An Alternate Witness

So how about a Thanksgiving toast: Let’s give thanks for the courage of these magnificent women, and to those readers who had the faith to send checks to an illiterate rape victim in a remote Pakistani village.

People are always telling me how brave I am to do what I do, traipsing about the world, volunteering here, there and everywhere....

But THIS is courage!

It was a cold, dark, wet and miserable Sunday afternoon. I was in my car, driving my 12-year-old daughter and her friend back from a birthday party. I was tired and fed up from being in the car.
"Mummy, mummy," trilled a voice from the back. "I want to phone the pirates."
My daughter had heard me repeatedly trying to get through to the Somali pirates on board the Sirius Star.
They usually picked up the phone but put it down again when I said I was from the BBC. My obsession with getting through to them had reached the point that I had even saved their number on my mobile phone.
"Mummy, mummy, please can I phone the pirates for you?"
"No."
"Pleeeeez."
By this time, with rain battering my windscreen and cars jamming the road, I was at the end of my tether.
"OK", I said, tossing the phone into the back of the car.
"They are under P for pirates."
"Hello. Please can I talk to the pirates," said my daughter in her obviously childish voice.
I could hear someone replying and a bizarre conversation ensued which eventually ended when my daughter collapsed in giggles.
This was a breakthrough. Dialogue had been established.

I guess it's hard to establish contact when you represent the Power Couple of the US and Britain that intervenes half-heartedly in Africa only when intervention sends the right message.
Don't get me wrong. I applaud this reporter for her tenacity, for her determination to get the point of view of the pirates themselves. This is reporting at its most responsible, the kind of reporting I was calling for recently. But it's exactly what she was able to report in doing so that makes my point:

A pirate, who called himself Daybad, spoke in Somali, calmly and confidently. He said Somalis were left with no choice but to take to the high seas.

"We've had no government for 18 years. We have no life. Our last resource is the sea, and foreign trawlers are plundering our fish."

Once upon a time, the United States of America and Great Britain declared that they were not going to stand idly by and watch Somalia fall into ruin. And they continue to warn that the situation in Somalia is fostering anger and radical Islamism and that it is a serious threat in the "War On Terror." Yadda yadda yadda. It sounds great on the airwaves and on the campaign trail. When it comes down to it, though, the US and the UK are completely unwilling to put their resources where their mouths are.

I understand that resources are limited, and now more limited than ever with their Iraqi follies and the repurcussions of Americans' and Britains' unwillingness to live within their means. I also know all too well that, even when we are willing to put our resources where our mouths are, we are not always effective. (Just ask me about a bus station in the southern Madaba governorate of Jordan.) It's just frustrating, when you're on this side of the pond or the Channel, to listen to the talk and know that, not only is nothing going to be done, but that the world's most powerful forces are going to continue doing the selfish, damaging, infuriating things that they have always done, the things that have contributed to the problems that they claim to want to fix.

Is today's education teaching our children to live in their world?

Leaving my job as a second grade teacher at the Modern American School here in Amman, Jordan, has made me rethink a conversation we frequently had in Peace Corps with Jackie and Lynn, who were retired elementary school teachers, and had been students in the American system fifty years ago. They would frequently say that Jordan's education system is about where America's was 50 years ago, and it would take time to catch up. I would say that the Modern American School may be where the American system was 40 years ago, but I keep thinking back to a video I saw on YouTube some time ago:



We can't afford to be stuck in an educational philosophy that is 40 years old. We can't even afford to be stuck in today's educational philosophy.

I don't know what the answer is. That's the whole point. None of us knows what the answer is, what our new teaching model needs to look like. But I know that it shouldn't look like this:

My math class was the hardest to teach, not only because I don't do math the way most people do math, but also because it was a class of extremes. I had one student who needed me to do every problem with her, because she couldn't remember how to do them from one question to the next. I also had about five students who finished their workbook pages in five minutes, finished four or five additional double-sided worksheets, and still had twenty minutes left in the class period, day after day. My mother suggested what seemed to me like a brilliant solution, which I proposed to my supervisor: Elementary school math books are designed to be more or less self-explanatory to students who are competent readers. Couldn't I just put my best students together at one table and allow them to teach themselves at their own pace? It was essentially what those students had been asking to be allowed to do for weeks.

