
What steps have been taken over the years to train translators are the results of ad hoc political decisions and the endeavours of well-intentioned individuals. But these measures have no pan-Arab ramifications.
If the situation regarding general translation is poor, when it comes to children’s literature it is absolutely dire. In the Arab world the translation of children’s books is almost non-existent.
Yasir Suleiman, a professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge and a trustee of the Abu Dhabi International Prize for Arab Fiction, known as the Arab Booker, comments on translation for Arab children in Translation, Representation and Identity in Intercultural Translation (which I edited). He says: “Even the most basic information is lacking on which empirically to base research, including a list of translated works into Arabic which would provide the necessary data for describing existing selection practice, and whether this practice is accidental, or fits into a rational policy or set of coherent policies.”
Translation for Arab children, like its adult counterpart, urgently requires a clear pan-Arab decision to extend the diversification of sources, which are currently mostly English or French. Programmes are also required to train translators in the nuances of children’s literature. One solution could be to establish a body, perhaps under the auspices of the Arab League, to oversee such translations.
In general terms, modern Arabic translation suffers from serious ailments. For it to regain some state and status, the following points need to be addressed seriously and urgently:
• The state of education, in general, and of Arabic and foreign languages, in particular, needs to be overhauled.
• The social status of translation needs to be improved.
• A large-scale and sustained push to publish and distribute native and translated books needs to be undertaken.
• An organised, state-sponsored and pan-Arab co-ordinated translation movement needs to be launched that can “imitate” medieval Arabic translation.
• Truly competent-cum-expert translators need to be trained and an open “shopping list” of source texts drawn up that covers all areas of knowledge.
• Clear policies need to be established for translation as a project of national importance and pride.
• Collective efforts and clear strategies need to be devised to deal with and hopefully solve the problems of terminology as well as other issues relating to machine translation, translation memory and language engineering systems.
• A strategic plan should be drawn up for the choice of texts for translation and pan-Arab shared databases of translation activities.
• And, of course, the provision of generous funding needs to be forthcoming.
The recently established translation organisations in the Gulf region, notably in the Emirates, are encouraging beacons for a renaissance of translation in the Arab world. Such organisations should be encouraged and “copied” in other Arab countries with a view to establishing networks of translation that can be linked together for the benefits of the Arab world.
The great cultural shifts of history have been made possible because of translation. Medieval Arabic translation is a clear case in point and today’s Arab world needs to re-enact that movement. Translation as a socio-cultural enterprise cannot be left to ad hocness. It should rather be at the centre of priorities as it remains the sure means of benefiting from and being contributing partners to knowledge in a rapidly globalised world.
Dr Said Faiq is a professor of Translation & Intercultural Studies at the American University of Sharjah. He is a Visiting Professor at Exeter University in Britain.
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
Shakespeare studied in Arabic
ABU DHABI // “The king’s name is a tower of strength”, the immortal words from Shakespeare’s tragedy Richard III, ring true in any language. And soon, university students here will be hearing them performed on stage for the first time in Arabic.
Students at two of the country’s biggest universities, Zayed University and the UAE University in Al Ain, are studying a translated version of the text in the run-up to the staging of an Arabic version of the play.
The initiative, launched by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach), may pave the way for Shakespeare’s works to be introduced permanently to university curriculums.
The official name of the text being taught is Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, by Sulayman al Bassam, a director and playwright from Kuwait. Mr al Bassam will also conduct drama workshops with the students.
Nezar Andary, assistant professor in humanities at Zayed University, has been teaching Mr al Bassam’s script to his drama students this week.
He said that while the language was difficult to deal with at first, it gave them an extra dimension of understanding.
“The translation is a mixture of fus-hah [classical] Arabic, colloquial Khaleeji dialect and some English. It wasn’t easy for everyone to handle. Some students appreciated it and some didn’t, some of those more immersed in Arabic culture helped me to understand it further. But in the end their knowledge of Shakespeare will be greatly enhanced by this play.”
Mr Andary said Richard III was one of Shakespeare’s most important plays in terms of language. King Richard’s soliloquies, which take up a large portion of the original script, were powerful, he said, and at times extremely manipulative.
“Richard III is a typical Machiavellian character whose language is very strong. He spends more than three quarters of the play on stage and in that time he persuades people to do things they don’t want to. For example, he seduces Lady Anne, a woman whose husband and father he has killed, and he sends one of his lords to kill his nephews.
“To understand the strength of his words in Arabic as well as in English allows the students to see the importance of the villain as a role not just in Shakespeare’s time but today,” Mr Andary explained.
He added that he put the play in historical context by teaching students about the War of the Roses in late 15th-century England. Mr al Bassam moved the action to an oil-rich feudal kingdom in his version, first performed in Stratford-upon Avon in 2007.
Richard III: An Arab Tragedy is not the first classical work to be translated for Arabic audiences. Last year Abu Dhabi Classics staged the first Arabic performance of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni and this weekend a translated version of The Marriage of Figaro will be presented in Al Ain.
Abdullah al Amri, director of the arts and culture department at Adach, said the latest collaboration with the universities would highlight the importance of drama education and the classical traditions of international theatre.
“Theatre should not only be entertainment, but also an educational formative experience, and an aspiration for higher thoughts and analysis of the universal human condition,” he said, adding that the Richard III production would help to promote contemporary Arabic theatre.
Mr Andary commented: “There are many traditional and avant-garde plays coming from within the UAE. In Sharjah, for example, in the next two weeks there is a theatre festival with many local shows.”
The translation of works should be “a two-way street”, he said. “If they translate Shakespeare to Arabic they should also translate Arab plays into English.”
Students at two of the country’s biggest universities, Zayed University and the UAE University in Al Ain, are studying a translated version of the text in the run-up to the staging of an Arabic version of the play.
The initiative, launched by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach), may pave the way for Shakespeare’s works to be introduced permanently to university curriculums.
The official name of the text being taught is Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, by Sulayman al Bassam, a director and playwright from Kuwait. Mr al Bassam will also conduct drama workshops with the students.
Nezar Andary, assistant professor in humanities at Zayed University, has been teaching Mr al Bassam’s script to his drama students this week.
He said that while the language was difficult to deal with at first, it gave them an extra dimension of understanding.
“The translation is a mixture of fus-hah [classical] Arabic, colloquial Khaleeji dialect and some English. It wasn’t easy for everyone to handle. Some students appreciated it and some didn’t, some of those more immersed in Arabic culture helped me to understand it further. But in the end their knowledge of Shakespeare will be greatly enhanced by this play.”
Mr Andary said Richard III was one of Shakespeare’s most important plays in terms of language. King Richard’s soliloquies, which take up a large portion of the original script, were powerful, he said, and at times extremely manipulative.
“Richard III is a typical Machiavellian character whose language is very strong. He spends more than three quarters of the play on stage and in that time he persuades people to do things they don’t want to. For example, he seduces Lady Anne, a woman whose husband and father he has killed, and he sends one of his lords to kill his nephews.
“To understand the strength of his words in Arabic as well as in English allows the students to see the importance of the villain as a role not just in Shakespeare’s time but today,” Mr Andary explained.
He added that he put the play in historical context by teaching students about the War of the Roses in late 15th-century England. Mr al Bassam moved the action to an oil-rich feudal kingdom in his version, first performed in Stratford-upon Avon in 2007.
Richard III: An Arab Tragedy is not the first classical work to be translated for Arabic audiences. Last year Abu Dhabi Classics staged the first Arabic performance of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni and this weekend a translated version of The Marriage of Figaro will be presented in Al Ain.
Abdullah al Amri, director of the arts and culture department at Adach, said the latest collaboration with the universities would highlight the importance of drama education and the classical traditions of international theatre.
“Theatre should not only be entertainment, but also an educational formative experience, and an aspiration for higher thoughts and analysis of the universal human condition,” he said, adding that the Richard III production would help to promote contemporary Arabic theatre.
Mr Andary commented: “There are many traditional and avant-garde plays coming from within the UAE. In Sharjah, for example, in the next two weeks there is a theatre festival with many local shows.”
The translation of works should be “a two-way street”, he said. “If they translate Shakespeare to Arabic they should also translate Arab plays into English.”
Thursday, 1 January 2009
Prison-house of language
Abdelfattah Kilito’s new book explores Arabic literature’s long, tortured relationship with translation. Meditating on the perils and possibilities of multilingualism, Kanishk Tharoor reads across the divide.
Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language
Abdelfattah Kilito
Translated by Wail S Hassan
Syracuse University Press
Dh95
In the much-quoted 2002 Arab Human Development Report, literature stood as a barometer for stagnation and cupidity in the Arab world. According to the UN-sponsored study, there was a paucity of new, dynamic writing on the market, where “religious books and educational publications that are limited in their creative content” held sway. Moreover, dialogue between the sacred realm of the Arab language and the world outside was meagre. The report noted that “the figures for translated books are also discouraging. The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Ma’mun’s time is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year.” Published in the bellicose early years of the now winded “war on terror”, the report’s blizzard of statistics have since been challenged. (Spain, for example, translates less than 10,000 books each year.) But at the time the report provided damning evidence for critics of the Arab world: open societies required an open exchange of literatures.
But translation, particularly in the world of Arabic letters, has never been an innocent or simple process. In his slim, energetic work Though Shalt Not Speak My Language, the Moroccan scholar Abdelfattah Kilito burrows into the age-old problem of the translation of Arabic literature. The book, itself translated from Arabic, privileges anecdote over argument, drifting playfully through the centuries to explore the relationship between the Arab and the foreign. Kilito indulges in a wide panoramic view, taking into account writings of numerous periods and styles, including ninth century theoretical musings on Persian-Arabic translation, various accounts of Arab travel writing (including Ibn Battuta’s famous journey to China), and passages from 20th century crime novels. This disparate material is shaped by the premise that there is something essentially unsound and compromised about the very act of translation, and that foreigners have yet to treat Arabic literature with appropriate sensitivity and care.
Arabic occupies a rather lonely place in the landscape of world languages. With the possible exceptions of Chinese and Tamil, no other major modern idiom enjoys such a long, unbroken scriptural history. Classical Arabic remains intelligible to much of the literate Arab world, while most other modern languages only emerged in their current written form in the last 600 years. Modern Greek is gobbledygook compared to its ancient predecessor; French is the ruins of a ravaged Roman Gaul; English is the flighty, Latinised step-child of earthy Anglo-Saxon; Hindi (and Urdu) are the mongrel beasts of Mughal army camps in South Asia. Arabic in the 21st century looks into the mirror of its antiquity and sees a familiar reflection. Its continuity can be threaded through the centuries, endowing contemporaries with both a deep sense of the coherence of Arab linguistic traditions and the burden of their legacy.
At the same time, the Arabic language has always been surrounded by others. From the days of the first caliphs, Arab intellectual history was framed by interaction with other languages. Kilito – echoing fairly conventional wisdom – places the high noon of Arab thought and writing in the period between the seventh and 13th centuries. As Arab forces gobbled up the lands of the Persian and Byzantine empires, Arab scholars absorbed Persian and Greek texts. Translation here was principally one-way, from ancient languages like Greek, Persian and Syriac into Arabic. It was guided by the arrogant but understandable assumption that those seeking knowledge should now do so in Arabic; at its peak the caliphate was the real heir of both the Mediterranean power of Rome and the universal pretensions of Persian kingship. Much has been written and said in recent years about how the accumulated lore of other lands stirred a cauldron of intellectual ferment in the Arab world, and about how the eventual flowering of the Renaissance in southern and western Europe rested on the soil of Arab knowledge. In this period, Arabic indisputably surpassed its regional competitors as the principal vehicle – and engine – of scholarly innovation.
But while numerous philosophical, historical and scientific works crossed into Arabic, barely any poetry made the same journey. Al Jahiz, the ninth century Afro-Arab writer, Arab scholars had already begun to argue that while it was possible to translate philosophy, the same could not be said of literature. In fluent close readings, Kilito shows how al Jahiz distinguished between the two; the “universality” of philosophy allowed it to be shared across tongues, while the “particularity” of poetry confined it to its language. How can schemes of alliteration, rhythm, and word play be made sufficiently legible in the parallel universe of another language? Poetry in its very nature resists the estranging force of translation.
Al Jahiz maintained a fundamental distrust of translation and the translator, and he suggested multilingualism was a form of failure: “Whenever we find [the translator] speaking two languages, we know that he has mistreated both of them, for each one of the two languages pulls at the other, takes from it, and opposes it.” Some echo of this belief is present in the possible association between the modern verb to translate, tarjam, and the root verb rajam, which means, among other things, to throw an object through space (as in stoning, but also as in shooting stars and, by association, spell casting); in this sense the practise of translation, or tarjamah, may carry a subconscious connotation of arbitrariness, unreliability, or transgression.
Kilito himself seems to share in this distrust, but his own suspicion grows from more modern, political roots in the inversion of power relations with Europe and in the experience of colonialism. Breached and looted, Arabic has been invaded by the west. The problem now is not one of translating into Arabic, but of the implications of translation from Arabic. “The fundamental change for us in the modern age,” Kilito says, “is that the process of reading and writing is always attended with potential translation, the possibility of transfer into other literatures, something that never occurred to the ancients, who conceived of translation only within Arabic literature.” Classical Arab poets never considered the world of letters beyond their own. Their contemporary counterparts have no option but to do so.
