• • •
EVEN KNOWING THAT adult bilinguals don’t have any magical cognitive abilities, it was hard to not feel that there was indeed something superhuman about bilinguals while observing life in Beirut. One day, armed with coupons for a beach club on the shores north of Beirut, we decided to spend the day lounging in the pool. At the pool, I saw children no older than my son switching between languages. It was fascinating the way they would read my face and guess my language. The adults were typically better at it—if I was waiting in line at the grocery store, the clerk always switched to English before I said anything. The children at this pool, though, would try Arabic sometimes, but mostly they mistook me for French.
One little boy swam over to me and said something in French and I tried to respond in kind, “Bonjour!”
His mother spoke to him in English: “She speaks English. Use your English.”
He resisted. He continued with French.
“Tut tut, English,” the mother corrected.
He reluctantly said in English, “Can I use that?” pointing to the water gun we had been playing with in the pool.
“Yes, of course.”
Despite knowing that this was completely normal, and perhaps not that big of a deal, I was highly impressed. It was like watching small child prodigies sitting down to play Bach on the piano or reciting pi to the two hundredth digit.
I think part of that amazement that monolinguals feel toward bilinguals comes from our own experience learning languages. My son, who had never struggled over a vocabulary book for hours, was not at all impressed. In fact, the multiple languages didn’t even give him pause. Kids didn’t need words to play, and they ran around, shouting, laughing, and using whatever language they spoke or felt like speaking, whether or not it was understood.
Fifteen
Where’s Cole?” Drew asked me as I worked on my Arabic homework in the living room.
“I thought he was outside with you.”
“He was, did he come inside? I was cutting down bananas—look!” he said. He held up a broom with a knife taped to the end in one hand and a large stem of bananas, a bunch of twenty or so of the small, nearly ripe fruit, in the other.
“Holy crap, Drew!”
“I know, right? Rawrrr!” He lifted the bananas over his head as he roared. Then he dropped them to the floor. “Whoa, those are heavy.”
“Wait, where is Cole, though?” I said, getting up. I looked outside and he wasn’t in our small fenced yard. I ran around the house and he hadn’t wandered into the junglelike vegetation that was growing wild in the back.
“Drew! Where is he?” I yelled.
I ran inside and Drew passed me and said, “Nope, he’s not in here.” We both hustled back outside together.
“Cole!” we screamed in unison.
Cole laughed.
We looked up. There was Cole, hanging on to the stairs leading to the roof above us.
“Oh my God, Drew!” Drew ran up to get him. Cole hadn’t just climbed stairs for the first time; he had also climbed the outside of the stairs, hanging on to the handrail and slowly working his way up to the top until he couldn’t go any farther. My two-year-old was dangling one story above the concrete. Drew took the stairs two at a time and pulled him up over the handrail and into his arms.
“Drew! You have to watch him!”
“I know, but he’s never done that before.” Now that we’d found Cole, Drew seemed embarrassed.
“Okay, so let’s find a way to block off the stairs. And you really do have to watch him. No multitasking.”
“I know, but the bananas—no, never mind, you’re right. I am so sorry.”
“It’s okay. Whoa. I think I had a mini stroke there.” I sat down hard on a chair and exhaled.
Drew sat beside me. “Yeah. Me too.”
Before we had a child, it was so different. It was just the two of us, traveling, in love, and we were the best of friends. We got along famously. We only fought when we got lost (“Take a right!” and of course, Drew takes the left and says, “Why are you yelling?”). All of those things were still true, but the combined effects of little sleep, a crying baby, these new demands, and my reduced free time (due to studying) just exaggerated everything. I was crankier with Drew, more curt, less patient, and if I didn’t watch myself, I could take out my frustrations on him.
This climbing-the-house phase of Cole’s was completely new to us. The logistics of traveling just got more complicated. Instead of a baby we could pick up and carry around the world with us, we had a curious little monkey who apparently wasn’t afraid of heights.
Drew and I gave each other a look. Eventually we’d have to settle down. This was really happening.
• • •
IN CLASS, WE WERE FIGHTING with Majed. Our textbook wasn’t consistent on the spelling of words, and to us as native English speakers this seemed like an atrocity. Majed was in a tough spot. The language, after all, was written in a different set of letters than English. Also, since the dialect is only spoken, even the Arabic script was an approximation of how the Beirut dialect is pronounced, and there were little things that a native Beiruti knew that seem completely confusing to someone just learning.
On top of that, some words in Arabic are pronounced differently based on the first letter. Take the liaison. For example, the word for Monday is el tanein, which is how it’s spelled in Arabic script. However, Majed kept spelling it as et tanein; because that’s the way it sounds; the el borrows from the t in tanein, making it flow better. El tanein becomes et tanein.
Both are correct, and I’d argue that Majed’s spelling is better because it emphasizes how it’s pronounced. He brushed off the student’s criticism and continued to drill the days of the week: “Sunday . . . el ahad, Monday . . . et tanein, Tuesday . . . et talaataa . . .”