Now, I know that my supervisor was thinking of the third grade teachers when she answered my question. The third grade teachers who would have those students next year, and have to fit them back into the officially sanctioned little boxes. I am sympathetic to my supervisor's answer, but I am shocked nonetheless by it. She said:

"Absolutely not! We can't have students thinking that they can learn by themselves!"

The parents of my students are being told and believe that they are getting the best possible education for their children. What their children are learning, however, is to work within a social system that will be completely irrelevant by the time they finish college. I'm not sure how to teach for that. I think it probably looks something more like the way I taught for nerd camp. What I know is that it's not the way I was being asked to teach the second grade.

I don't know much about the campaign that is being waged against Rashid Khalidi. I don't remember much of what I read by Rashid Khalidi in graduate school. Unfortunately, I worked so many hours to pay my bills that I had to choose between learning Arabic or reading carefully for my so-called "content classes," and chose the former (but that's another rant for another day). What I do know is that my friend Chris brought this video to my attention while I'm unemployed and have the time to watch it, and I think every student and politician should be listening to what Rashid Khalidi (and presumably the other presenters at this conference) have to say about the state of the Fifth Column.

We had this discussion all the time at Indiana University. With some valuable exceptions, academics have become so turned inward that they don't know how to engage with the public, how to make use of the new media revolution to get out their valuable, informed opinions. Academia and a free press are supposed to be working together to illuminate what government forgets or attempts to cover up. Western liberal democracies tout academic freedom and press freedom as hallmarks of what makes Western liberal democracy great and worth exporting to the developing world. If we can't guarantee those freedoms at home, what business do we have imposing our particular variety of liberal democracy on Iraq, Afghanistan, DR Congo, North Korea, Iran, or anywhere else? If we can't keep the press honest, if we can't keep the debate clean, if we resort to Swiftboat-style personal vendettas, and if we can't give academics the freedom and objectivity that they deserve, how can we claim to be a bastion of liberal democracy?

Because I can tell you with absolute certainty that the rest of the world is watching. I can say this with such certainty because I'm now out in the rest of the world. I'm interacting not only with Jordanians, but with Germans, Filipinas, Mexicans, Canadians ... people from all over the world. I can tell you that they know more about American politics than the majority of Americans know about the politics of any other country in the world, even more than most Americans know about their own politics. Furthermore, I tell you that this is no new phenomenon. I've been out in this world for a decade listening to Europeans, Arabs, Aussies, Kiwis, South and East Asians, Africans and South Americans give detailed, accurate arguments about American foreign AND domestic policy.

They're listening, they're watching, and they are most certainly judging us. If you ask me, they're doing a very good job of it. People here know that while the administration and the media are touting full-voice their support of the occupation of Iraq, the majority of Americans are against it. People out in the world see that American policy is addressing the exact same nuclear issues by making nice with North Korea, but not with Iran or Syria. People here know that the European Union's economic stimulus package announced yesterday is a serious attempt to fix the problem, and the stimulus package McCain made such a big deal of abandoning his campaigning for was just that much flag waving, and won't actually help anyone who really needs it. (They also know that's why Obama won the election.)

People out here are very insightful critics of American policy, politics, media and society, and let me tell you, it does not look good from out here in the rest of the world!

I've been having an interesting series of conversations about language with my top-level adult English students. We've been doing a chapter on language registers: business vs. casual English, written vs. spoken language, the English of different age and cultural groups. There was a question in the book asking whether students believed most people spoke their own language correctly.

Now, you have to understand that asking this question in the Arab world is like asking it in Switzerland or Bavaria. The difference between the dialects of those regions and High German are so great that northern German swear they can't understand a word. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is like High German, the language of writing, TV news and official speeches, except that there is no population which speaks Standard Arabic as their native language. All Arabs first learn a dialect of some sort. Many say that the Levantine dialect of Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon is the closest to Modern Standard, but it is still significantly different.