Europeans since the 19th century have had none of al Jahiz’s qualms about translation, and have eagerly studied and translated works from Arabic; Kilito’s roaming explorations spring in part from his disquiet at how foreigners have misappropriated Arab writing. He is particularly startled by the insistence of the French Orientalist Charles Pellat – who devoted much of his career to the study of al Jahiz – that all Arab literature “produces a sense of boredom”. European interpreters of Arab writing, Kilito says, find it “boring unless it bears a family resemblance to European literature.”
The translation of Arab literature into western languages yokes it to western sensibilities and conventions. As Kilito muses, “Who can read an Arab poet or novelist today without establishing a relationship between him and his European peers? We Arabs have invented a special way of reading: we read an Arabic text while thinking about the possibility of transferring it into a European language.” That long thread of Arab language and culture unravels under the heat of the European gaze. “Woe to the writers for whom we find no European counterparts: we simply turn away from them, leaving them in a dark, abandoned isthmus, a passage without mirrors to reflect their shadow or save them from loss and deathlike abandon.”
Of course, the sins of translation are not simply those of Europeans. Though he laments the fate of these marooned Arab writers, Kilito opens the book with his own account of the pitfalls of cross-cultural translation. Invited to give a lecture in France on al Hamadhani’s maqamat (a 10th century collection of stories written in rhymed prose), Kilito describes his struggle to find a way to make the genre comprehensible to a contemporary European audience. The only European contemporary to al Hamadhani, he finds, is an obscure female German poet named Roswitha, who wrote dialogues in verse. He declines to make this connection – it strikes him as absurd, for who in his audience will have heard of Roswitha – but in his lecture he does equate the maqamat with the picaresque novels popular in Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries.
“In other words,” he writes, “I translated the maqamat, not in the sense of transferring them from one language to another, but presented them as though they were picaresque novels, I translated them into a different genre, a different literature.”
The celebrated 12th century philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Kilito writes, was another victim of the traps of translation. His fine commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics won him even the respect of Dante, who placed him alongside Plato and Aristotle in Limbo. But his treatise on Aristotle’s Poetics remains an embarrassment of literary muddling. Ibn Rushd grappled with subjects of which he knew nothing (the Greek theatrical genres of “comedy” and “tragedy”) which in the translation provided him had been rendered in the terms of Arabic poetry (“satire” and “panegyric”). Kilito calls this blunder a “sterile misunderstanding” that failed to open “new horizons” while bordering precipitously on farce. Legions of other Arab scholars have mourned the botched job as a missed opportunity for the mingling of Greco-Roman and Arab literary traditions. But was that ever possible? One can almost imagine al Jahiz grumbling in the background: I told you so.
Whatever uncertainties Kilito himself holds about the possibility of translations, they are not – like those of al Jahiz – seeming observations of fact. Instead, they were forged in the furnace of recent Arab-European history and, more importantly perhaps, in the memory of colonisation by the French, who were far more aggressive in their use of language as a pacifying and “civilising” tool than the British. However poignant within their own context, Kilito’s doubts about multilingualism carry a whiff of the parochial about them. While discussing al Jahiz, Kilito argues that “to speak a language is to turn to a side. Language is tied to a location on the map or a given space. To speak this or that language is to be on the right or the left ... and since [the bilingual] looks in two directions, he is two-faced.” This is a real dilemma for al Jahiz and for Kilito (albeit slightly less so). But it forgets that multilingualism in much of the world is (and was) a comfortable, untortured fact of life. Language is not always wedded to geographical and political loyalties. That Kilito suggests it is says much about a common Arab and European understanding of language: not the caliphate-era vision of language spread boundlessly by the sword and the book, but a vision of a fissured landscape of languages, each guarded by its own political project, its own nation. To accept this view of the world is to succumb to that false cliché produced by the era of the modern European nation-state: a language is but “a dialect with an army.”
We can forgive Kilito, perched as he is in Rabat, on the joined frontiers of Arab and European history. Just as poetry (in al Jahiz’s view) could not be lifted from its original language and dropped into another, Kilito’s misgivings about multilingualism should not be translated out of their own context. His book should be understood as a commentary on the Arab experience of translation, not on translation in general.
In fairness, Kilito takes great pains always to cushion the sharp edges of his arguments. He disassembles the Orientalist view of Arab literature without resorting to the disheartening thunder (and fog) of post-colonial jargon. He even questions his own doubts about translation, spying an unsettling chauvinism in his jealous guardianship of Arabic from the European interloper. At all times, he uses a light touch, relying frequently on implication and allusion, leaving much unresolved and open to conjecture. Such a drifting, almost whimsical style may frustrate readers who need the anchor of a systematically and clearly articulated argument. Kilito does not guide, but instead charms you into his floating adventure.
Kanishk Tharoor, an associate editor at openDemocracy, is a frequent contributor to The Review.
Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language
Abdelfattah Kilito
Translated by Wail S Hassan
Syracuse University Press
Dh95
In the much-quoted 2002 Arab Human Development Report, literature stood as a barometer for stagnation and cupidity in the Arab world. According to the UN-sponsored study, there was a paucity of new, dynamic writing on the market, where “religious books and educational publications that are limited in their creative content” held sway. Moreover, dialogue between the sacred realm of the Arab language and the world outside was meagre. The report noted that “the figures for translated books are also discouraging. The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Ma’mun’s time is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year.” Published in the bellicose early years of the now winded “war on terror”, the report’s blizzard of statistics have since been challenged. (Spain, for example, translates less than 10,000 books each year.) But at the time the report provided damning evidence for critics of the Arab world: open societies required an open exchange of literatures.
But translation, particularly in the world of Arabic letters, has never been an innocent or simple process. In his slim, energetic work Though Shalt Not Speak My Language, the Moroccan scholar Abdelfattah Kilito burrows into the age-old problem of the translation of Arabic literature. The book, itself translated from Arabic, privileges anecdote over argument, drifting playfully through the centuries to explore the relationship between the Arab and the foreign. Kilito indulges in a wide panoramic view, taking into account writings of numerous periods and styles, including ninth century theoretical musings on Persian-Arabic translation, various accounts of Arab travel writing (including Ibn Battuta’s famous journey to China), and passages from 20th century crime novels. This disparate material is shaped by the premise that there is something essentially unsound and compromised about the very act of translation, and that foreigners have yet to treat Arabic literature with appropriate sensitivity and care.
Arabic occupies a rather lonely place in the landscape of world languages. With the possible exceptions of Chinese and Tamil, no other major modern idiom enjoys such a long, unbroken scriptural history. Classical Arabic remains intelligible to much of the literate Arab world, while most other modern languages only emerged in their current written form in the last 600 years. Modern Greek is gobbledygook compared to its ancient predecessor; French is the ruins of a ravaged Roman Gaul; English is the flighty, Latinised step-child of earthy Anglo-Saxon; Hindi (and Urdu) are the mongrel beasts of Mughal army camps in South Asia. Arabic in the 21st century looks into the mirror of its antiquity and sees a familiar reflection. Its continuity can be threaded through the centuries, endowing contemporaries with both a deep sense of the coherence of Arab linguistic traditions and the burden of their legacy.
At the same time, the Arabic language has always been surrounded by others. From the days of the first caliphs, Arab intellectual history was framed by interaction with other languages. Kilito – echoing fairly conventional wisdom – places the high noon of Arab thought and writing in the period between the seventh and 13th centuries. As Arab forces gobbled up the lands of the Persian and Byzantine empires, Arab scholars absorbed Persian and Greek texts. Translation here was principally one-way, from ancient languages like Greek, Persian and Syriac into Arabic. It was guided by the arrogant but understandable assumption that those seeking knowledge should now do so in Arabic; at its peak the caliphate was the real heir of both the Mediterranean power of Rome and the universal pretensions of Persian kingship. Much has been written and said in recent years about how the accumulated lore of other lands stirred a cauldron of intellectual ferment in the Arab world, and about how the eventual flowering of the Renaissance in southern and western Europe rested on the soil of Arab knowledge. In this period, Arabic indisputably surpassed its regional competitors as the principal vehicle – and engine – of scholarly innovation.
But while numerous philosophical, historical and scientific works crossed into Arabic, barely any poetry made the same journey. Al Jahiz, the ninth century Afro-Arab writer, Arab scholars had already begun to argue that while it was possible to translate philosophy, the same could not be said of literature. In fluent close readings, Kilito shows how al Jahiz distinguished between the two; the “universality” of philosophy allowed it to be shared across tongues, while the “particularity” of poetry confined it to its language. How can schemes of alliteration, rhythm, and word play be made sufficiently legible in the parallel universe of another language? Poetry in its very nature resists the estranging force of translation.
Al Jahiz maintained a fundamental distrust of translation and the translator, and he suggested multilingualism was a form of failure: “Whenever we find [the translator] speaking two languages, we know that he has mistreated both of them, for each one of the two languages pulls at the other, takes from it, and opposes it.” Some echo of this belief is present in the possible association between the modern verb to translate, tarjam, and the root verb rajam, which means, among other things, to throw an object through space (as in stoning, but also as in shooting stars and, by association, spell casting); in this sense the practise of translation, or tarjamah, may carry a subconscious connotation of arbitrariness, unreliability, or transgression.
Kilito himself seems to share in this distrust, but his own suspicion grows from more modern, political roots in the inversion of power relations with Europe and in the experience of colonialism. Breached and looted, Arabic has been invaded by the west. The problem now is not one of translating into Arabic, but of the implications of translation from Arabic. “The fundamental change for us in the modern age,” Kilito says, “is that the process of reading and writing is always attended with potential translation, the possibility of transfer into other literatures, something that never occurred to the ancients, who conceived of translation only within Arabic literature.” Classical Arab poets never considered the world of letters beyond their own. Their contemporary counterparts have no option but to do so.
Europeans since the 19th century have had none of al Jahiz’s qualms about translation, and have eagerly studied and translated works from Arabic; Kilito’s roaming explorations spring in part from his disquiet at how foreigners have misappropriated Arab writing. He is particularly startled by the insistence of the French Orientalist Charles Pellat – who devoted much of his career to the study of al Jahiz – that all Arab literature “produces a sense of boredom”. European interpreters of Arab writing, Kilito says, find it “boring unless it bears a family resemblance to European literature.”
The translation of Arab literature into western languages yokes it to western sensibilities and conventions. As Kilito muses, “Who can read an Arab poet or novelist today without establishing a relationship between him and his European peers? We Arabs have invented a special way of reading: we read an Arabic text while thinking about the possibility of transferring it into a European language.” That long thread of Arab language and culture unravels under the heat of the European gaze. “Woe to the writers for whom we find no European counterparts: we simply turn away from them, leaving them in a dark, abandoned isthmus, a passage without mirrors to reflect their shadow or save them from loss and deathlike abandon.”
Of course, the sins of translation are not simply those of Europeans. Though he laments the fate of these marooned Arab writers, Kilito opens the book with his own account of the pitfalls of cross-cultural translation. Invited to give a lecture in France on al Hamadhani’s maqamat (a 10th century collection of stories written in rhymed prose), Kilito describes his struggle to find a way to make the genre comprehensible to a contemporary European audience. The only European contemporary to al Hamadhani, he finds, is an obscure female German poet named Roswitha, who wrote dialogues in verse. He declines to make this connection – it strikes him as absurd, for who in his audience will have heard of Roswitha – but in his lecture he does equate the maqamat with the picaresque novels popular in Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries.
“In other words,” he writes, “I translated the maqamat, not in the sense of transferring them from one language to another, but presented them as though they were picaresque novels, I translated them into a different genre, a different literature.”
The celebrated 12th century philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Kilito writes, was another victim of the traps of translation. His fine commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics won him even the respect of Dante, who placed him alongside Plato and Aristotle in Limbo. But his treatise on Aristotle’s Poetics remains an embarrassment of literary muddling. Ibn Rushd grappled with subjects of which he knew nothing (the Greek theatrical genres of “comedy” and “tragedy”) which in the translation provided him had been rendered in the terms of Arabic poetry (“satire” and “panegyric”). Kilito calls this blunder a “sterile misunderstanding” that failed to open “new horizons” while bordering precipitously on farce. Legions of other Arab scholars have mourned the botched job as a missed opportunity for the mingling of Greco-Roman and Arab literary traditions. But was that ever possible? One can almost imagine al Jahiz grumbling in the background: I told you so.
