take courage friends. I owe a debt of gratitude to the enormously brave Joel B. Pollak for exposing the insidious Arabic textbook
Al-Kitab. Pollak, a student at Harvard Law School and the president of the HLS alliance for Israel, exposed the Arabic threat in the editoral pages of the Washington Post. Specifically he shows how the books principle character Maha is a vehicle for the malaise of the Arab world in its journey into America. Pollack writes,
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.
You can probably imagine how the little bit of this story that I learned changed my life. Although I only knew Maha as an NYU student whose father works at the U.N. her misery was patently obvious and dangerously contagious. Pollack writes of Moha that, "We may laugh, but there is something fundamentally wrong with this indoctrination into misery." I would respond that here Joel does not go far enough. Since being introduced to Maha I have been incapable of laughter. The idea at laughing at Maha never occurred to my totally decimated capacity for independent thought. I think some of the readers of this blog may have noticed my unfortunate proclivities towards the self pity and sorrow that I inherited from Maha.
Fortunately, Joel is a stronger man than myself. He was not "indoctrinated" by Al-Kitab and proudly fought back against its agenda. Case and point.
Alongside simple Arabic poems, students read about anti-Western heroes such as Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The DVD that comes with "Al-Kitaab" includes footage of Nasser's mass rallies in Cairo -- including slogans in Arabic and French such as "Brother Nations in Struggle, We Are By Your Side." These scenes of totalitarian rage are fondly described by the narrator as "dreams of his youth."
The accompanying lesson describes the highlights of Nasser's career, including the nationalization of the Suez Canal and the formation of the United Arab Republic. No mention is made of Egypt's defeat in the Six-Day War or of Nasser's brutal, repressive rule. In my class, we were asked to recite a passage about Nasser to practice our vocalization. (I refused.)
I only pray that no American students are inspired by Al-Kitab to repeat Nasser's follies and unite Egypt and Syria. But without the lessons of the 1967 war readily available to them I cannot be sure that they won't at least try.