So I asked my students what they considered to be their native language. Was it dialect, or MSA? About half the class said of course dialect was their native language! They never spoke a word of MSA till some time in elementary school. MSA, which they simply call "Arabic," was a foreign language to them. The rest of the class said that Levantine was not a language, that it was just a corruption of real Arabic. (As a hobby linguist who believes languages are organic, evolving systems, this answer always irks me, but I held my tongue.)

So then we asked the book's question, Do most people speak their native language correctly? Their answers fell predictably along the same lines. Those who considered Levantine their first language said yes, of course we speak our first language correctly. Those who considered MSA their only language claimed that it took years of study to speak even one's native language properly.

The whole conversation reminded me of a conversation I had with my adult class last session. I showed them my resume, which says I speak Standard, Levantine and some Iraqi Arabic. My students considered it completely illogical that Iraqi, Levantine and Egyptian dialects should be considered worth mentioning separately. For an Arab, they're all Arabic. They grow up watching Egyptian films, news from al-Jazeera in the Persian Gulf, and call-in shows with dialects from Morocco to Oman. But for me, the differences are huge. Egyptian is unintelligible to me. I was listening to Yemenis on al-Jazeera talk about the recent flood in Hadramawt, and barely understood one word in three. Just listening to the newscasters on al-Jazeera with their fully-inflected MSA is a frustration to me. But put on the Syrian mini-series Baab al-Haara or any other miniseries in Levantine dialect, and I feel very much at home.

This is, of course, opposite to most non-native speakers of Arabic. Unless you learned your Arabic by marrying an Arab, chances are that you learned MSA first and best, and the dialects are just so much grammarless jibberish to you. This is why, when I gave directions home from Club Nai for my American and German friends the other night, the cab driver said, "Are you Jordanian? No? But your Arabic...!"

My standard reponse has become, "I learned my Arabic by living near Gafgafa for two years." Everyone laughs, because everyone knows Gafgafa as the site of one of Jordan's most infamous prisons.

First, let me say that my faith in American democracy has been restored. Regardless of who won this election, I was hoping that we wouldn't have the same quagmire we had in the last two elections, with no one quite sure who really deserved to win, even four and eight years later. I'm glad that McCain and the xenophobic, bellicose GOP right and especially Sarah Palin didn't win, but I'm mostly glad that the election was an unambiguous one.

Those Jordanians who had a preference in the recent election are also mostly pleased by the result. I can't tell you how many people, upon seeing me for the first time after the election, have said "Mabrouk! [Congratulations!]" So tonight in my adult English class at AMIDEAST, I decided to ask my students for their thoughts on the election. Most Jordanians I've spoken to tend to agree that as far as the Middle East is concerned, the two candidates are basically the same. On Palestine, the same. On Afghanistan, the same. On Iran, Obama is calling for more dialogue, but is not significantly less belligerent.

Wait a minute, I said. All of that I can agree with. But what about Iraq? Don't you see a difference there?

No, said Ghassan. Whether it's a few hundred troops, or thousands, both candidates want to leave a troop presence in Iraq. They came for the oil, he said, and that hasn't changed.

However, everyone here seems to recognize that, while there isn't a difference where Arabs are concerned, for Americans there is a huge difference between McCain and Obama on domestic issues. All the Jordanians I've spoken to here know that Obama is calling for national health care, and they will all tell you that he has the better plan to help ordinary Americans in their current financial crisis. On domestic issues, all the Jordanians I've met would say that Obama is clearly the best choice.

And, of course, all the Muslims I know here are delighted that America has elected the son of a Muslim. I haven't actually asked anyone why yet. I can think of two likely reasons, though. First, under Islamic law and tradition, any son or daughter of a Muslim is and always will be a Muslim, so although he's been a practicing Christian for years, many Muslims may be telling themselves that America has a Muslim president. The other, probably more likely reason that comes to mind is that, whether Obama is Muslim or Christian, Muslims in America have come under an awful lot of not-so-flattering scrutiny in America in the last seven years, and at the very least, Obama knows something about Muslims. I think that Muslims may well be hoping, as I am hoping, that an Obama administration will be sympathetic to the troubles of both Muslims and Muslim Americans, or at the very least, will be more rational.