Whatever uncertainties Kilito himself holds about the possibility of translations, they are not – like those of al Jahiz – seeming observations of fact. Instead, they were forged in the furnace of recent Arab-European history and, more importantly perhaps, in the memory of colonisation by the French, who were far more aggressive in their use of language as a pacifying and “civilising” tool than the British. However poignant within their own context, Kilito’s doubts about multilingualism carry a whiff of the parochial about them. While discussing al Jahiz, Kilito argues that “to speak a language is to turn to a side. Language is tied to a location on the map or a given space. To speak this or that language is to be on the right or the left ... and since [the bilingual] looks in two directions, he is two-faced.” This is a real dilemma for al Jahiz and for Kilito (albeit slightly less so). But it forgets that multilingualism in much of the world is (and was) a comfortable, untortured fact of life. Language is not always wedded to geographical and political loyalties. That Kilito suggests it is says much about a common Arab and European understanding of language: not the caliphate-era vision of language spread boundlessly by the sword and the book, but a vision of a fissured landscape of languages, each guarded by its own political project, its own nation. To accept this view of the world is to succumb to that false cliché produced by the era of the modern European nation-state: a language is but “a dialect with an army.”
We can forgive Kilito, perched as he is in Rabat, on the joined frontiers of Arab and European history. Just as poetry (in al Jahiz’s view) could not be lifted from its original language and dropped into another, Kilito’s misgivings about multilingualism should not be translated out of their own context. His book should be understood as a commentary on the Arab experience of translation, not on translation in general.
In fairness, Kilito takes great pains always to cushion the sharp edges of his arguments. He disassembles the Orientalist view of Arab literature without resorting to the disheartening thunder (and fog) of post-colonial jargon. He even questions his own doubts about translation, spying an unsettling chauvinism in his jealous guardianship of Arabic from the European interloper. At all times, he uses a light touch, relying frequently on implication and allusion, leaving much unresolved and open to conjecture. Such a drifting, almost whimsical style may frustrate readers who need the anchor of a systematically and clearly articulated argument. Kilito does not guide, but instead charms you into his floating adventure.
Kanishk Tharoor, an associate editor at openDemocracy, is a frequent contributor to The Review.
Friday, 28 November 2008
Yiddish
Yiddish - a language once spoken by more than 10 million Jews - had a profound effect on American culture in the first half of the 20th Century.
It originated in central and eastern Europe - and spread to the United States when thousand of immigrants arrived in New York.
Zalmen Mlotek is the Artistic Director of the city's last surviving professional Yiddish theatre - the Folksbiene.
With the help of his piano, he has been telling Radio 3's Dennis Marks how the language influenced jazz music - and the likes of George and Ira Gershwin.
Yiddish
It originated in central and eastern Europe - and spread to the United States when thousand of immigrants arrived in New York.
Zalmen Mlotek is the Artistic Director of the city's last surviving professional Yiddish theatre - the Folksbiene.
With the help of his piano, he has been telling Radio 3's Dennis Marks how the language influenced jazz music - and the likes of George and Ira Gershwin.
Yiddish
Saturday, 15 November 2008
We have 50 words for ‘love’ – and we risk losing them all
The Arabic language possesses an unquestionable beauty and elegance than can be recognised by all. There are numerous stories about people who have fallen in love with Islam or Arab culture simply by being introduced to the perfect form of Arabic writing. A language filled with an endless flow of lines displaying a faultless structure of art, even in its simplest form: to see it is to witness writing that is almost being sung off the pages on which it is written.
To fully understand the meaning of its words is a complex, everlasting journey that many scholars have spent their entire lives travelling. Take just one English word – “love” – and you will find more than 50 Arabic words to appropriately describe it, each more harmonic than the last.
For centuries, Arabic poetry was the most respected form of communication in the Arab world and beyond. For this reason it is not uncommon in the UAE to find Arabic poetry being recited during a casual get together, an official ceremony, a wedding, or even a funeral. When Arabic poetry is heard, all Emiratis stop to listen out of respect.
However, throughout the Arab world, Arabic is struggling in a vicious battle against globalisation. Conferences are being held to support the language and to speak out against “language pollution”. To focus on matters closer to home, a new problem has risen for UAE nationals that threatens to grow if not resolved.
Emiratis are expected to know Arabic. That is a fair statement; after all, it is hard to imagine one without the other, and 10 years ago, it was a rare thing to find an Emirati whose first language was not Arabic – only, maybe, a small minority of people who were educated abroad or whose mother was from an another country. Nowadays, thanks to poor teaching in our schools and the minimal usage of Arabic in our daily lives, the language is beginning to disappear, even among UAE nationals.
This is a tragedy. It is heart breaking to see the language of our forefathers disappearing – especially among the young – particularly as there are so many organisations struggling to prevent this very thing from happening. Yet, it is clear that what is being done to preserve our language is simply not enough.
Today, it may only be a small percentage of our children who are experiencing this loss of language. But 10 years ago, they hardly existed at all; what is the situation likely to be in another 10 years? There is no denying that globalisation will take its toll on the language of the country, but that doesn’t mean we should simply do nothing.
I enjoy travelling to Malaysia whenever I find an opportunity to do so. In my opinion, the country displays a perfect blend of nature and technology intertwined brilliantly with the Muslim culture. I was talking with a friend of mine who is a Muslim Malaysian of Chinese origin. He tells me that the Chinese language among the younger generation of his ethnic group is facing the same problem as Arabic here but has reached a much further stage then our own. According to my friend, it has become socially acceptable for Malaysian-Chinese to not know how to write or read in any of the Chinese languages.
Yet in Malaysia and elsewhere, this erosion of language has happened over centuries. We Emiratis are fortunate to have had our years of development compressed into less than 40 years, and as a consequence we have only begun to see the impact on Arabic in the last decade or so. Which means that we still have a chance to prevent the ultimate catastrophe – the complete loss of our language – from befalling us.
We should take heed and begin building our defences. We need stronger Arabic curriculums in our schools, free courses offered in different levels across our major cities, and more up to date literature. Even in our public schools, when students reach a certain stage in many subjects they are asked to switch tuition from Arabic to English.
We need to find a way to bring life back to the Arabic language, to show its benefits and our involvement in its history. Our children continuously need to be reminded of the beauty of their native tongue and should be expected to express themselves in it with clarity and confidence.
It was shocking to read in yesterday’s The National how few of the novels shortlisted for this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction are stocked by bookshops here. But if you walk into any popular book store you will find that Arabic literature takes up only a small corner. Which is hardly surprising, as I recall the damning statistic from 2005 that revealed that the total number of Arabic language books published across the Arab world in one year was equivalent to the output of a small non-Arab country in the same time.
A strategy must be devised to preserve the Arabic language and to ensure that our children continue to speak their native tongue.
Taryam al Subaihi is a journalist from Abu Dhabi who specialises in human resources
To fully understand the meaning of its words is a complex, everlasting journey that many scholars have spent their entire lives travelling. Take just one English word – “love” – and you will find more than 50 Arabic words to appropriately describe it, each more harmonic than the last.
For centuries, Arabic poetry was the most respected form of communication in the Arab world and beyond. For this reason it is not uncommon in the UAE to find Arabic poetry being recited during a casual get together, an official ceremony, a wedding, or even a funeral. When Arabic poetry is heard, all Emiratis stop to listen out of respect.
However, throughout the Arab world, Arabic is struggling in a vicious battle against globalisation. Conferences are being held to support the language and to speak out against “language pollution”. To focus on matters closer to home, a new problem has risen for UAE nationals that threatens to grow if not resolved.
Emiratis are expected to know Arabic. That is a fair statement; after all, it is hard to imagine one without the other, and 10 years ago, it was a rare thing to find an Emirati whose first language was not Arabic – only, maybe, a small minority of people who were educated abroad or whose mother was from an another country. Nowadays, thanks to poor teaching in our schools and the minimal usage of Arabic in our daily lives, the language is beginning to disappear, even among UAE nationals.
This is a tragedy. It is heart breaking to see the language of our forefathers disappearing – especially among the young – particularly as there are so many organisations struggling to prevent this very thing from happening. Yet, it is clear that what is being done to preserve our language is simply not enough.
Today, it may only be a small percentage of our children who are experiencing this loss of language. But 10 years ago, they hardly existed at all; what is the situation likely to be in another 10 years? There is no denying that globalisation will take its toll on the language of the country, but that doesn’t mean we should simply do nothing.
I enjoy travelling to Malaysia whenever I find an opportunity to do so. In my opinion, the country displays a perfect blend of nature and technology intertwined brilliantly with the Muslim culture. I was talking with a friend of mine who is a Muslim Malaysian of Chinese origin. He tells me that the Chinese language among the younger generation of his ethnic group is facing the same problem as Arabic here but has reached a much further stage then our own. According to my friend, it has become socially acceptable for Malaysian-Chinese to not know how to write or read in any of the Chinese languages.
Yet in Malaysia and elsewhere, this erosion of language has happened over centuries. We Emiratis are fortunate to have had our years of development compressed into less than 40 years, and as a consequence we have only begun to see the impact on Arabic in the last decade or so. Which means that we still have a chance to prevent the ultimate catastrophe – the complete loss of our language – from befalling us.
We should take heed and begin building our defences. We need stronger Arabic curriculums in our schools, free courses offered in different levels across our major cities, and more up to date literature. Even in our public schools, when students reach a certain stage in many subjects they are asked to switch tuition from Arabic to English.
We need to find a way to bring life back to the Arabic language, to show its benefits and our involvement in its history. Our children continuously need to be reminded of the beauty of their native tongue and should be expected to express themselves in it with clarity and confidence.
It was shocking to read in yesterday’s The National how few of the novels shortlisted for this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction are stocked by bookshops here. But if you walk into any popular book store you will find that Arabic literature takes up only a small corner. Which is hardly surprising, as I recall the damning statistic from 2005 that revealed that the total number of Arabic language books published across the Arab world in one year was equivalent to the output of a small non-Arab country in the same time.
A strategy must be devised to preserve the Arabic language and to ensure that our children continue to speak their native tongue.
Taryam al Subaihi is a journalist from Abu Dhabi who specialises in human resources
Tuesday, 11 November 2008
Textbooks: No place for propaganda Usually, foreign language classes stress positives of other cultures; some Arabic lessons are biased
BY JOEL B. POLLAK. Joel B. Pollak is a student at Harvard Law School. This is from The Washington Post.
At Harvard, the star of Arabic A is a girl named Maha. Maha Muhammed Abulaal, to be precise. She's the pouty protagonist in the melodrama that runs throughout "Al-Kitaab," the standard beginning text in Arabic classes at Harvard and other American universities.
We are taught to speak our first Arabic sentences by expressing Maha's incurable angst. We learn in Chapter 1 that Maha is desperately lonely. In later chapters, we are told that she hates New York, has no boyfriend and resents her mother.
Soon we encounter her equally depressing relatives in Egypt - such as her first cousin Khalid, whose mother died in a car accident and who was forced to study business administration after his father told him literature "has no future." Like Maha, Khalid is loveless; his only romantic prospect ran away with a rich engineer. The family eventually intervenes with plans to marry the cousins off to each other. This makes everyone equally unhappy.
Then the story ends.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the number of Americans studying Arabic has more than doubled. Nearly 24,000 U.S. students enrolled in Arabic classes in the fall of 2006, the Modern Language Association reported in November. In 2002, 264 colleges offered Arabic; as of the 2006-07 academic year, 466 did.
Young, ambitious Americans are responding constructively to our country's new challenges by demanding Arabic classes. But there are not enough teachers to meet this demand, and the available textbooks are suffused with the stale prejudices and preoccupations of the pre-Sept. 11 Middle East.
To study Arabic in America today is to be inducted into a world of longing, abandonment and regret. And that's before you even touch the political issues.
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. Alongside simple Arabic poems, students read about anti-Western heroes such as Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The DVD that comes with "Al-Kitaab" includes footage of Nasser's mass rallies in Cairo - including slogans in Arabic and French such as "Brother Nations in Struggle, We Are By Your Side."
These scenes of totalitarian rage are fondly described by the narrator as "dreams of his youth." The accompanying lesson describes the highlights of Nasser's career, including the nationalization of the Suez Canal and the formation of the United Arab Republic. No mention is made of Egypt's defeat in the Six-Day War or of Nasser's brutal, repressive rule. In my class, we were asked to recite a passage about Nasser to practice our vocalization. (I refused.) The last lesson in the book - which we skipped - features Maha's mother speaking wistfully of her childhood in Palestine: "My childhood was taken from me!" Over mournful music on the DVD, she talks about returning to Jerusalem, as if she were a refugee, but the images suggest that she left voluntarily after the Six-Day War, when Israel offered citizenship to the Arab residents of East Jerusalem.
The fact that Israel also claims Jerusalem as its capital is ignored.
My class watched three movies this semester, all with political themes. One was "West Beirut," which cast Christians as the prime bad guys in Lebanon's civil war (though, to be fair, there was plenty of hatred all around). Another was "The Tale of Three Jewels," an allegorical film about Palestinian nationalism that portrayed Israeli soldiers as bloodthirsty child-killers.
The third movie, "Destiny," told the story of the great medieval Islamic philosopher Averroes and his struggles against Islamic religious fundamentalism. It was a bit more nuanced than the first two. But the film omitted the fact that it was only through the Hebrew transcription of Averroes' writings by Jewish scholars in Egypt that his works were preserved for posterity.
Friends and relatives who have used "Al-Kitaab" at other American universities report similarly morose experiences. At several colleges and high schools, students have created Facebook profiles for Maha.
