How to Endear Arabic to Its Children

What a subject this is — one that fills the soul with pride, brims the heart with hope, and confers upon the mind a pleasure that is at once its nourishment and its cure.

The pride is in this living language, which the ages have not been able to kill, though they have killed many of its sisters.

The hope is because we, the educated of this generation — people, governments, and teachers — can restore to it its former glory, revive it after a period of death-agony, and wake it from a restful slumber whose term has run too long.

As for the mind, it is because faith works wonders, and because these wonders have proofs and demonstrations which the Phoenicianizers, the Frenchifiers, the Anglicizers, and the champions of the colloquial will not acknowledge — but which logic acknowledges, history attests, and the facts of the present confirm.

For all that I am an optimist, and I repeat with Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi his famous saying:

"When souls aspire to life,
fate cannot but respond."

In this talk of mine I shall not take up the history of this language, nor the need to produce scholars of it who know how it was influenced by other languages and how it influenced them. The history of Arabic is long and far-reaching; as you dig into it you feel as though you were digging for pure gold in a treasure whose gleam dazzles you and whose sight holds you fast in delight. I shall rather set out briefly the raw materials with which we must work to make this language, so beloved of the elite, a language easy of approach, smooth and yielding in its obedience, one with which everyone falls in love for its sweetness and its splendor, for the elegance of its structure and the majesty of its diction, and for its special properties — such as meter in poetry, derivation, and Arabization.

In my belief the beginning must be made first in the schools and second in the government departments, and likewise with the help of the government itself and the Ministry of Education.

If we speak of the schools, we must understand that the teacher of Arabic — whom the Ministry of National Education must select with the greatest care — should be a devoted lover of this language, so that the pupils catch this passion from him and grow up enthusiastic for it, possessed by it, enamored of its beauty, zealous over everything in it, great and small. He must have a literary gift, so that nothing in the language, coming or going, escapes him. And he must be well acquainted with the course of the literary movement, in the stages through which it passed in earlier times and in the present age, so that he may give his pupils a taste of the pleasure of weighing one writer against another and one book against another. In this way he can spur his pupils on to read through a vast library and to know many men of letters — above all the contemporaries among them, for the abundance of their production and the breadth of their horizons — without letting them feel the weight of an assignment, the annoyance of importunity, or the difficulty of becoming cultivated. At this stage the teacher must leave the pupils wide room to debate and compare; there is no harm in his sharing his opinion with them and discussing their subjects, without belittling or distorting, leaving them freedom of opinion, of inquiry, and of comparison, making of himself a dictionary by whose guidance they find their way to what they seek.

The teacher must likewise accustom the pupils' ears and tongues — indeed exercise all the artfulness he can in this — to beautiful delivery and splendid diction. He must show them where the grace of an opening lies and where the felicity of a transition. He must direct their attention to the secret of forceful wording and the wonder of eloquence's magic, and compare with them phrase against phrase and verse of poetry against verse, making them feel the melody, listen for the ring, and be captivated by radiant expression in whatever mold it comes.

That is for the intermediate classes. In the elementary classes it is required of the teacher that he possess some facility in improvising classical Arabic, for he must take a middle road, neither climbing too far into the colloquial nor sliding too low with the classical. He may then make his little ones understand that the correct language is not so very far removed from the colloquial. They can, for example, say instead of "btrid," "aturid"; instead of "mahhaya," "mahat"; instead of "het," "ha'it"; instead of "mshi," "imshi" — and so on through all the words that lie close together, which the pupil memorizes easily because of their resemblance, believing he has accomplished something great when he masters them. Then comes the turn of conversation — and what an effect conversation has on straightening the pupils' language! By means of it the child can chatter with his teachers and his companions without fearing anyone's reproach. The child, moreover, is quick to memorize and quick-witted, and his tongue has not grown used to keeping pace with grown-ups in the talk they carry on; his tongue is therefore easily straightened, and it is a light matter for the teacher to train him rapidly. All this without

resorting to making the pupil believe that a lesson awaits him which he must recite tomorrow; rather he must make that lesson beloved to him by way of enticement. On this occasion I shall describe a method I followed myself and tested with the girls of the second elementary year, and the result was satisfying — astonishing, even.

The first thing I did was to follow the method of correcting the distorted pronunciations of all the words the little girls might need while in the classroom and on the playground, with their teachers and with their classmates.

Then, once they had the necessary vocabulary at their command, I set about, together with them, assembling the words into sentences. That was delightful to the little ones, with no difficulty or twist in it, because it comes as close as can be to the colloquial, and because it opened before them a field for give-and-take that satisfied their disputatious nature.

When I was sure they had absorbed the correct constructions, I began drilling them in writing — that is, in expressing what they wanted and what they did not want. Oh, the scratching of those pencils on the slate boards, and oh, the beauty of those eager faces and shining eyes when they received their first writing lesson!