I recently received one of those Republican propoganda emails full of vitriol and innuendo trying to discredit the Obamas as un-American. It came from the same person who sent me the infamous and very damaging email speciously claiming that Barack Obama is secretly a dangerous anti-American Muslim terrorist, because his father is a non-American and a Muslim, and because Barack went to early elementary school in the Philippines. This email, however, was not even about the candidate himself. The subject was "This is NOT First Lady material!" and it was about the Senior thesis of one Michelle Obama, nee Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, written 23 years (half her lifetime!) ago.

In stark contrast to the authors of this suspiciously anonymous forwarded email, I don't see anything abut Michelle Obama's thesis that's controversial. Let me give you a few examples.

What is Michelle Obama planning to do with her future resources if she's first lady that will elevate black over white in America ? The following passage appears to be a call to arms for affirmative action policies that could be the hallmark of an Obama administration.
'Predominately white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.'

Universities like Princeton DO cater to the needs of WASPs over all other ethnicities, because WASPs (and a few Catholics) established and still run these universities. It's a fact that has been proven over and over in academic studies, just as it's a fact that the SATs are culturally biased towards white middle and upper class high schoolers, which hinders minorities from getting into universities like Princeton (or Goucher, or even Indiana University) in the first place.

Here is another passage that is uncomfortable and ominous in meaning:
'There was no doubt in my mind that as a member of the black community, I am obligated to this community and will utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit the black community first and foremost.' (emphasis not mine!)

Ominous? Michelle Obama is hardly unusual in wanting to channel her abilities and resources towards the improvement of her own community, just as white evangelicals give preference to the white evangelical community, Latinos give preference to their community, Jewish America protects its own interests, and Republicans prefer to give to Republican causes. This doesn't make her a racist. It merely means that she has a strong sense of community and social responsibility, and as First Lady her community would expand to include all of America. I believe that a First Lady with a strong sense of social responsibility can only be good for American society. I would call this quite the opposite of ominous; I would call it hopeful.

Obama writes that the path she chose by attending Princeton would likely lead to her 'further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.'
Michele Obama clearly has a chip on her shoulder.

I think she has less of a chip on her shoulder than she has a right to. She's absolutely right that most white Americans see her as black first and American second, just as they see Barack Obama as black first and American second. If that wasn't the case, no one would care about her college thesis or her "ethnic allegiances," because they would recognize that Michelle and Barack are Americans. Just as American as any Mayflower descendent or DAR member, and just as dedicated, if not more, to making sure that all Americans succeed.

If you want to talk about what we DON'T want in the White House, take a look at Sarah Palin, who tried to !ban books in her local library in Alaska, who didn't tell her children that her baby would have Downs Syndrome because she wasn't sure she would keep him, and who thinks that dealing with the Yukon Territories of Canada is significant international policy experience. *I* have more foreign policy experience than Sarah Palin, as do these nearly 54,000 people. Oh, yes, and she's under investigation for corruption in her home state ... but I wouldn't worry too much about that: Innocent until proven guilty (or Muslim).

There were other even more specious and out-of-context quotes in this email I received, but I'll just leave you with one more:

P.S. We paid for her scholarship.

Damn right we did! That's what America's supposed to be all about:

...Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome.... "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore...."
--Emma Lazarus, 1883, on the Statue of Liberty

This interview and the associated book offer a view of Iraqi history and culture not often heard these days:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/a_talk_with_orit_bashkin/?page=full

It's a controversial viewpoint, to be sure, one that I call the "Istrabadi version" of Iraqi history, because it's the one that I heard most often from my professors at Indiana University, Dr. Zainab Istrabadi and her brother Amb. Faisal Istrabadi. But there is some truth to this viewpoint. For a very long time, especially during the Abbasid Dynasty that built Baghdad, Iraq and especially Baghdad were the center of the known world. Scholars came to Baghdad, Basra and Kufa from as far away as al-Andalus in Spain or the Philippines to study with the some of the greatest scholars of their ages in Baghdad.