The Harvard profile for Maha informs visitors in the "About Me" section: "I'm pretty lonely. I only have one friend. My parents are always busy." We may laugh, but there is something fundamentally wrong with this indoctrination into misery. Most introductory language classes avoid controversial political subjects. In fact, they often highlight the brighter side of different cultures. Particularly with the growing importance of Arabic, can't we do better? The U.S. government has funded studies on anti-Semitism in Palestinian textbooks. Fairfax County, Va., officials have asked the State Department to investigate the teaching materials at a Saudi-funded school.
"Al-Kitaab" is published by Georgetown University Press, with some assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Perhaps we should also be looking into the content of the federally funded materials used in Arabic programs at our own universities.
Learning Arabic should not include lessons in political propaganda.
At Harvard, the star of Arabic A is a girl named Maha. Maha Muhammed Abulaal, to be precise. She's the pouty protagonist in the melodrama that runs throughout "Al-Kitaab," the standard beginning text in Arabic classes at Harvard and other American universities.
We are taught to speak our first Arabic sentences by expressing Maha's incurable angst. We learn in Chapter 1 that Maha is desperately lonely. In later chapters, we are told that she hates New York, has no boyfriend and resents her mother.
Soon we encounter her equally depressing relatives in Egypt - such as her first cousin Khalid, whose mother died in a car accident and who was forced to study business administration after his father told him literature "has no future." Like Maha, Khalid is loveless; his only romantic prospect ran away with a rich engineer. The family eventually intervenes with plans to marry the cousins off to each other. This makes everyone equally unhappy.
Then the story ends.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the number of Americans studying Arabic has more than doubled. Nearly 24,000 U.S. students enrolled in Arabic classes in the fall of 2006, the Modern Language Association reported in November. In 2002, 264 colleges offered Arabic; as of the 2006-07 academic year, 466 did.
Young, ambitious Americans are responding constructively to our country's new challenges by demanding Arabic classes. But there are not enough teachers to meet this demand, and the available textbooks are suffused with the stale prejudices and preoccupations of the pre-Sept. 11 Middle East.
To study Arabic in America today is to be inducted into a world of longing, abandonment and regret. And that's before you even touch the political issues.
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. Alongside simple Arabic poems, students read about anti-Western heroes such as Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The DVD that comes with "Al-Kitaab" includes footage of Nasser's mass rallies in Cairo - including slogans in Arabic and French such as "Brother Nations in Struggle, We Are By Your Side."
These scenes of totalitarian rage are fondly described by the narrator as "dreams of his youth." The accompanying lesson describes the highlights of Nasser's career, including the nationalization of the Suez Canal and the formation of the United Arab Republic. No mention is made of Egypt's defeat in the Six-Day War or of Nasser's brutal, repressive rule. In my class, we were asked to recite a passage about Nasser to practice our vocalization. (I refused.) The last lesson in the book - which we skipped - features Maha's mother speaking wistfully of her childhood in Palestine: "My childhood was taken from me!" Over mournful music on the DVD, she talks about returning to Jerusalem, as if she were a refugee, but the images suggest that she left voluntarily after the Six-Day War, when Israel offered citizenship to the Arab residents of East Jerusalem.
The fact that Israel also claims Jerusalem as its capital is ignored.
My class watched three movies this semester, all with political themes. One was "West Beirut," which cast Christians as the prime bad guys in Lebanon's civil war (though, to be fair, there was plenty of hatred all around). Another was "The Tale of Three Jewels," an allegorical film about Palestinian nationalism that portrayed Israeli soldiers as bloodthirsty child-killers.
The third movie, "Destiny," told the story of the great medieval Islamic philosopher Averroes and his struggles against Islamic religious fundamentalism. It was a bit more nuanced than the first two. But the film omitted the fact that it was only through the Hebrew transcription of Averroes' writings by Jewish scholars in Egypt that his works were preserved for posterity.
Friends and relatives who have used "Al-Kitaab" at other American universities report similarly morose experiences. At several colleges and high schools, students have created Facebook profiles for Maha.
The Harvard profile for Maha informs visitors in the "About Me" section: "I'm pretty lonely. I only have one friend. My parents are always busy." We may laugh, but there is something fundamentally wrong with this indoctrination into misery. Most introductory language classes avoid controversial political subjects. In fact, they often highlight the brighter side of different cultures. Particularly with the growing importance of Arabic, can't we do better? The U.S. government has funded studies on anti-Semitism in Palestinian textbooks. Fairfax County, Va., officials have asked the State Department to investigate the teaching materials at a Saudi-funded school.
"Al-Kitaab" is published by Georgetown University Press, with some assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Perhaps we should also be looking into the content of the federally funded materials used in Arabic programs at our own universities.
Learning Arabic should not include lessons in political propaganda.
How will Arabic be preserved with rules like these?
If one is to believe the statements coming out of Government, then one major concern is the way in which the whole nature and ethos of what is being described as the “UAE’s national identity” is being undermined and lost as a result of the development of the past 30 or 40 years. Indeed, this year has been dubbed “Year of National Identity” – how to define it and how to preserve it.
There are many reasons for the “undermining”, which certainly exists. At one level, it’s a simple reflection of the change in the country’s demography. What was, in large measure, an Arab country in the not-so-distant past is now one where more than 80 per cent of the population are non-Emiratis, and where over two thirds, at a guess, are non-Arabs. Not only are languages other than Arabic widely used, such as Urdu, English, Bengali, Malayalam, and, increasingly, Mandarin and the various Filipino languages, but a new lingua franca has emerged, and is spreading, which is a curious mix of Arabic, Urdu and English words and a highly-simplified grammar. I call it “Urdubic”, though others may have their own name for it.
At another level, the threat to national identity comes from increasing globalisation – whether it be in business, on television channels, absorbed as a by-product of education overseas, or in a non-native tongue at home. That’s not just a matter of language, of course, but in culture and daily life. Even in food – where the all-pervasive presence of American fast-food chains affects almost all, with a consequent rise in obesity and heart disease.
My concern, however, is with language, particularly the use of Arabic. Of course English is widely used in business, and, indeed, in Government. It would be difficult to engage with the outside world otherwise. It is absolutely right that English is considered to be a high priority in both Government and private schools. Any young Emirati today who lacks fluency in English will be at a clear disadvantage to better-equipped compatriots in the future.
I worry, though, that, in the drive to promote a knowledge of English as a second language, the need to promote Arabic as a first language is being sidelined.
I am not bothered about those who have a different mother tongue and for whom Arabic will always be a second language, though I regret that so many expatriate non-Arabs make no effort to try to learn a few simple words. That’s pitiful. Rather, I am concerned about those for whom Arabic is a first language.
I am told by colleagues who recruit native Arabic speakers, including Emiratis, into positions where a proper level of Arabic literacy is required, that all too often the standards even of university graduates with degrees in the Arabic language are simply not up to scratch. That must be in part due to the teaching they receive, both in school and university, as well as the use of Arabic at home.
I recently had an interesting conversation with the headmistress of one of Abu Dhabi’s leading primary schools. Around 20 per cent of her students are Emiratis and in some classes there’s an almost 50-50 split between those with Arabic as the mother tongue (Emiratis and others) and the rest, many whose first language is English but many from Europe, India and elsewhere.
The language of instruction in the school is English, so that, naturally, takes priority. In accordance with Ministry of Education guidelines, the school provides Arabic only at the kindergarten or foundation stages (up to five years old) for those whose mother tongue is Arabic, in two 20-minute conversation classes a week. Is that really sufficient for Emirati and other Arab children, particularly those being brought up in homes where parents, sadly, might devolve much of the responsibility for their children to employees who speak no Arabic whatsoever? Will those children ever be properly fluent in their mother tongue?
I have a particular interest in the topic because my wife, a native Arabic speaker, and I have a small child currently in the kindergarten stage. It will be a hard task to bring her up to be as bilingual as possible, though we’re trying. She is having the twice-weekly conversation classes and, provided her level stays high enough, she should go on to the formal classes in Arabic for native speakers next year.
I gather, though, that the rough rule used by the Ministry of Education to determine whether a child should go into “native speaker” classes is based on the nationality of the father. How, I wonder, do they assess a couple of Arab birth who have taken up British, Canadian or American citizenship? There are plenty of those around.
And as for mixed marriages, I, as a Briton, would be ruled out from the start. Were my child to be put in a class next year designed for those for whom Arabic is not a mother tongue – simple beginners – it would be a distinct step backwards. I have no quarrel with the school: they don’t set the guidelines and, rightly, must focus on English.
Language is, surely, a fundamental part of national identity. So what is the Ministry of Education doing to tackle this issue of declining Arabic literacy skills among so many of the country’s native Arabic speakers, Emiratis and others?
After more than 30 years here, I should, I concede, speak much better Arabic than I do. I hope that my young child will do so, and my wife and I intend to make the effort to ensure that she does. But I’m well aware it’s not going to be easy. Shu Sawee?
Peter Hellyer is a writer and consultant specialising in the UAE’s heritage and environment. He has also written extensively on the country’s social, political and economic development
There are many reasons for the “undermining”, which certainly exists. At one level, it’s a simple reflection of the change in the country’s demography. What was, in large measure, an Arab country in the not-so-distant past is now one where more than 80 per cent of the population are non-Emiratis, and where over two thirds, at a guess, are non-Arabs. Not only are languages other than Arabic widely used, such as Urdu, English, Bengali, Malayalam, and, increasingly, Mandarin and the various Filipino languages, but a new lingua franca has emerged, and is spreading, which is a curious mix of Arabic, Urdu and English words and a highly-simplified grammar. I call it “Urdubic”, though others may have their own name for it.
At another level, the threat to national identity comes from increasing globalisation – whether it be in business, on television channels, absorbed as a by-product of education overseas, or in a non-native tongue at home. That’s not just a matter of language, of course, but in culture and daily life. Even in food – where the all-pervasive presence of American fast-food chains affects almost all, with a consequent rise in obesity and heart disease.
My concern, however, is with language, particularly the use of Arabic. Of course English is widely used in business, and, indeed, in Government. It would be difficult to engage with the outside world otherwise. It is absolutely right that English is considered to be a high priority in both Government and private schools. Any young Emirati today who lacks fluency in English will be at a clear disadvantage to better-equipped compatriots in the future.
I worry, though, that, in the drive to promote a knowledge of English as a second language, the need to promote Arabic as a first language is being sidelined.
I am not bothered about those who have a different mother tongue and for whom Arabic will always be a second language, though I regret that so many expatriate non-Arabs make no effort to try to learn a few simple words. That’s pitiful. Rather, I am concerned about those for whom Arabic is a first language.
I am told by colleagues who recruit native Arabic speakers, including Emiratis, into positions where a proper level of Arabic literacy is required, that all too often the standards even of university graduates with degrees in the Arabic language are simply not up to scratch. That must be in part due to the teaching they receive, both in school and university, as well as the use of Arabic at home.
I recently had an interesting conversation with the headmistress of one of Abu Dhabi’s leading primary schools. Around 20 per cent of her students are Emiratis and in some classes there’s an almost 50-50 split between those with Arabic as the mother tongue (Emiratis and others) and the rest, many whose first language is English but many from Europe, India and elsewhere.
The language of instruction in the school is English, so that, naturally, takes priority. In accordance with Ministry of Education guidelines, the school provides Arabic only at the kindergarten or foundation stages (up to five years old) for those whose mother tongue is Arabic, in two 20-minute conversation classes a week. Is that really sufficient for Emirati and other Arab children, particularly those being brought up in homes where parents, sadly, might devolve much of the responsibility for their children to employees who speak no Arabic whatsoever? Will those children ever be properly fluent in their mother tongue?
I have a particular interest in the topic because my wife, a native Arabic speaker, and I have a small child currently in the kindergarten stage. It will be a hard task to bring her up to be as bilingual as possible, though we’re trying. She is having the twice-weekly conversation classes and, provided her level stays high enough, she should go on to the formal classes in Arabic for native speakers next year.
I gather, though, that the rough rule used by the Ministry of Education to determine whether a child should go into “native speaker” classes is based on the nationality of the father. How, I wonder, do they assess a couple of Arab birth who have taken up British, Canadian or American citizenship? There are plenty of those around.
And as for mixed marriages, I, as a Briton, would be ruled out from the start. Were my child to be put in a class next year designed for those for whom Arabic is not a mother tongue – simple beginners – it would be a distinct step backwards. I have no quarrel with the school: they don’t set the guidelines and, rightly, must focus on English.
Language is, surely, a fundamental part of national identity. So what is the Ministry of Education doing to tackle this issue of declining Arabic literacy skills among so many of the country’s native Arabic speakers, Emiratis and others?
After more than 30 years here, I should, I concede, speak much better Arabic than I do. I hope that my young child will do so, and my wife and I intend to make the effort to ensure that she does. But I’m well aware it’s not going to be easy. Shu Sawee?
Peter Hellyer is a writer and consultant specialising in the UAE’s heritage and environment. He has also written extensively on the country’s social, political and economic development
Friday, 17 October 2008
Language acts
In her new film, the Lebanese director Danielle Arbid explores the Arabic vocabulary of intimacy. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reports.
