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Reader comment on item: Teach Arabic or Recruit Extremists?

Submitted by ABU NUWAS (United States), Sep 7, 2007 at 01:23

Dear MEF readers:

You can't get away from it. Teaching Arabic means teaching Islam and eventually the entire Islamist propaganda paraphernalia.

After all, what are you going to "discuss" in Arabic? Science? History? Literature? Sociology? Art? Political Science? Astronomy? Computer Science? Philosophy? Mathematics?

Try to teach or discuss any of these and other subjects usually found in a Western curriculum in Arabic and you're going to run smack into Islam.

If you try to avoid Islam but use Arabic in your discussion, ½ the words you'll use will be English borrowings of one sort or another anyway and the whole discussion becomes a sort of meaningless gibberish.

You may as well use English instead of Arabic. (And in fact, that's what happens. At any Middle Eastern university of any standing at all – which isn't saying much – English is the medium of instruction.)

When Arabic is insisted upon, then you get such deep thoughts as the "fact" that the theory of relativity, thermodynamics, etc. were really Islamic discoveries and can be found in the Koran. (To deny this would be tantamount to subversion).

Let's not forget that throughout the Islamic world, it was widely reported in the press and believed by hundreds of millions of the faithful, that when the first US manned spaceship circled the Moon for the first time, the first words our astronauts heard as they emerged from the "dark" side of the moon was "Allahu Akbar". This really happened!!

(I wasn't aware that any of our astronauts were conversant in Arabic…..but that's a minor point).

If you're really going to learn Arabic, you may as well accept the fact that Islam will feature hugely in your training.

The trick is to accept that fact…..and then laugh your way through the Islamic indoctrination, as I did. (rite, Muhanna, ur rite…whatever ya say…Mahma taquul, saHeeH).

The bottom line is that in the end you can't really separate Islam and Islamism (the dream of a world-wide Caliphate). It comes with the territory. Arabic = Islam and vice versa.

--Abu Nuwas--

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