I read the sweet, naive thoughts, and a tear sprang from my eye — a tear I do not know whether it belonged to this young generation, which I love and for whom I clear the way, or to the language, everything in which enchants me, or to literature, which is the whole of a writer's pleasure in life...?

Yes, I did not know; but I did know that classical Arabic is not what many of its children, and others not its children, boastfully claim. It is not hard of approach like other languages; on the contrary, it is gentle of temper and smoothly obedient. On this basis I went on building my experiments. I asked my little ones each to prepare a small notebook in which to record her daily diary, and I promised whoever kept up this diary the addition of six marks to her marks assigned for language. I drilled them for some days, then gave them a simple model and left them for some days more; and when I came back to them I found in my hands the likes of these simple samples by girls of six, seven, and eight. Here is one of them:

"Four o'clock in the afternoon. Today I went to school and saw the teacher; she had been away seven days, and I was glad of her, and I said good morning to her, and when I entered the classroom I came up to her, all shy, and said to her, thank God for your safe return."

The second was this:

"Yesterday evening, while I was going home, I found a poor woman in torn clothes with a small child. She stretched out her hand to me asking for alms; my heart softened, and I gave her my pocket money so she could spend it on her son. O Lord, do not let us need people!"

And here is another sample, sent to me by a bright pupil whose illness forced her to leave school for a few days; she saw no harm in sending me her diary, and here it is:

"I am sick. Father told me not to leave my bed, and I obeyed him because I love him very much. Beside me on the table are my sister's toy and some sweets and some pictures. But I do not love any of this now, because I long for school. When will I get well?"

This speech is simple in structure, naive in wording; it comes from the heart of the colloquial; there is not in it one feature of splendid style nor one word of verbal magic. But there is in it that correct expression, and this alone is all we want at the beginning. When the pupil has drunk deep of reading, his faculties will widen and his style be polished, and he will become able to express his thoughts in more eloquent language and sounder exposition without hardship or strain.

Here comes the turn of the Ministry of Education. Upon its shoulders falls a great responsibility — responsibility for the language of a people whose history is joined to its own. To strengthen the language, then, it must revise the curricula, giving the language alone half the weekly timetable and leaving the other half to the remaining subjects. It must put at the pupils' disposal numerous libraries to which the pupil may turn whenever he finds spare time for reading, without exacting any price in return; and the employees of those libraries must be in constant touch with whatever good new work in Arabic the presses put out.

The Ministry must also add extra hours to the free hours of the language teacher, so that he can prepare his lessons thoroughly and study each pupil singly, to straighten his language and explain to him what has escaped him in his copybooks or in his diary — so that his explanations do not come off on the instant, like a hint, nor so terse that they are misunderstood.

It must impose hours of conversation as an obligation upon all classes, for by conversation the language is set right, and on it depends the pupils' passion for Arabic: from the summary of a book, to a letter to a friend, to a dialogue between pupil and pupil, to a recital of verses of poetry, to a debate between one view and another, and so on through all the strengtheners and endearers there are.

It must also impose the teaching of the Koran as language, not as religion, and at the hands of men of letters, not sheikhs — men of letters in whom the culture of the Koran, its eloquence, and its inimitability are found in full; for it is to the Koran alone that the credit is owed for preserving the Arabic language, through all these centuries, from extinction and eclipse.

As for the government, it is its duty to impose

Arabic upon the foreign institutions with an imposition that admits no leniency, for the country's sake; and it is its duty not to allow a single student to graduate unless he presents his certificate before it, and it may refuse to employ or appoint him, whatever the kind of his certificate.

Then it is the government's duty, after this, to give special care to the learned academies, providing them with capable men who leave no new word without Arabizing it and no newly coined term without translating it, so that when we want to translate or to compose we find the material needed for building, and it becomes easy for us to offer it to the rising generation without standing helpless before them — lest they hold their language cheap and turn away from it as a lover turns away who finds a flaw in his beloved: he can neither forgive her the flaw nor forget his love for her.

The government must also open a wide field for broadcasts about the great men of the Arabs — the heroes among them and the philosophers, the physicians and the astronomers, the mathematicians and the men of letters, the philologists and the poets, the scholars and the sages — and about the civilization of the Arabs, leaving no side of it untreated with precision, lifting the veil from it, so that souls may be stirred by the ancient heritage. All this in a pure, luminous classical Arabic which the people will grow used to understanding by degrees, just as they grew used, for example, to understanding the Egyptians' colloquial dialect by means of the cinema, whereas some ten years ago they did not understand a single word of it.

Thus, with the help of the teaching body, the government, the Ministry of Education, the radio, the learned academies, and the rich libraries, we can endear this language to the rising generation, to the young, and to the common people.

And with a little steadfastness and confidence, a little enthusiasm and fidelity, and a little honest pride, we can repeat with Hafez Ibrahim his words:

"How many peoples have risen by the rising of their tongues!"