In 2005, the programmers of a French radio station approached the filmmaker Danielle Arbid and offered her two hours of Sunday evening airtime to do whatever she liked. So Arbid called up several of her friends in Beirut and recorded them talking in detail about their sex lives. She manipulated the anonymous recordings into a seamless, stylised barrage of explicit stories, confessions, reflections and observations rendered in colourful language and crude slang. The show went out on Radio France Culture, and Arbid got 10 scathing letters from angry listeners in response. “All French and one Lebanese who was listening by mistake,” she says.
Three years later, Arbid ends this anecdote with a triumphant smile. She has since taken her radio footage and turned it into an elusively beautiful yet unabashedly bawdy 20-minute film, which, after screenings in Beirut, Locarno and in the French city of La Rochelle (where it was projected onto the ceiling of a church at midnight), is now being hotly pursued by film festivals on three continents.
Arbid belongs to a generation of Lebanese filmmakers that includes Ziad Doueir (West Beirut), Nadine Labaki (Caramel), Philippe Aractingi (Bosta and Under the Bombs), Ghassan Salhab (The Last Man) and the team of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (A Perfect Day and I Want to See). In terms of subject matter, there is a lot of overlap among them. They have all made films whose subject is the civil war, the disappeared and the destruction of Beirut (by war, reconstruction and other means). They share a tendency to produce short, cinematic love letters to the city’s resilient visual culture, and an affection for the visual codes and rhythms of art-house cinema.
All of these filmmakers, Arbid included, struggle to negotiate between Lebanon and the rest of the world to make films in a place where there is little audience and less funding. But her work makes clear that Arbid’s relationship with the country of her birth is more tortured than that of her peers. Her films do not simply expose a wound – whether it is the tear ripped between Lebanon and France, East and West, past and present, memory and amnesia or masculine and feminine. They dig into it and extract from it something both playful and productive.
Arbid’s sense of playfulness is not actually lighthearted. The game she sets up in film after film is a dangerous one. She deals not with the fun of play but the terror of escape, the act of a prisoner plotting a jailbreak into the unknown. It is probably no coincidence that the main characters in both of Arbid’s features flee from different forms of confinement. Escaping, rebelling, breaking rules – these are crucial, necessary acts in Arbid’s cinema. They are its oxygen and, one suspects, hers.
Arbid, who is 38, was born in Lebanon and moved to France when she was 17. She studied literature and worked as a journalist for five years. She wanted to be like Hunter S Thompson, but ended up writing hard news and hated the rigid, formulaic storytelling of the genre. So she quit, wrote a screenplay, won a competition and began making films. She has produced 10 films in 10 years, and her work has been the subject of four festival retrospectives – not bad for a director under the age of 40.
Arbid has screened both of her features in Cannes, and her documentaries and shorts have won a slew of awards. But she has met a hostile reception from critics and audiences at every turn, in part because her films refuse to be what they appear.
Her 2004 debut feature, In the Battlefields, seems at first a sweet fable about innocent children during the Lebanese civil war but turns out to be an evocative study of adolescent sexuality and young women coming into their own through the bursts of rebellion that follow bouts of humiliation. “I like this period between 12 and 18,” Arbid says. “When you could go crazy; when you are not an adult and not a child.”
In the film, one young girl, Lina, befriends another, Siham. But Lina is the daughter of a middle-class Lebanese family while Siham, slightly older, is a Syrian maid. Siham leads a wild life outside of her place of employment, a few floors up from Lina’s apartment. She brings Lina along on her adventures, until Lina discovers that Siham plans to run away to marry her boyfriend and snitches. Siham gets locked up and never forgives Lina for the transgression. The film scholar Lina Khatib, in her new book Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond, reads the film as a treatise on the deep class divisions in Lebanon. It is also a study of the rite of passage that is getting dropped, ditched or left behind, and the act of throwing off burdens both social and cultural.
Arbid’s second feature, Un Homme Perdu, from 2007, tracks the story of a man who goes missing from Lebanon in 1985. He turns up as a day labourer in Syria many years later and then, after spitting on his employer and taking off, encounters a photographer on the Jordanian border. As the two men travel together, the photographer, whose character is based on Antoine d’Agata (a Magnum photographer with a cult following in France), attempts to wrench open the man’s story. He pulls the man into brothels and pushes him into street fights. He tries to break the man down so he will confess who he is and what he has done. He does not succeed, but he manages to return the man, against his will, to his life in Lebanon. Reunited with his wife and reinstalled in an atmosphere of domestic bliss, the man smoulders in silent anger. And as soon as he can, he runs, leaving the photographer with nothing but images to illustrate their unfulfilled adventure.
Like In the Battlefields, Un Homme Perdu could have been an earnest account of the need for remembrance and reconciliation in postwar Lebanon. But Arbid’s film suggests that uncovering the truth isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, and that obsessive engagement with the dark episodes in Lebanon’s tumultuous history might ultimately be a dead end. In place of meaningful redemption or a tidy resolution, she emphasises the assertions of power, cruelty and desire at play in the relationship between the two men.
But critics were preoccupied by the film’s explicit content, and slammed Arbid for having the audacity to take on a figure as large as d’Agata, arguing that she should stick to her home turf in war-torn Lebanon and leave France’s artists alone. Variety called Un Homme Perdu a “pointless exercise” and “a big step back” for Arbid, and blasted its “typically Gallic mix of erotica and existentialism.” But Arbid considers such criticisms a kind of chauvinism: “If I had been a man making Un Homme Perdu, it would have been OK” for western critics, Arbid says. “The Arab critics, I knew why they hated it. It wasn’t for this purpose, me being a girl. For them, it was just out of the question to make this film at all, boy or girl.” Out of the question, presumably, because Arbid filmed in brothels on Arab soil.
In the end, the film was neither well reviewed nor widely seen. But Arbid has pressed on to two new projects: her third feature, which she will begin shooting next year, an adaptation of an American novel, Salt Water, transposed to France – and This Smell of Sex, the film featuring her France Culture radio footage, whose explicit language and exuberant lewdness will probably infuriate Arbid’s Arab critics even further.
But for all its prurient content, the film’s real subject may be language – Arbid captures the graphic precision and expressive imagery used to describe these physical intimacy in Arabic. Seen in the context of Arbid’s other work, This Smell of Sex continues a fascination with language that the filmmaker has been exploring for years in an open-ended series of videos called Conversations de Salon, which feature older women (including her mother and her aunts) speaking about the lives, their prescription drug habits, their husbands and their sons. The works open a window onto a particular class of Lebanese women that some viewers find them claustrophobic and unbearable (others find them revealing and amusing).
“I’ve always been interested in the Arabic language,” says Arbid. “I’ve been in France for 20 years but when I come back to Lebanon I like very much to speak Arabic. I love to hear how my mother’s friends ‘image’ things. The whole thing becomes an image and they lie and they use the language in a great way, whereas in France they don’t do this. People here always tell me in Arabic how they [have sex]. You know, my friends and I, we speak about this. I have friends in Dahiyeh [Beirut’s southern suburbs] and they always tell me lewd things. They slang the language, they change it, and it’s very inventive.”
“So I decided to record it. Maybe because I wasn’t filming them, I knew they wouldn’t censor themselves. Because when you speak about this, you have to be precise. And in a way, I like joining this to the idea of the Arab world, where sex is out, where it doesn’t exist, where it exists behind the image, where it is blacked out.”
But transforming disembodied voices into a film was no small challenge. “When I did this in 2005, I thought I wanted to make a film out of it but I didn’t have the idea of how to illustrate the words with images. When you have a text like this and you put erotic things on screen, it isn’t good. I tried lots of things, but it wasn’t there. So I had to wait two or three years for the idea to come.”
Each year, the Né à Beyrouth Festival of Lebanese Film (which Arbic has helped organize for the past six years) holds a special screening of found Super 8 footage discovered and donated by filmmakers and members of the public. One day, Arbid was reviewing the reels and watched a home movie that had been found in an old, abandoned Beirut marketplace. It features a young woman posing innocently, for a camera in her bedroom.
“I liked it very much,” says Arbid. “It’s amateur, unknown, but it’s definitely Beirut. I zoomed it and sped it up. It was already very good but I worked on it and it became the film.”
Arbid asked the singer Yasmine Hamdan to do the music, and she improvised on old Arabic love songs, which are full of rich, sensual metaphors to begin with. As a result, This Smell of Sex consists of voices, images and songs sliding in and out of the audience’s range of perception. Arbid added an introduction, a fictional voice-over narration in the style of a promotional tourism spot on Radio Monte Carlo circa 1960, about the magical city of Beirut, a playground for the easy-going and the adventurous. Arbid’s film suggests, in extremely subtle ways, that this idea of Beirut as a hothouse for licentious behaviour never died, despite the Lebanese capital’s subsequent plunge into patterns of self-destruction.
“It’s very joyful,” Arbid says. “It has nothing to do with secrets or shame or things that people are not supposed to say. It’s not sad. It’s very dirty and very funny.”
“I wouldn’t have done it if there were [only men and] no [women] speaking. I don’t believe in the sexual exoticism of the Arab world. When I show the film in Europe, people don’t tell me: ‘They’re exotic.’ People tell me: ‘They’re like us.’ I don’t want people to go see the film and say to themselves: ‘Let’s see how the animals speak about sex.’ I’m attacked here, but really they should pay me, because I show people as they are, I show them as human beings.”
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reports from Beirut for The National.
In 2005, the programmers of a French radio station approached the filmmaker Danielle Arbid and offered her two hours of Sunday evening airtime to do whatever she liked. So Arbid called up several of her friends in Beirut and recorded them talking in detail about their sex lives. She manipulated the anonymous recordings into a seamless, stylised barrage of explicit stories, confessions, reflections and observations rendered in colourful language and crude slang. The show went out on Radio France Culture, and Arbid got 10 scathing letters from angry listeners in response. “All French and one Lebanese who was listening by mistake,” she says.
Three years later, Arbid ends this anecdote with a triumphant smile. She has since taken her radio footage and turned it into an elusively beautiful yet unabashedly bawdy 20-minute film, which, after screenings in Beirut, Locarno and in the French city of La Rochelle (where it was projected onto the ceiling of a church at midnight), is now being hotly pursued by film festivals on three continents.
Arbid belongs to a generation of Lebanese filmmakers that includes Ziad Doueir (West Beirut), Nadine Labaki (Caramel), Philippe Aractingi (Bosta and Under the Bombs), Ghassan Salhab (The Last Man) and the team of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (A Perfect Day and I Want to See). In terms of subject matter, there is a lot of overlap among them. They have all made films whose subject is the civil war, the disappeared and the destruction of Beirut (by war, reconstruction and other means). They share a tendency to produce short, cinematic love letters to the city’s resilient visual culture, and an affection for the visual codes and rhythms of art-house cinema.
All of these filmmakers, Arbid included, struggle to negotiate between Lebanon and the rest of the world to make films in a place where there is little audience and less funding. But her work makes clear that Arbid’s relationship with the country of her birth is more tortured than that of her peers. Her films do not simply expose a wound – whether it is the tear ripped between Lebanon and France, East and West, past and present, memory and amnesia or masculine and feminine. They dig into it and extract from it something both playful and productive.
Arbid’s sense of playfulness is not actually lighthearted. The game she sets up in film after film is a dangerous one. She deals not with the fun of play but the terror of escape, the act of a prisoner plotting a jailbreak into the unknown. It is probably no coincidence that the main characters in both of Arbid’s features flee from different forms of confinement. Escaping, rebelling, breaking rules – these are crucial, necessary acts in Arbid’s cinema. They are its oxygen and, one suspects, hers.
Arbid, who is 38, was born in Lebanon and moved to France when she was 17. She studied literature and worked as a journalist for five years. She wanted to be like Hunter S Thompson, but ended up writing hard news and hated the rigid, formulaic storytelling of the genre. So she quit, wrote a screenplay, won a competition and began making films. She has produced 10 films in 10 years, and her work has been the subject of four festival retrospectives – not bad for a director under the age of 40.
Arbid has screened both of her features in Cannes, and her documentaries and shorts have won a slew of awards. But she has met a hostile reception from critics and audiences at every turn, in part because her films refuse to be what they appear.
Her 2004 debut feature, In the Battlefields, seems at first a sweet fable about innocent children during the Lebanese civil war but turns out to be an evocative study of adolescent sexuality and young women coming into their own through the bursts of rebellion that follow bouts of humiliation. “I like this period between 12 and 18,” Arbid says. “When you could go crazy; when you are not an adult and not a child.”
In the film, one young girl, Lina, befriends another, Siham. But Lina is the daughter of a middle-class Lebanese family while Siham, slightly older, is a Syrian maid. Siham leads a wild life outside of her place of employment, a few floors up from Lina’s apartment. She brings Lina along on her adventures, until Lina discovers that Siham plans to run away to marry her boyfriend and snitches. Siham gets locked up and never forgives Lina for the transgression. The film scholar Lina Khatib, in her new book Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond, reads the film as a treatise on the deep class divisions in Lebanon. It is also a study of the rite of passage that is getting dropped, ditched or left behind, and the act of throwing off burdens both social and cultural.