The Talmud, the greatest compendium of Jewish law, was written in Babylon (a suburb of present-day Baghdad), where the Jews had been banished by King Nebuchadnezzar II in 588 BC. Even after the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great allowed Jews to return to Palestine half a century later, many stayed on in Baghdad, and for 25 centuries there was a substantial Jewish population in Baghdad. In addition to Jewish contributions, The Thousand and One Nights as we in the West know it today was adapted from Hindi in Abassid Baghdad. The seat of the Nestorian Church, considered heretical and heavily persecuted by the Byzantine Holy Roman Empire, has always been in Baghdad, with Nestorians living peacefully alongside Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Armenian Catholics, Armenian Orthodox, Jews, Sabeans, Zoroastrians, Muslims (Sunnis, Shi'is and Sufis), Yazidis and others.

As Zainab and Amb. Istrabadi's father used to say, Iraq is a country of 38 nationalities (i.e. ethnic and religious groups). The Istrabadi family tree itself includes Sunni Arabs, Shi'i Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Turkmens, and many others, and the Istrabadis are hardly unique in this respect.

I see two futures for Baghdad and the rest of Iraq. The tapestry of Iraqi identity may well survive and be repaired after the occupation ends, with all Iraqis finding a way to coexist. We may find, however, that America and the so-called Coalition of the Willing has shredded the Iraqi cultural tapestry so badly that Iraq will be shattered for generations.

"I had spent years discussing religious matters with smart American students in excellent schools before I was sent to the Middle East. I had found those conversations enjoyable, often challenging and usually sincere. But something was often missing, something I found hard to pin down. An Egyptian Muslim friend I met in Qatar helped me understand what that something was. Talking with Americans about faith and religion, he told me, is like having coffee with Forrest Gump: pleasant enough, but not of much substance. "They just don't have much to say because they just don't get it," he said....

"The majority of Georgetown students I know are fairly knowledgeable about religion. They can talk intelligently about Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. The glitch is that they talk from the perspective of anthropologists and sociologists and historians. These are valuable perspectives. But they are not enough. Of course we need to raise young people who can be smart, savvy, sophisticated participants in international affairs. What we also need are young people who can be all of those things while at the same time knowing and understanding what it is to live one's life with a commitment rooted in faith."

---Father Ryan J. Maher, Asst. Dean, Georgetown University

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/18/AR2008071802558.html?referrer=myspace

I couldn't say anything more precise and eloquent than Father Maher says here. Suffice it to say, he's absolutely right when he says that most Americans in the international sphere don't understand what faith means in many other parts of the world. I count myself among them. And I wish there were a thousand more students like this one:

"Recently, I had a conversation with a young woman who is about to begin her sophomore year at Georgetown. She has a passion for art history and American democracy and is serious about her Jewish faith. She hopes to work in international affairs one day. We were discussing the courses she might take this fall.

"She reported that people had been telling her she really should take more economics. "What if instead of that," she said, "I took only four courses this semester and used the extra time to go with my Christian and Muslim friends to their churches and mosques? I just think that if I had a better sense of how they prayed and what they mean when they use the word 'God,' I'd be able to have much better conversations with them about the situation in the Middle East."

"What do you say to that, except "Amen"? And, "Have you thought of taking the foreign service exam after you graduate?" "

There are those really amazing days in teaching when you can see a student finally get it, make that breakthrough that just makes your day....
And then there are days like this....

Bulqiis was one of my brightest first graders. She had learned every word in her vocabulary, she had learned at home to identify all the words and letters in the English alphabet, and she never gave me any trouble in a class that was often quite unruly. Like the Queen of Sheba whose name she shared, Bulqiis was already well on her way to being a very capable, admirable woman.

One day, as I was starting class, Bulqiis raised her hand. "Miss Maryah," she asked, "do you speak Arabic?"

"Of course. We're speaking Arabic right now. You hear me use it a lot in class." Too much, perhaps, though I needed the least amount of Arabic to get the lessons across to my first graders, who had not yet formed the habit of learning English through Arabic. But maybe, I was thinking, I didn't use as much Arabic as I thought, if Bulqiis wasn't sure I spoke the language at all.

Then she asked the question that burst my bubble. "Then why do you always speak to us in English?"