Monday, 28 June 2010

When 'Arabic' Isn't A Language Anymore

It shows how discontented the young people are with the state, when they prefer to speak a foreign tongue, and I don't mean immigrant kids who may do so for all sorts of reasons, including alienation, I mean the educated young (the future leaders in normal societies, but not in many Arab lands, where criminals or religious thugs are the rulers).

The reasons why mainstream Arabic is spoken less amongst the younger educated of many in the Arab world is two fold.
  1. There are no jobs (outside of corrupt state patronage) in the Arabic world, and English is the worlds lingua franca
  2. The state education system is at best 'basic to non existent', with 'religious education' the only option for many i.e. reciting from the Koran, and only with 'lessons' that don't contradict its teachings e.g. any history or philosophy which is pre Islam.
So it's no wonder that despite the mullahs and the mosque mobs who often fuel the worlds perception of Arabs, and who are the foot soldiers of any Islamist revolutions (or counter revolutions), the educated middle classes are trying to teach their kids to live with Western languages .....


A fact which makes it all the more of a condemnation of the educated Western based Muslims, who recite and recycle the fundamentalist Islamist ideals, and who take no heed of what's really the opinion of many in the Arab world ..... i.e. they fail to learn from those who are forced to live in the Arab Muslim world, and would do just about anything to leave it ...."Allah Akbar" is not the answer to a failure to develop.

Ironically, the English speakers often have very strange ideas of what the West would want from would be Muslim immigrants ..... the girl Parvaneh, a student, living in Qom and Tehran in Iran on this BBC interview thinks that her husband being a Muslim religious student in one of the most fundamentalist states in the world  i.e. a would be Muslim Shiite cleric, would guarantee them the right to emigrate to the US.

"We moved to Qom because my husband is studying Islam here ...... when my husband's course is finished, we will emigrate to the US."

It's this idea, that being taught the Koran (often by rote in a non critical manner), somehow makes you a 'scholar' in anyway like the Jewish or Christian tradition, and therefore useful in some way in the West, is why the education system in the Arab world lets so many down.

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are welcomed, or even just thanks if you enjoyed the post. But please make any comment relevant to the post it appears under. Off topic comments will be blocked or removed.

Moderation is on for older posts to stop spamming and comments that are off topic or inappropriate from being posted .... comments are reviewed within 48 hours. I don't block normal comments that are on topic and not inappropriate. Vexatious comments that may cause upset to other commentators, or that are attempting to espouse a particular wider political view, are reviewed before acceptance. But a certain amount of debate around a post topic is accepted, as long as it remains generally on topic and is not an attempt to become sounding board for some other cause.

Final decision on all comments is held by the blog author and is final.

Comments are always monitored for bad or abusive language, and or illegal statements i.e. overtly racist or sexist content. Spam is not tolerated and is removed.

Commentaires ne sont surveillés que pour le mauvais ou abusif langue ou déclarations illégales ie contenu ouvertement raciste ou sexiste. Spam ne est pas toléré et est éliminé.