The Politics Of Al-Kitaab
Posted on July 6th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Reading this (via Yglesias) reminds me that what most people mean to say when they complain about “propaganda” in schools is that they dislike the propagations of views other than their own. Certainly, I think there can be cases where a focus on politics can distract from the purpose of a class, but that simply isn’t the case with the Al-Kitaab books themselves. If instructors supplement the book with other material, that may be an entirely different story. Even so, the demand for even-handedness in American Arabic textbooks because they unduly give Arabs more than a fair shake for once strikes me as fairly ridiculous.
I cannot say whether or not later parts of Al-Kitaab omit Israel from their maps, but for the first part that introductory Arabic students use it is misleading to say that Israel is not on the map. The territory on the map in my copy is labeled Filistin, which probably grates on the ears of “pro-Israel” people the way that continuing to call the West Bank Judea and Samaria grates on the ears of a lot of other people, but the boundaries of the State of Israel are acknowledged.
More to the point, the idea that introductory language classes always eschew controversial political topics is silly. The difference is that when you use Le chemin du retour for your first year of French, virtually everyone accepts the idea that it is a very bad and unpleasant thing to have had an ancestor who collaborated with the Nazis under the Vichy regime, but that is still political propaganda about a fairly controversial topic (it is particularly controversial in France!). In general, a little more fortitude and little less whining are in order.
But, yes, Maha and Khalid were annoying, and it had nothing to do with their politics or those of anyone else in the story.
P.S. Previous thoughts on the sinister power of Al-Kitaab here.
Good Lord. If you study Arabic, it should hardly come as a shock that most of the Arab world is less than enamored of Israel.
What do they want? Palestinian shepherds who enjoy being beaten by settlers from Brooklyn? Now that would be perverse.
One of the funniest moments of my undergrad experience came during a Comparative Politics class. A student who had chosen to write a paper about the recent history of Israel raised her hand and asked: “All the primary sources so biased! Where are the objective books about Israel?”
I can’t remember how our T.A. - who was Indian, and working on her doctorate on Kashmir conflict - answered her, but you could tell she was amused.
More seriously: a significant faction of the Republican Party’s punditry seems to be a modern version of the Know-Nothing Party. Biology is bunk (stem cells, cloning), ecology is bunk (global warming, endangered species), literature is bunk (post-modernism), law is bunk (lawfare, activist judges), and now even the language departments. I’m surprised they haven’t gotten around to denouncing mathematics yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
I really wish there was some way that the people who are disturbed by this Know-Nothingism, and the President’s unconstitutional berzerks, could make common cause. I don’t like the thought of having my “HELL NO!” vote split between Barr and Nader.
Nader could always drop out. Just a thought.
I agree. But it is it true that languages of our other “enemies” are often taught with a more pro-American bias. When I was studying Russian in the 80s all the textbooks were clearly prepared by emigres and were full of snide dialogues about Russian anti-semitism, bread shortages and shoddy clothing (which in fact proved quite useful when I finally got to Moscow). Apparently a lot of Farsi textbooks used in the US are also pro ancien regime. I think conservatives expect the same treatment for Arabic, but there simply doesn’t seem to be a large group of disaffected Arab speakers out there. Most Arabs of all political and religious persuasions hold pretty similar views when it comes to Israel.