Arbid’s second feature, Un Homme Perdu, from 2007, tracks the story of a man who goes missing from Lebanon in 1985. He turns up as a day labourer in Syria many years later and then, after spitting on his employer and taking off, encounters a photographer on the Jordanian border. As the two men travel together, the photographer, whose character is based on Antoine d’Agata (a Magnum photographer with a cult following in France), attempts to wrench open the man’s story. He pulls the man into brothels and pushes him into street fights. He tries to break the man down so he will confess who he is and what he has done. He does not succeed, but he manages to return the man, against his will, to his life in Lebanon. Reunited with his wife and reinstalled in an atmosphere of domestic bliss, the man smoulders in silent anger. And as soon as he can, he runs, leaving the photographer with nothing but images to illustrate their unfulfilled adventure.
Like In the Battlefields, Un Homme Perdu could have been an earnest account of the need for remembrance and reconciliation in postwar Lebanon. But Arbid’s film suggests that uncovering the truth isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, and that obsessive engagement with the dark episodes in Lebanon’s tumultuous history might ultimately be a dead end. In place of meaningful redemption or a tidy resolution, she emphasises the assertions of power, cruelty and desire at play in the relationship between the two men.
But critics were preoccupied by the film’s explicit content, and slammed Arbid for having the audacity to take on a figure as large as d’Agata, arguing that she should stick to her home turf in war-torn Lebanon and leave France’s artists alone. Variety called Un Homme Perdu a “pointless exercise” and “a big step back” for Arbid, and blasted its “typically Gallic mix of erotica and existentialism.” But Arbid considers such criticisms a kind of chauvinism: “If I had been a man making Un Homme Perdu, it would have been OK” for western critics, Arbid says. “The Arab critics, I knew why they hated it. It wasn’t for this purpose, me being a girl. For them, it was just out of the question to make this film at all, boy or girl.” Out of the question, presumably, because Arbid filmed in brothels on Arab soil.
In the end, the film was neither well reviewed nor widely seen. But Arbid has pressed on to two new projects: her third feature, which she will begin shooting next year, an adaptation of an American novel, Salt Water, transposed to France – and This Smell of Sex, the film featuring her France Culture radio footage, whose explicit language and exuberant lewdness will probably infuriate Arbid’s Arab critics even further.
But for all its prurient content, the film’s real subject may be language – Arbid captures the graphic precision and expressive imagery used to describe these physical intimacy in Arabic. Seen in the context of Arbid’s other work, This Smell of Sex continues a fascination with language that the filmmaker has been exploring for years in an open-ended series of videos called Conversations de Salon, which feature older women (including her mother and her aunts) speaking about the lives, their prescription drug habits, their husbands and their sons. The works open a window onto a particular class of Lebanese women that some viewers find them claustrophobic and unbearable (others find them revealing and amusing).
“I’ve always been interested in the Arabic language,” says Arbid. “I’ve been in France for 20 years but when I come back to Lebanon I like very much to speak Arabic. I love to hear how my mother’s friends ‘image’ things. The whole thing becomes an image and they lie and they use the language in a great way, whereas in France they don’t do this. People here always tell me in Arabic how they [have sex]. You know, my friends and I, we speak about this. I have friends in Dahiyeh [Beirut’s southern suburbs] and they always tell me lewd things. They slang the language, they change it, and it’s very inventive.”
“So I decided to record it. Maybe because I wasn’t filming them, I knew they wouldn’t censor themselves. Because when you speak about this, you have to be precise. And in a way, I like joining this to the idea of the Arab world, where sex is out, where it doesn’t exist, where it exists behind the image, where it is blacked out.”
But transforming disembodied voices into a film was no small challenge. “When I did this in 2005, I thought I wanted to make a film out of it but I didn’t have the idea of how to illustrate the words with images. When you have a text like this and you put erotic things on screen, it isn’t good. I tried lots of things, but it wasn’t there. So I had to wait two or three years for the idea to come.”
Each year, the Né à Beyrouth Festival of Lebanese Film (which Arbic has helped organize for the past six years) holds a special screening of found Super 8 footage discovered and donated by filmmakers and members of the public. One day, Arbid was reviewing the reels and watched a home movie that had been found in an old, abandoned Beirut marketplace. It features a young woman posing innocently, for a camera in her bedroom.
“I liked it very much,” says Arbid. “It’s amateur, unknown, but it’s definitely Beirut. I zoomed it and sped it up. It was already very good but I worked on it and it became the film.”
Arbid asked the singer Yasmine Hamdan to do the music, and she improvised on old Arabic love songs, which are full of rich, sensual metaphors to begin with. As a result, This Smell of Sex consists of voices, images and songs sliding in and out of the audience’s range of perception. Arbid added an introduction, a fictional voice-over narration in the style of a promotional tourism spot on Radio Monte Carlo circa 1960, about the magical city of Beirut, a playground for the easy-going and the adventurous. Arbid’s film suggests, in extremely subtle ways, that this idea of Beirut as a hothouse for licentious behaviour never died, despite the Lebanese capital’s subsequent plunge into patterns of self-destruction.
“It’s very joyful,” Arbid says. “It has nothing to do with secrets or shame or things that people are not supposed to say. It’s not sad. It’s very dirty and very funny.”
“I wouldn’t have done it if there were [only men and] no [women] speaking. I don’t believe in the sexual exoticism of the Arab world. When I show the film in Europe, people don’t tell me: ‘They’re exotic.’ People tell me: ‘They’re like us.’ I don’t want people to go see the film and say to themselves: ‘Let’s see how the animals speak about sex.’ I’m attacked here, but really they should pay me, because I show people as they are, I show them as human beings.”
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reports from Beirut for The National.
Saturday, 11 October 2008
The Lost Jihad: Love in Islam
The many words and meanings for love in Arabic are reflective of Islam's comprehensiveness and depth.
"At the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow," wrote Egyptian author Adhaf Soueif in her Booker-nominated novel, The Map of Love. She was indulging in a very beautifully written digression about Arabic grammar, comparing words derived from the same root: in this case, qalb, "heart"; and enqilab, "overthrow". At this level, where the interplay of meaning and construction is visible, Arabic becomes an extraordinary language, forcing into cooperation concepts and ideas that are entirely unrelated in English.
Despite the tremendous conceptual range and utility provided by the root-and-pattern system of the language, there is a common assumption among non-speakers that Arabic-and thus, Islam-lacks an equivalent of agapé, a Greek term used by Christians to mean the boundary-less, self-sacrificing love between believers, or between a believer and God. More passionate than filia, less explicit than eros, agapé is love stripped of expectation, in which the lover is humbled and disciplined before the beloved. Running a Google search for 'agapé' and 'Islam' yields literally hundreds of Christian sites claiming there is no such term in Arabic, and painting Islam as a cold, dispassionate religion in its absence.
Over the years, Sufi Muslims have co-opted many of the romantic Arabic words for love and made them serve an ideal very much like agapé: Rumi feels hayam for the absent Shams; al Ghazali explores 'aishq as the union between a worthy believer and a higher Beloved, Allah. The poetry of 10th and 11th-century Sufis helped inspire the troubadour culture and ideals of courtly love that flourished in the medieval kingdoms of southern France, Navarre and Aragonne; one of the positive artistic developments to arise from contact between Christian Europe and the Muslim Near East during the Crusades. But many of the greatest Sufi thinkers, including al Ghazali, were themselves influenced by Platonic, Neoplatonic and Gnostic Christian ideals of love, kept alive in the medieval Middle East by the translation of Greek, Roman and Byzantine texts into Arabic and Persian. The question remains: we know the Prophet Muhammad meant Muslims to love and serve God, but did he mean them to be in love with God-and to reflect this love and service among each other?
The answer is, simply, yes. Though it has classically been overlooked by Islam's detractors, there is a word for agapé in Arabic. It carries the same non-specific 'boundary-less' connotation as the Greek word, and is used contextually in the same way. Better yet, it is entirely original; not borrowed, adapted, or modeled on a word from another language. The Arabic word for agapé is mahubba, and it is fascinating for two reasons: one, because it comes from hub-in its feminine form. Two, because of the prefix ma. Adding the letter mim to the beginning of a word in Arabic means "one who is/does", "that which is/does", or "in a state of" the word that follows it. Junun is mad, and majnun is "one who is mad" or "in a state of madness"; baraka is a blessing, and mubarak is "one who is blessed" or "in a state of blessedness"; Islam is submission, and Muslim is "one who submits" or "in a state of submission". Thus, mahubba is quite literally 'in love', but it is rarely used in an erotic sense. It can describe either love among people or love for the divine, and is used most commonly in a spiritual context in both cases. Implicit in mahubba is service; the lover puts the beloved at the center of the discourse, and submits to his/her demands. Author Fethullah Gulen describes mahubba as "obedience, devotion and unconditional submission" to the beloved, quoting Sufi saint Rabi'a al-Adawiya's couplet, "If you were truthful in your love, you would obey Him/for a lover obeys whom he loves."
While it is, again, primarily Sufis who have propagated the ideal of mahubba over the centuries, the word and the concept have roots in mainstream Islamic tradition: verse 3:31 of the Qur'an is sometimes called 'ayat ul'mahubba', and reads "Say: if you do love Allah, follow me, and Allah will love you." Even ibn Taymiyya, one of the founders of the Wahhabi movement, said of this verse, "There can be no clearer recognition of mahubba than this, and this recognition in itself increases love for Allah. And people have discussed (at length) about mahubba: its causes, its signs, its fruits, its supports and rulings." A hadith qudsi included in the Muwatta of Imam Malik is even more explicit: "God said, 'My love [mahubbati] necessarily belongs to those who love one another [mutahubinna] for My sake, sit together for My sake, visit one another for My sake, and give generously to one another for My sake'."
Mahubba differs from agapé in one crucial respect: because serving and approaching the beloved is a form of ongoing personal struggle, mahubba is a form of jihad. A far cry from the violent and indiscriminate "small jihad" preached by militants, mahubba is a form of al-jihad al-kabir, the greater jihad, or jihad against one's own ego. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in an age of lesser jihad mahubba has fallen out of practice and almost out of memory; it is so universally neglected that when Islam is accused of lacking a concept of divine brotherhood, few Muslims have the intellectual wherewithal to protest. But Adhaf Soueif is right: at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow. The struggle to serve God out of love, and one another out of love, is the jihad of human potential against the jihad of violent ideology; if resurrected, it has the power to change the world.
____________________
G. WILLOW WILSON is a Cairo-based author and essayist. Her articles about modern Islam and the Middle East have appeared in publications including the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and the Canada National Post
"At the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow," wrote Egyptian author Adhaf Soueif in her Booker-nominated novel, The Map of Love. She was indulging in a very beautifully written digression about Arabic grammar, comparing words derived from the same root: in this case, qalb, "heart"; and enqilab, "overthrow". At this level, where the interplay of meaning and construction is visible, Arabic becomes an extraordinary language, forcing into cooperation concepts and ideas that are entirely unrelated in English.
Despite the tremendous conceptual range and utility provided by the root-and-pattern system of the language, there is a common assumption among non-speakers that Arabic-and thus, Islam-lacks an equivalent of agapé, a Greek term used by Christians to mean the boundary-less, self-sacrificing love between believers, or between a believer and God. More passionate than filia, less explicit than eros, agapé is love stripped of expectation, in which the lover is humbled and disciplined before the beloved. Running a Google search for 'agapé' and 'Islam' yields literally hundreds of Christian sites claiming there is no such term in Arabic, and painting Islam as a cold, dispassionate religion in its absence.
Over the years, Sufi Muslims have co-opted many of the romantic Arabic words for love and made them serve an ideal very much like agapé: Rumi feels hayam for the absent Shams; al Ghazali explores 'aishq as the union between a worthy believer and a higher Beloved, Allah. The poetry of 10th and 11th-century Sufis helped inspire the troubadour culture and ideals of courtly love that flourished in the medieval kingdoms of southern France, Navarre and Aragonne; one of the positive artistic developments to arise from contact between Christian Europe and the Muslim Near East during the Crusades. But many of the greatest Sufi thinkers, including al Ghazali, were themselves influenced by Platonic, Neoplatonic and Gnostic Christian ideals of love, kept alive in the medieval Middle East by the translation of Greek, Roman and Byzantine texts into Arabic and Persian. The question remains: we know the Prophet Muhammad meant Muslims to love and serve God, but did he mean them to be in love with God-and to reflect this love and service among each other?