“But the book says el 2a7ad, el tanein, el talaataa, and so on . . .” The book was using Arabic chat, a form of writing that’s used when people text one another. Letters not in English, like ‘ayn () were represented by the best possible alternative, in this case, the number 3.
Majed ignored the student. “Please take out your homework.” He wasn’t going to entertain any more questions.
I pulled out my notebook and opened to the page of exercises I had carefully written out in Arabic script the night before. Majed checked each student’s work and grew more and more agitated.
“Kate, where is your work?” he demanded of a girl in the second row.
“I didn’t do it.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t.”
Majed seemed flustered. “I gave you an assignment; why didn’t you do it?”
Kate crossed her arms. “I don’t feel like I have to explain myself to you.”
Majed just stood there, wide-eyed.
“What?” Kate said defiantly. “I didn’t do it. I am paying for this class, and if I don’t do the work, that’s up to me.”
Majed let out a big sigh. He went to the next student. No work. The next, the same thing.
“Where is John?” Majed asked the room at large when he came to an empty seat.
“Uh, I think, I think he’s going to be a little late.”
Another sigh from Majed.
Most of the students were here on summer vacation from their college schedule, so while studying Arabic in Beirut may have sounded like a good idea to them initially, the class was quite intense, requiring four hours of classroom time five days a week and as many hours doing assignments at home (Majed loved worksheets). I can only imagine it wasn’t what these kids had bargained for, for summer break.
Majed came to my desk. I meekly handed him my sheet of exercises, and he corrected my homework right there, writing over my script in parts where I didn’t form the letters quite right, making a check mark next to the correct answers
.
“Good.” He moved on.
The next day, Jason, the student who knew the letter aleph on the first day and seemed the most experienced with Arabic, dropped out of the course. Natalie followed a few days later. Then it was Josh. Soon there were just four of us: a broke backpacker from the United States, a chemist from the Netherlands, Kate the British art curator who recently lost her job in Dubai and who refused to do her homework, and me.
“Maybe now that those three are gone we can learn something,” the chemist said during our daily coffee break. “No more complaining.”
“Yes, we waste too much time arguing with Majed,” I said.
“That’s because he’s a horrible teacher,” Kate interjected.
“Maybe we’re just frustrated because Arabic is hard,” the backpacker said.
We shuffled back to class and Majed announced, excitedly, that we would be drilling vocabulary. At this point, we sighed and opened our books.
• • •
AT FIRST I HAD BEEN frustrated by the rote memorization style of the class, but as I learned the Arabic script and began speaking the language, I didn’t care how it was taught because Arabic enthralled me. The script itself is so beautiful it has me completely charmed. Here was the simple word for “house,” bayt:
To read it, I just counted the dots and the positions from right to left. Once you know it, it’s quite simple. Yet the script was so elegant that writing in it felt like I had mastered a kind of calligraphy. I wanted to write everything in Arabic. I would point out signs to Drew and tell him the letters. I often didn’t know what they spelled, or even how to pronounce them, because written Arabic on the street almost always leaves out the vowel markers because fluent people know that byt is bayt. This seemed impossible to me at first, but if you think about it, a fluent English speaker could still read English if you dropped some vowels, such as the letters i, e, and o:
A flunt nglsh spaker culd stll rad nglsh f yu drppd sm vwls. . . .
So written Arabic on the street would skip the vowels similarly, for efficiency.
But it was the writing, not the reading, that amazed me, the way Majed drew lines from Arabic poetry into a knot of intertwined letters. I noticed that the logos of many businesses are just the Arabic letters written creatively. Like the news organization Al Jazeera: Their logo looks like an artful rendering of a flame, but it’s also their name spelled in Arabic. I practiced my writing every day, trying to copy the little flourishes that Majed put in or the way they draw two dots as a single line, little handwriting tricks that make it flow even more easily.
Given the disparity in written versus spoken Arabic, it was not surprising then that unlike other languages, written Arabic isn’t processed on the same side of the brain as when it’s spoken; the left side of the brain handles the written language, while the right side handles the spoken. Researchers suggest this is because the right hemisphere processes letters in words in a global sense, but because you have to count dots and be concerned with specifics in Arabic, the task shifts to the left hemisphere, the same way it would if you were solving math problems. Most other languages like English or even Hebrew (which is also written right to left) are handled in the right hemisphere for both written and spoken.
• • •
ONE THING I DIDN’T EXPECT from learning Arabic (although in hindsight perhaps it should have been obvious) was how much it would be tied to Islam. Remember, Arabic is triglossic—there is the spoken dialect, the written language (Modern Standard Arabic), and then there’s classical Arabic, the Arabic of the Qur’an. For Muslims, even those living in Asia or Africa, everything religious is done in Arabic, from reading the Qur’an to their daily prayers to the Shahadah, the acceptance of Islam:
Translation: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”
Iraqi-born British theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili notes in his book The House of Wisdom that “classical Arabic, being the language of the Qur’an, has not changed at all in fourteen centuries, making the writings of the early Islamic scholars as accessible today as they were then.” When you consider that Beowulf was written in Old English around that same time and is completely impenetrable to modern English speakers, that fact is kind of astonishing. Here’s an excerpt, taken at random, from Beowulf: “Nalæs hi hine læssan lacum teodan, þeodgestreonum, þon þa dydon, þe hine æt frumsceafte forð onsendon ænne ofer yðe umborwesende.” I put that into Google Translate and clicked “Detect language” and it chose Icelandic. It certainly wasn’t modern English. Imagine reading the Bible in clear-as-day English from the original.
