A Madrassa Grows In Brooklyn

Come September,an Arabic-language public secondary school is slated to open its doors in Brooklyn.The New York City Department of Education says the Khalil Gibran International Academy, serving grades six through 12,will boast a "multicultural curriculum and intensive Arabic language instruction."This appears to be a marvelous idea,for New York and the country need native-born Arabic speakers.They have a role in the military,diplomacy,intelligence, the courts, the press,the academy,and many other institutions-and teaching languages to the young is the ideal route to polyglotism.As someone who spent years learning Arabic,I am enthusiastic in principle about the idea of this school,one of the first of its kind in America.In practice,however,I strongly oppose the KGIA and predict that its establishment will generate serious problems.I say this because Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage.Some examples:Franck Salameh taught Arabic at the most prestigious American language school,Middlebury College in Vermont.In a column for the Middle East Quarterly,he wrote:"even as students leave Middlebury with better Arabic,they also leave indoctrinated with a tendentious Arab nationalist reading of Middle Eastern history.Permeating lectures and carefully-designed grammatical drills,Middlebury instructors push the idea that Arab identity trumps local identities and that respect for minority ethnic and sectarian communities betrays Arabism."For an example of such grammatical drills, see the just-published book of Arabic instruction by Shukri Abed, "Focus on Contemporary Arabic: Conversations with Native Speakers" (Yale University Press), one chapter of which is titled "The Question of Palestine." The work's intensely politicized readings would be unimaginable in a book of French or Spanish conversations. The Islamist dimension worries me as well. An organization that lobbies for Arabic instruction, the Arabic Language Institute Foundation, claims knowledge of Islam's holy language can help the West recover from what its leader, Akhtar Emon, calls its "moral decay." In other words, Muslims tend to see non-Muslims learning Arabic as a step toward an eventual conversion to Islam, an expectation I encountered while studying Arabic in Cairo in the 1970s.
By Daniel Pipes
http://www.nysun.com/article/53060
PS:This madrassa is already generating all sorts of controversy...It's gonna be another "Jihad school" in our soil....
As in the days of Noah...