the human province

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.