According to Pew Research, over 80 percent of Muslims are not Arab; in fact, 60 percent of them are in Asia—yet they use classical Arabic for religious purposes. Because of this link between Arabic and Islam, by 2050 Arabic is expected to become the second most spoken language in the world (Mandarin is expected to remain well in the lead).
Even in spoken Arabic dialect, there are constant references to Islam—like in English when we say “Bless you” after someone sneezes. At home I practiced greeting people with “As-salam alaykum” (Peace be upon you), but decided to stick with the secular “Marhaba” (Hello), feeling too unsure about using a Muslim greeting when I wasn’t Muslim. However, even then the response to “Hello” is usually “Marhabtein” (Two hellos; literally Two marhabas)—or if you want to combine French and Arabic you can say “Bonjourtein” (Two bonjours). Why? Majed told us, “Never respond with just ‘hello’; do something more.” Later I’d learn this idea comes directly from the teachings in the Qur’an: “When you are greeted with a greeting, greet in return with that which is better than it, or (at least) return it equally” (Qur’an 4:86).
As I discovered these aspects of Arabic, I became more interested in the history of Islam, and bought the book Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary, an American historian who grew up in Afghanistan and now lives in San Francisco. Ansary had been hired to write a Texas classroom history book earlier in his career, and was told to devote only one chapter of thirty to Islam and the Arab world (which stretches from North Africa across the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula all the way to Asia)—and that it should be in the “Ancient Civilizations” section. In Destiny Disrupted, Ansary takes a look at the “alternative world history of Islam.” Because he was a secular Muslim, his quest wasn’t as much about personal identity as it was about reconciling the Eurocentric Western world history that he covered as a textbook writer with the narrative that he grew up hearing in the Islamic world.
Some might be surprised to know that the prophet Muhammad came in A.D. 570, quite a long time after Jesus, and in a time with writing, so there is a written account of the things the prophet said, the revelations he spoke of, that forms the basis of the Qur’an. Believers consider it to be the verbatim word of God as spoken by Muhammad. There are also interviews with people who knew him, and even further interviews and character checks on those people. These documents form the basis of the hadith, which informs Muslim traditions. There are experts who spend their entire lives studying these documents and producing their own analysis. Of course, the same is true in Christianity and Judaism, and this is well known in the West. But when it came to Islam in the Western media, I had only ever heard a single view of Islam, which I now learned is much more complicated and varied, with a sea of voices over the centuries.
Even the scope of what is now the Middle East surprised me. For example, when Shakespeare was writing Othello, the Moors he wrote about were in fact Muslims by another name, living in what is today modern Spain. The Middle East also played unwilling host to the likes of not just the Crusaders, but also the Mongols. Genghis Khan reached as far as the fabled city from The Arabian Nights (now known as Baghdad) and tossed its entire Persian library into the river. He would have continued to Greece, Rome, and onward, perhaps erasing all of Greek and Roman history with it, but he died and his emp
ire fell apart. The simple luck of geography saved one civilization’s legacy while erasing another.
And then there’s Palestine. Ansary wrote that in 1883 it was 4 percent Jewish. By the end of World War I it was 11 percent Jewish, and by the end of World War II it was about 50 percent Jewish. By the end of World War II, after Jews fled mass executions in Europe and immigration rates were capped in the United States, they headed in large numbers to Palestine and started buying up land. The problem was that the landless Palestinian natives who had been working the land for hire now had nowhere to go. To put this in context: There are 320 million people living in the United States. What if 320 million immigrants came into the country within half a century and bought the majority of the land and houses? What would happen to the Americans who hadn’t owned their houses and now could no longer rent? How would Americans feel? I started to get a sense of the origins of the Arab-Jewish animosity in the region.
Jerusalem, which straddles the border between Israel and the West Bank and is home to some of the holiest sites in both Judaism and Islam, was another hot point of contention. Of course, the right to live in Jerusalem has deep historical and religious roots for Jewish people, and on Passover they even say, “Next year in Jerusalem.” However, it is possible to simultaneously feel for the plight of Jews, persecuted during the Holocaust and now settling in their holy land—and also to feel for the native Arab community who had their concerns brushed aside. After World War II, the League of Nations blithely cut and formed countries to benefit Western interests—nobody asked the people of Palestine for permission to have their land taken from them. World War II had driven the Jewish community into Jerusalem, but to the Arabs in the region, this didn’t entitle them to take over the country. Tensions eventually boiled over after Israel formed a nation, and in 1967 the Arab world attacked. Israel won a decisive victory, claiming the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Old City of Jerusalem, among other spoils. Syria, Egypt, and Jordan suffered heavy losses. It became known as the Six-Day War.
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