The answer is, simply, yes. Though it has classically been overlooked by Islam's detractors, there is a word for agapé in Arabic. It carries the same non-specific 'boundary-less' connotation as the Greek word, and is used contextually in the same way. Better yet, it is entirely original; not borrowed, adapted, or modeled on a word from another language. The Arabic word for agapé is mahubba, and it is fascinating for two reasons: one, because it comes from hub-in its feminine form. Two, because of the prefix ma. Adding the letter mim to the beginning of a word in Arabic means "one who is/does", "that which is/does", or "in a state of" the word that follows it. Junun is mad, and majnun is "one who is mad" or "in a state of madness"; baraka is a blessing, and mubarak is "one who is blessed" or "in a state of blessedness"; Islam is submission, and Muslim is "one who submits" or "in a state of submission". Thus, mahubba is quite literally 'in love', but it is rarely used in an erotic sense. It can describe either love among people or love for the divine, and is used most commonly in a spiritual context in both cases. Implicit in mahubba is service; the lover puts the beloved at the center of the discourse, and submits to his/her demands. Author Fethullah Gulen describes mahubba as "obedience, devotion and unconditional submission" to the beloved, quoting Sufi saint Rabi'a al-Adawiya's couplet, "If you were truthful in your love, you would obey Him/for a lover obeys whom he loves."
While it is, again, primarily Sufis who have propagated the ideal of mahubba over the centuries, the word and the concept have roots in mainstream Islamic tradition: verse 3:31 of the Qur'an is sometimes called 'ayat ul'mahubba', and reads "Say: if you do love Allah, follow me, and Allah will love you." Even ibn Taymiyya, one of the founders of the Wahhabi movement, said of this verse, "There can be no clearer recognition of mahubba than this, and this recognition in itself increases love for Allah. And people have discussed (at length) about mahubba: its causes, its signs, its fruits, its supports and rulings." A hadith qudsi included in the Muwatta of Imam Malik is even more explicit: "God said, 'My love [mahubbati] necessarily belongs to those who love one another [mutahubinna] for My sake, sit together for My sake, visit one another for My sake, and give generously to one another for My sake'."
Mahubba differs from agapé in one crucial respect: because serving and approaching the beloved is a form of ongoing personal struggle, mahubba is a form of jihad. A far cry from the violent and indiscriminate "small jihad" preached by militants, mahubba is a form of al-jihad al-kabir, the greater jihad, or jihad against one's own ego. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in an age of lesser jihad mahubba has fallen out of practice and almost out of memory; it is so universally neglected that when Islam is accused of lacking a concept of divine brotherhood, few Muslims have the intellectual wherewithal to protest. But Adhaf Soueif is right: at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow. The struggle to serve God out of love, and one another out of love, is the jihad of human potential against the jihad of violent ideology; if resurrected, it has the power to change the world.
____________________
G. WILLOW WILSON is a Cairo-based author and essayist. Her articles about modern Islam and the Middle East have appeared in publications including the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and the Canada National Post
Monday, 25 August 2008
Hebrew's evolution: More anxiety for Israel Modern language drifts from biblical
JERUSALEM -- Some Israelis have described being moved almost to tears by a rare viewing of the Great Isaiah Scroll - the best-preserved and most complete Dead Sea biblical scroll - on special exhibit this summer at the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book for the first time in 40 years.
The familiar, unfulfilled prophecy of the 2,100-year-old scroll - ''and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more'' - undoubtedly arouses emotion here. But there is also a thrill born of ordinary people being able to read, and at least partially understand, such an ancient Hebrew text.
Two centuries after the scroll was written, Jewish history became one of dispersal and exile, and Hebrew ceased to be spoken anywhere for the next 1,700 years.
Its revival is often hailed as one of the greatest feats of the Zionist enterprise. Today modern Hebrew is the first language of millions of Israelis, a loquacious and literary nation that is said to publish an average of 5,500 books a year.
But in a country where self-doubt and insecurity run deep, even a linguistic triumph can be a cause for concern. After such a meteoric comeback, some worry that the common language may already be in decline, popularized to the point where many Israelis can no longer cope with the rich complexities of traditional Hebrew prose.
''There is a feeling of anxiety,'' said Ruvik Rosenthal, a popular Israeli language guru and author of a best-selling dictionary of Hebrew slang.
There is the creeping foreign influence, as urban sophisticates pepper their Hebrew speech with accented English affectations like ''please,'' ''sorry'' and ''whatever,'' along with a noticeable loss of nuance and relative paucity of vocabulary in regular use.
Israelis can obsess about language. ''We speak with mistakes,'' Rosenthal said. ''Everyone does, and everyone corrects everyone else.''
But he and other Hebrew watchers point to a potentially more disturbing trend: Living Hebrew has moved at a fast pace, and in the process it has become increasingly estranged from its ancient form.
''We used to understand the biblical language better, and our language was closer to it,'' said Ronit Gadish, academic secretary of Israel's Academy of the Hebrew Language, the supreme guardian of the national tongue. ''Now, what can we do to keep up the continuity?''
In a country laden with religious and historical symbolism, the linguistic link to the past has evoked feelings of national identity, vindication and pride. Any erosion is bound to stir unease.
''The Bible,'' Rosenthal said, ''is first of all our connection to the land.''
Hebrew was never actually dead. It was more like an unborn child, according to Ariel Hirschfeld, a Hebrew literature lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, slowly developing over the centuries as the language of Jewish letters and prayer.
Educated Jews would read the weekly Torah portion in Hebrew, while sages from Prague to Baghdad corresponded on religious questions in their only common tongue.
But the linguistic reincarnation came with the birth of modern Zionism and was largely driven by one man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who was born in a Lithuanian village 150 years ago and immigrated to Palestine in 1881.
The classical scriptures provided words for concepts like justice, mercy, love and hate, but not for more mundane things like ''office'' or ''socks.'' So Ben-Yehuda started inventing new words, mostly drawn from ancient biblical patterns and roots.
Authors and poets like the Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon, Chaim Nahman Bialik and Uri Tzvi Greenberg, Hebrew revivalists from Eastern Europe, also drew on the ancient sources to create texts rich in biblical allusions yet conceptually avant-garde.
''They managed to tie the ancient language with the modern world in all its depth,'' said Hirschfeld, who has compared them in importance to James Joyce.
The Hebrew-speaking project took off rapidly in what was then Palestine, adopted zealously by the Zionist pioneers. By 1914, there was a decision to teach only in Hebrew in Jewish schools, and by the time the Israeli state was founded in 1948, there was already a generation of Israelis who spoke Hebrew as their native tongue.
Now the academy continues in its quest for new words, trying, with partial success, to introduce authentic Hebrew equivalents for foreign terms before they stick. In the country that commercialized instant messaging with ICQ, that can often mean a race against time. So an SMS is now officially called a ''misron,'' from ''meser,'' the word for message. The proper Hebrew for talk-back (commonly pronounced ''tokbek'') is ''tguvit,'' a diminutive of ''tguva,'' response.
''When there was no word for tickle, nobody wrote about tickling,'' said Gabriel Birnbaum, a language expert at the Academy. ''Today, we have everything.''
Birnbaum is now helping preserve the link with the past as one of a team writing entries for a historical dictionary of Hebrew. The Academy has been compiling material for it since 1959. Asked about a particular example of Hebrew shorthand often used in laconic online chat, Birnbaum was able with a click of his mouse to locate the earliest use of it - in a Dead Sea scroll.
Birnbaum, like most of the experts, views the apparent deterioration of Hebrew as a natural process, if it can be considered degeneration at all. The reality, they say, is not as bad as it sounds. Rather, the anxiety may stem less from the state of Hebrew and more from the Israeli state of mind.
''It comes from a lack of security,'' said Rosenthal, who was born in 1948, the year that Israel was founded, and explained the linguistic qualms as part of the collective summing-up of the past 60 years. ''The state of Israel has no confidence in its continued existence.''
The language may have moved on since the days of the prophets, but perhaps the sense of doom has not.
The familiar, unfulfilled prophecy of the 2,100-year-old scroll - ''and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more'' - undoubtedly arouses emotion here. But there is also a thrill born of ordinary people being able to read, and at least partially understand, such an ancient Hebrew text.
Two centuries after the scroll was written, Jewish history became one of dispersal and exile, and Hebrew ceased to be spoken anywhere for the next 1,700 years.
Its revival is often hailed as one of the greatest feats of the Zionist enterprise. Today modern Hebrew is the first language of millions of Israelis, a loquacious and literary nation that is said to publish an average of 5,500 books a year.
But in a country where self-doubt and insecurity run deep, even a linguistic triumph can be a cause for concern. After such a meteoric comeback, some worry that the common language may already be in decline, popularized to the point where many Israelis can no longer cope with the rich complexities of traditional Hebrew prose.
''There is a feeling of anxiety,'' said Ruvik Rosenthal, a popular Israeli language guru and author of a best-selling dictionary of Hebrew slang.
There is the creeping foreign influence, as urban sophisticates pepper their Hebrew speech with accented English affectations like ''please,'' ''sorry'' and ''whatever,'' along with a noticeable loss of nuance and relative paucity of vocabulary in regular use.
Israelis can obsess about language. ''We speak with mistakes,'' Rosenthal said. ''Everyone does, and everyone corrects everyone else.''
But he and other Hebrew watchers point to a potentially more disturbing trend: Living Hebrew has moved at a fast pace, and in the process it has become increasingly estranged from its ancient form.
''We used to understand the biblical language better, and our language was closer to it,'' said Ronit Gadish, academic secretary of Israel's Academy of the Hebrew Language, the supreme guardian of the national tongue. ''Now, what can we do to keep up the continuity?''
In a country laden with religious and historical symbolism, the linguistic link to the past has evoked feelings of national identity, vindication and pride. Any erosion is bound to stir unease.
''The Bible,'' Rosenthal said, ''is first of all our connection to the land.''
Hebrew was never actually dead. It was more like an unborn child, according to Ariel Hirschfeld, a Hebrew literature lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, slowly developing over the centuries as the language of Jewish letters and prayer.
Educated Jews would read the weekly Torah portion in Hebrew, while sages from Prague to Baghdad corresponded on religious questions in their only common tongue.
But the linguistic reincarnation came with the birth of modern Zionism and was largely driven by one man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who was born in a Lithuanian village 150 years ago and immigrated to Palestine in 1881.
The classical scriptures provided words for concepts like justice, mercy, love and hate, but not for more mundane things like ''office'' or ''socks.'' So Ben-Yehuda started inventing new words, mostly drawn from ancient biblical patterns and roots.
Authors and poets like the Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon, Chaim Nahman Bialik and Uri Tzvi Greenberg, Hebrew revivalists from Eastern Europe, also drew on the ancient sources to create texts rich in biblical allusions yet conceptually avant-garde.
''They managed to tie the ancient language with the modern world in all its depth,'' said Hirschfeld, who has compared them in importance to James Joyce.
The Hebrew-speaking project took off rapidly in what was then Palestine, adopted zealously by the Zionist pioneers. By 1914, there was a decision to teach only in Hebrew in Jewish schools, and by the time the Israeli state was founded in 1948, there was already a generation of Israelis who spoke Hebrew as their native tongue.
Now the academy continues in its quest for new words, trying, with partial success, to introduce authentic Hebrew equivalents for foreign terms before they stick. In the country that commercialized instant messaging with ICQ, that can often mean a race against time. So an SMS is now officially called a ''misron,'' from ''meser,'' the word for message. The proper Hebrew for talk-back (commonly pronounced ''tokbek'') is ''tguvit,'' a diminutive of ''tguva,'' response.
''When there was no word for tickle, nobody wrote about tickling,'' said Gabriel Birnbaum, a language expert at the Academy. ''Today, we have everything.''
Birnbaum is now helping preserve the link with the past as one of a team writing entries for a historical dictionary of Hebrew. The Academy has been compiling material for it since 1959. Asked about a particular example of Hebrew shorthand often used in laconic online chat, Birnbaum was able with a click of his mouse to locate the earliest use of it - in a Dead Sea scroll.
Birnbaum, like most of the experts, views the apparent deterioration of Hebrew as a natural process, if it can be considered degeneration at all. The reality, they say, is not as bad as it sounds. Rather, the anxiety may stem less from the state of Hebrew and more from the Israeli state of mind.
''It comes from a lack of security,'' said Rosenthal, who was born in 1948, the year that Israel was founded, and explained the linguistic qualms as part of the collective summing-up of the past 60 years. ''The state of Israel has no confidence in its continued existence.''
The language may have moved on since the days of the prophets, but perhaps the sense of doom has not.
Thursday, 21 August 2008
ARABIC TRANSLATION OF HARRY POTTER AND PINOCCHIO UNWELCOME IN ISRAEL
MEDIA BLAB NEWS BITES
Harry Potter and Pinocchio are apparently not welcome in Israel, at least in their Arabic translations imported from Syria and Lebanon.
Arab-Israeli publisher Salah Abassi told Israeli public radio on Monday that authorities ordered him to stop importing Arabic-language children's books from the two long-time foes of Israel.
The ban includes translations of such books as Pinocchio and Harry Potter as well as Arabic classics.
Abassi, who imported the books through Jordan, said "Ministry and treasury warned me that importing those books is illegal."
The ban is based on a decree from 1939 - when the area was under British mandate - prohibiting the importation of books from countries that are at war with Israel.
Abassi told the Maariv daily newspaper that most of the books can be found only in Lebanon and Syria.
He said, "If they were printed in Jordan or Egypt, which are friendly to Israel, I would lose no time in buying them there. Now the significance is that the Arabic reading public in Israel will not be able to enjoy the best literature."
