Teaching Arabic and Propaganda
6th July 2008
At Harvard, the star of Arabic A is a girl named Maha. Maha Muhammed Abulaal, to be precise. She’s the pouty protagonist in the melodrama that runs throughout “Al-Kitaab,” the standard beginning text in Arabic classes at Harvard and other American universities.
We are taught to speak our first Arabic sentences by expressing Maha’s incurable angst. We learn in Chapter 1 that Maha is desperately lonely. In later chapters, we are told that she hates New York, has no boyfriend and resents her mother.
Soon we encounter her equally depressing relatives in Egypt — such as her first cousin Khalid, whose mother died in a car accident and who was forced to study business administration after his father told him literature “has no future.”
Like Maha, Khalid is loveless; his only romantic prospect ran away with a rich engineer. The family eventually intervenes with plans to marry the cousins off to each other. This makes everyone equally unhappy.
Then the story ends.