BY PHILIP ISSA

In print | Published September 25, 2008

Dear Constance Hungerford,

I received your letter about the current review of the Tri-College Arabic program. I will be happy to describe my specific experiences with the program in a private letter, but I would like to make clear my support for the Arabic program in this public letter. I strongly believe that the Arabic program is an indispensible part of this school’s academic program. The program is central to the College’s mission of imbuing its students with a sense of social consciousness and responsibility. As such, I urge you to take special care not to weaken the program in any way. I sincerely hope that the program will emerge from this revision process larger and more robust.

Arabic has a special importance at Swarthmore. War News Radio and the Genocide Intervention Network, two of our most ambitious and successful student initiatives to date, were both born as responses to major events in the Arab world. These groups will benefit enormously from an expanded Arabic program — students will develop a stronger interest in and a better understanding of the events unfolding in Iraq and Sudan, the groups can communicate more earnestly with Iraqi and Sudanese citizens and the school will attract more native Arabic speakers who can make invaluable contributions to such groups.

Ignorance and misunderstanding of Arabic culture has long plagued our society. American foreign policy towards the Middle East has been woefully neglectful of the welfare of the hundreds of millions of ordinary Arabs living under the whims of corrupt autocrats. The daily injustices that occur throughout these Arab nations are not our fault, but we as Swarthmore students can make no pretence of being concerned global citizens if we do not first push ourselves to understand a people that have been manipulated and oppressed for over half a century.

The cost of our ignorance runs high here at home as well. Outright racism against Arabs and Muslims has erupted since 9/11. As shocking as those hate crimes committed against a Palestinian student at the beginning of the semester were, they are a sad and daily reality for many Palestinians and Arabs living in the US today. The culture has been stereotyped and the language has been misappropriated. Many Arab-Americans have been made to feel uncomfortable while traveling, wondering (rightly so) if they will be detained for hours, days, months or years on end simply because of the way they dress or the way their name sounds.

As a respected leader of social change, Swarthmore has an obligation to itself and to its community to fight cultural ignorance with education. The Arabic program at Swarthmore promotes diversity of thought and social consciousness, and it goes hand in hand with the work that students do here to fight for social justice across the globe.

The Swarthmore Arabic program — with its rigorous course of study and its superb study abroad program in Damascus, Syria — has the potential to prepare graduates for a lifelong journey with the language, should the program be allowed to grow. This is perhaps best illustrated by the experiences that a recent graduate had learning Arabic during her time at Swat.

Ruth McDonough ’08 had never been exposed to Arabic when she arrived at Swarthmore as a freshman. She endeavored to take Arabic for all four years, but the program was not created until her junior year. As such, she spent her first two years taking proxy courses to learn Arabic through the Religion Department before studying the language at Middlebury the summer before her junior year. She then studied abroad for a year in Jordan and Syria before returning to Swarthmore to find that no courses could directly accommodate her high level of Arabic in the budding program. She took one mixed-level course her senior year.

Today, Ruth is practically fluent in Arabic. She had lunch with my grandmother in Syria over the summer and blew her away with her accent and command of the language. Ruth spoke with such ease that I was scolded by the housemaid for letting my Arabic (my first language) slide. “She speaks much better than you do,” she said in all seriousness.

Still, Ruth, in an email to me, credits her time away from Swarthmore as providing her with the rigorous grammatical foundation necessary to understand written Arabic.

Students should not have to go to Middlebury to develop a strong foundation in the language, and they should not have to return from abroad to find that no courses can accommodate them due to their high level of proficiency.

I hope you will agree with me that the Arabic program at Swarthmore is an integral part of the college curriculum and that it should continue to grow over the next few years. With strong support from the school administration, the program can be strengthened and expanded so that other students can emulate Ruth’s success in the language without having to go through the same hurdles that she did, insha’allah.

Philip is a senior. He can be reached at pissa1@swarthmore.edu.

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