Fishawi, Jeddah: Teaching Arabic

Flore, Fishawi, Shati, McNamara

All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article of

Café Flore, Paris; poetry, under that of Fishawi, Jeddah or Cairo; learning under the title of the Shati Tea-and-Falafel-shop, Gaza; foreign and domestic news, you will have from

McNamara Ground Ops Lunchroom, Detroit; and what else I shall on any other subject offer, shall be dated from my own apartment.

Actually this painting is probably of the fishermen with their dhows here in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, not on the Jeddah Side, where Fishawi Coffee Shop in Maidan Al-Bai'a is.

The connection with learning is with the "Poetry House," in Bahrain, the restored house of the Bahraini poet Ibrahim Al-Arrayyed.  He corresponded with the poets of the Nahda, and I was reminded of my original interest in the writers of this period in Arabic, Tawfiq Al-Hakim, Taha Hussein, Fadwa Touqan, May Ziadeh, Mikha'il Nu'aimi, whom I read at Shemlan.  Thinking of these, I made the "Philosophy of Teaching" essay below:

Philosophy of Teaching,

From my perception as a long-time tourist-archaeologist in the Arabic-speaking countries, I see Arabic literature and art as being a continuation and elaboration of the humanist tradition of the Greeks and Romans, with a dash of Iranian and African spice.

I believe that in teaching Arabic, it is important to make frequent references to the important transmission and elaboration of the discoveries of the Greeks to the universities and the merchant class of the 12^th century and onwards in Europe, and (Ben Franklin’s) America.  In France, and, I believe, in England and Italy, too; students learned Arabic from anthologies of great pieces of Arabic writing, just as my third year Arabic teacher,  Andras Hamori at Princeton shared his doctoral work with us.  I remember he simply photocopied the Amr Al-Qais poem we studied from Chrestomathie Arabe, the University of Paris Sorbonne Arabic anthology, which even included the proclamations in Arabic, written by Paris scholars, for Napoleon’s 1798 campaign in Egypt.

Thus, even in beginning Arabic classes, with the modern, “communicative style” textbooks, I like to supplement these texts with some things the students could read seriously, translating word for word, and think about:  passages from Matta bin Younis’ 9^th century Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, for example, or the from Mas’oudi’s 10^th century history(al-Murug al-Dhahab) where he mentions the pre-Socratics of Miletus.

Universal “humanist” Arabic writing, even as simple quotations--for example, a phrase from Soliman Bustani’s 19^th century translation of the Iliad, from the Arabic original of Burton’s Arabian Nights translation, or from a play or poem by the Levantine and African writers of the 1930’s through 70’s “Nahda,” (Renaissance)--makes the Arabic class not just an exoticism, but a basis for the student and teacher to familiarize themselves with humanist thought in general.

As a refreshing, almost comic relief, I delight in teaching “getting-around-the-town,” or colloquial Arabic, as an important way of absorbing, and actually using classical Arabic vocabulary.  I am able to add my experience in Egyptian, Lebanese, and Saudi colloquial to teaching the colloquial in tandem with the classical Arabic.  In the colloquial, too, there is a rich humanist tradition on which I can tap as a teacher:  Bairam Al-Tunisisi’s poems in colloquial, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s and Ghassan Kanafani’s “colloquial in quotes,” and “classical-with-a-Palestinian-colloquial rhythm,” for example.

On the more specifics of minute by minute teaching, I have a whole panoply of English-Arabic grammar comparisons, whiteboard talk and tape-recorder listening-speaking teaching methods developed from my years of teaching English to Arabs.  Learning a foreign language is always a way of improving one’s own language, and my experience in explaining English nuances to Arabic speakers puts me in a good position to make studying Arabic a source of better understanding and use of one’s own language.