Harry Potter and Pinocchio are apparently not welcome in Israel, at least in their Arabic translations imported from Syria and Lebanon.
Arab-Israeli publisher Salah Abassi told Israeli public radio on Monday that authorities ordered him to stop importing Arabic-language children's books from the two long-time foes of Israel.
The ban includes translations of such books as Pinocchio and Harry Potter as well as Arabic classics.
Abassi, who imported the books through Jordan, said "Ministry and treasury warned me that importing those books is illegal."
The ban is based on a decree from 1939 - when the area was under British mandate - prohibiting the importation of books from countries that are at war with Israel.
Abassi told the Maariv daily newspaper that most of the books can be found only in Lebanon and Syria.
He said, "If they were printed in Jordan or Egypt, which are friendly to Israel, I would lose no time in buying them there. Now the significance is that the Arabic reading public in Israel will not be able to enjoy the best literature."
Monday, 18 August 2008
Social networks leap the language barrier
Business | Nothing has got lost in translation as the likes of Facebook and MySpace win millions of converts in new countries. By Catherine Holahan
When Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wants to illustrate the impact of his social network, he tells a story about several young religious militants from Lebanon who changed their view of Western culture through Facebook friendships. The subtext to the tale is that free expression of ideas, enabled by the web, bridges deep cultural divides.
But we knew that: it's one of the central concepts behind the Olympics, after all. What we didn't know is that Facebook is in Lebanon.
In fact, it is expanding rapidly in many regions. According to figures released by market research firm comScore last week, the site is the top global social network. Of Facebook's 132 million users, nearly 63 per cent are outside North America. The site, which had already been translated into 20 languages including French, Spanish and Mandarin, has recently added 69 more.
"Now, through translations, we are seeing a lot of growth abroad," said Javier Olivan, international manager at Facebook, in a recent interview.
As American sites such as Facebook and News Corporation's MySpace saturate their home markets, they are looking abroad to fuel the audience growth that has made them so attractive to users, advertisers, acquirers and would-be inves-tors. MySpace has expanded to more than 29 countries, including India and Korea, in the past few years.
MySpace is particularly popular with users in Puerto Rico, Australia, Britain and Malaysia, according to a study by Pingdom, a Swedish service that monitors website availability. Pingdom based its findings on the regions where a particular social network is searched for most often via Google. For instance, the countries with the greatest interest in LinkedIn, a network aimed at professionals, are India, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and the US.
But Facebook has been particularly successful in terms of sheer user adoption. Its number of new members was up 153 per cent in June from the same month a year earlier, driven mainly by astronomical growth in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Among specific countries Turkey, Canada, Britain, South Africa and Colombia have the greatest interest, according to Pingdom.
By comparison, Facebook's North American audience grew just 38 per cent in June and MySpace was up only 3 per cent, according to comScore.
Facebook owes its results, in part, to its technology-driven international strategy. Rather than launch local-language versions of Facebook for new markets, complete with a local Facebook bureau, it opted to provide translation tools that let users take the existing site and personalise it in their own tongue.
The tools, which users can tweak to create more accurate translations, helped Facebook roll out in new countries faster than many rivals, giving it an early presence in local markets that grew exponentially as users encouraged their friends to join the site.
MySpace has taken a different tack. It is opening offices in countries where it knows there are advertising dollars, as well as friends, to be made.
The strategy makes the company slower at expanding in new markets, but MySpace believes the approach will ultimately mean that its local offerings are better equipped to reflect the cultures of new countries while also catering to advertisers. The site's non-US audiences will soon account for more than 50 per cent of its revenues, explains Jeff Berman, MySpace's president of sales and marketing.
Hi5 is following a hybrid strategy. In May, the San Francisco-based social network launched tools enabling users to translate the site into any language. Before that, Hi5 had hired a third-party service provider, Lionbridge, to translate it into languages like Japanese and make it reflect the added countries' cultures.
The company's user base has grown to more than 56 million, thanks in large part to those efforts, according to Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at comScore. "Hi5 has really put an emphasis on cultural relevance beyond just the translation," he says.
The site is popular throughout Latin America, home to four of the five countries where it shows up most often in searches, according to Pingdom.
Although Facebook has focused on tools, it isn't ruling out opening local bureaux to help make the site more culturally relevant - and to sell ads. But executives aren't convinced that new offices are necessary. Once there are users, the thinking goes, advertisers will follow.
"The platform is open, and as soon as advertisers find value, they just start creating campaigns," says Mr Olivan. "So it is pretty much universal."
When Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wants to illustrate the impact of his social network, he tells a story about several young religious militants from Lebanon who changed their view of Western culture through Facebook friendships. The subtext to the tale is that free expression of ideas, enabled by the web, bridges deep cultural divides.
But we knew that: it's one of the central concepts behind the Olympics, after all. What we didn't know is that Facebook is in Lebanon.
In fact, it is expanding rapidly in many regions. According to figures released by market research firm comScore last week, the site is the top global social network. Of Facebook's 132 million users, nearly 63 per cent are outside North America. The site, which had already been translated into 20 languages including French, Spanish and Mandarin, has recently added 69 more.
"Now, through translations, we are seeing a lot of growth abroad," said Javier Olivan, international manager at Facebook, in a recent interview.
As American sites such as Facebook and News Corporation's MySpace saturate their home markets, they are looking abroad to fuel the audience growth that has made them so attractive to users, advertisers, acquirers and would-be inves-tors. MySpace has expanded to more than 29 countries, including India and Korea, in the past few years.
MySpace is particularly popular with users in Puerto Rico, Australia, Britain and Malaysia, according to a study by Pingdom, a Swedish service that monitors website availability. Pingdom based its findings on the regions where a particular social network is searched for most often via Google. For instance, the countries with the greatest interest in LinkedIn, a network aimed at professionals, are India, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and the US.
But Facebook has been particularly successful in terms of sheer user adoption. Its number of new members was up 153 per cent in June from the same month a year earlier, driven mainly by astronomical growth in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Among specific countries Turkey, Canada, Britain, South Africa and Colombia have the greatest interest, according to Pingdom.
By comparison, Facebook's North American audience grew just 38 per cent in June and MySpace was up only 3 per cent, according to comScore.
Facebook owes its results, in part, to its technology-driven international strategy. Rather than launch local-language versions of Facebook for new markets, complete with a local Facebook bureau, it opted to provide translation tools that let users take the existing site and personalise it in their own tongue.
The tools, which users can tweak to create more accurate translations, helped Facebook roll out in new countries faster than many rivals, giving it an early presence in local markets that grew exponentially as users encouraged their friends to join the site.
MySpace has taken a different tack. It is opening offices in countries where it knows there are advertising dollars, as well as friends, to be made.
The strategy makes the company slower at expanding in new markets, but MySpace believes the approach will ultimately mean that its local offerings are better equipped to reflect the cultures of new countries while also catering to advertisers. The site's non-US audiences will soon account for more than 50 per cent of its revenues, explains Jeff Berman, MySpace's president of sales and marketing.
Hi5 is following a hybrid strategy. In May, the San Francisco-based social network launched tools enabling users to translate the site into any language. Before that, Hi5 had hired a third-party service provider, Lionbridge, to translate it into languages like Japanese and make it reflect the added countries' cultures.
The company's user base has grown to more than 56 million, thanks in large part to those efforts, according to Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at comScore. "Hi5 has really put an emphasis on cultural relevance beyond just the translation," he says.
The site is popular throughout Latin America, home to four of the five countries where it shows up most often in searches, according to Pingdom.
Although Facebook has focused on tools, it isn't ruling out opening local bureaux to help make the site more culturally relevant - and to sell ads. But executives aren't convinced that new offices are necessary. Once there are users, the thinking goes, advertisers will follow.
"The platform is open, and as soon as advertisers find value, they just start creating campaigns," says Mr Olivan. "So it is pretty much universal."
Tuesday, 5 August 2008
LITERATURE: THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL: On a mission to get Afghanistan reading
KABUL -- Shah Muhammad Rais is the biggest bookseller in Afghanistan, but while business is good, he still has another mission in mind: to get his countrymen interested in reading again.
Having failed to reach all the far-flung corners of war-torn Afghanistan with a mobile bookshop on a bus, the 54-year-old Rais has now launched a website (www.shahmbookco.com) to reach those who have access to the Internet and order books online.
He claims to have the world's largest collection of books on Afghanistan in key international languages.
“I would say they are unique,” Rais said in his store in the heart of Kabul as his staff dusted off a pile of books, part of the nearly one million he owns.
“With regret and unfortunately, I have to say that I am the main bookseller in Afghanistan. There will be a crisis of books if something happens to us or if we collapse. So, it is very important that we have others involved in this too,” he said.
Rais, who has an engineering degree, has been involved in the book trade for 35 years and is well known to expatriates in Kabul and to Afghan book lovers.
He was the subject of a book, written by a visiting Norwegian journalist after the Taliban's fall in 2001. The Bookseller of Kabul portrays Rais as tough and brutal with his family, and became a worldwide success with sales of more than a million copies.
Rais, who hosted the author, Asne Seierstad, rejects the book and at one time was planning to take legal action against her.
His said his worst experience as a bookseller during the past three decades of war was being thrown behind bars for two years by the communist government of the 1980s for selling “imperialistic books” and copies of the newspapers of Western-backed Afghan factions opposing the regime.
In 2002, he began work on a project to sell books from a bus to remote parts of Afghanistan. After failing to get support from foreign NGOs involved in educational or cultural projects, he bought a bus himself. The bus took some 20,000 books to a number of northern provinces in 2006, but violence and insecurity in the south and east blocked his efforts to reach the rest of the country.
“That way, a student would have saved money and time by not travelling all the way from Kunduz or Takhar to Kabul to buy a book,” he said referring to two northern provinces.
The cost of a book on the bus tour would not have been higher than they are now in Rais's store in Kabul, he says.
The broad-shouldered and neatly bearded Rais has now created a website containing the books he has for sale and their prices. But buyers have to pay for and arrange their own transport to receive the books.
The spirit of book reading has suffered in Afghan culture because of three decades of war. The years of conflict have damaged education and literacy rates in Afghanistan, once the birthplace of important scholars, scientists and poets.
“Through books, our kids would know about their culture, history and understand the world. Books are like seas. You have to dive into the sea to get the pearl. You have to read books to know how to solve your country's problems,” Rais said. “Unless we reintroduce the habit of book reading, we will have more illiterates and more trouble.”
Rais is working on a personal memoir of the last three decades and said he wants to expand his business by building a “massive bookshop, library and a publishing house to have direct contacts with the world's libraries.”
Having failed to reach all the far-flung corners of war-torn Afghanistan with a mobile bookshop on a bus, the 54-year-old Rais has now launched a website (www.shahmbookco.com) to reach those who have access to the Internet and order books online.
He claims to have the world's largest collection of books on Afghanistan in key international languages.
“I would say they are unique,” Rais said in his store in the heart of Kabul as his staff dusted off a pile of books, part of the nearly one million he owns.
“With regret and unfortunately, I have to say that I am the main bookseller in Afghanistan. There will be a crisis of books if something happens to us or if we collapse. So, it is very important that we have others involved in this too,” he said.
Rais, who has an engineering degree, has been involved in the book trade for 35 years and is well known to expatriates in Kabul and to Afghan book lovers.
He was the subject of a book, written by a visiting Norwegian journalist after the Taliban's fall in 2001. The Bookseller of Kabul portrays Rais as tough and brutal with his family, and became a worldwide success with sales of more than a million copies.
Rais, who hosted the author, Asne Seierstad, rejects the book and at one time was planning to take legal action against her.
His said his worst experience as a bookseller during the past three decades of war was being thrown behind bars for two years by the communist government of the 1980s for selling “imperialistic books” and copies of the newspapers of Western-backed Afghan factions opposing the regime.
In 2002, he began work on a project to sell books from a bus to remote parts of Afghanistan. After failing to get support from foreign NGOs involved in educational or cultural projects, he bought a bus himself. The bus took some 20,000 books to a number of northern provinces in 2006, but violence and insecurity in the south and east blocked his efforts to reach the rest of the country.
“That way, a student would have saved money and time by not travelling all the way from Kunduz or Takhar to Kabul to buy a book,” he said referring to two northern provinces.
The cost of a book on the bus tour would not have been higher than they are now in Rais's store in Kabul, he says.
The broad-shouldered and neatly bearded Rais has now created a website containing the books he has for sale and their prices. But buyers have to pay for and arrange their own transport to receive the books.
The spirit of book reading has suffered in Afghan culture because of three decades of war. The years of conflict have damaged education and literacy rates in Afghanistan, once the birthplace of important scholars, scientists and poets.
“Through books, our kids would know about their culture, history and understand the world. Books are like seas. You have to dive into the sea to get the pearl. You have to read books to know how to solve your country's problems,” Rais said. “Unless we reintroduce the habit of book reading, we will have more illiterates and more trouble.”
Rais is working on a personal memoir of the last three decades and said he wants to expand his business by building a “massive bookshop, library and a publishing house to have direct contacts with the world's libraries.”
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