My Experience at "Arabic" School

One of the major concerns for many newcomers to Canada is how to maintain their cultural identity, and language not in themselves but in their children. When we first moved here my mom and dad worked very hard at establishing a Saturday class that teaches Arabic to all levels. They called everybody they knew, they worked very hard at convincing the principal that we have the numbers to create and maintain a class. Once the class opened, we called every family on Friday night to remind them to bring their children the next morning. We picked up people from their houses to drive them school. But the number of students wasn’t enough to justify another class, at that time the Arabic community was small. By the end of semester the class was cancelled. During the semester that the class ran, my mom’s focus was on keeping a religion free class. As a result the class was a mixture of Muslims and Christians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrian, just the way it was intended to be.

Fast forward a few years and I’m finishing my high school, looking for an easy credit to bump up my average. Out of the 6 courses that determine my average, I had the freedom of choosing only one. So naturally I wanted to take something that I’m good at. At that time someone suggested that I take Arabic on Saturday, and having maintained a decent level of Arabic I thought it was a wonderful idea.

My first day at the school consisted of a morning Arabic lesson class, taught by a very competent languages professor at the University of Waterloo. He spoke 5 languages, and often mixed German, French and English while speaking. His lessons were all over the place, unorganized, and lacked theme. His class lasted for just over an hour, after which we had our break.

After the break came the Arabic teacher’s wife. Having not been to the previous week’s class, I didn’t know what expect for this period. I was shocked to learn that she didn’t actually speak Arabic! She was of Pakistani origin, knew her dua’ very well, probably knew a bunch of “soras” by heart, knew all the buzz words in Islam, but I stress once again, she didn’t speak Arabic. She was able to scribble a bunch of Arabic words on the blackboard with very neatly written letters, but that’s probably because she knew Urdu. In a sense she as good write Arabic as well as I could write Farsi. Her spelling was horrendous. During one boring lesson of hers, I remember clearly that she spelled “Wudu” by writing in Arabic, waw dal waw (so much for ‘lughat iddad’). We (me and a bunch of other students) got into a heated argument with her that her spelling was way off. Being the closed minded person that she was, she persisted that she was right, and kept on teaching us the dua’. Her classes mainly consisted of memorizing dua’, for example what should a Muslim say before he enters a bathroom, and before he eats, and so on. I’m not going to discuss my views on dua’ here but let’s just say it was something that I didn’t expect to learn at Arabic school. But of course being in an Arabic class, we not only had to memorize dua’s in Arabic, but also in English. It was then that I got introduced to translations such as “All praise is due to Allah” and “O Allah, I ask You to grant me beneficial knowledge” and other such phrases that I could not even relate to, just because of the mere fact they were taught to me in English. In this period we also had to go up and recite the dua’s one on one with the teacher. Being the least religious out of the bunch, I was the only one that had to memorize these dua’s five minutes before I had to recite them… So that’s two periods and still no Arabic.

Surely the last period had to offer some Arabic right? No, just like you probably expected it had nothing to do with learning Arabic. The last “lesson” consisted of “assirah annabiwiya” which’s Islam’s equivalent, and in many instances identical, to Biblical stories. Now don’t get me wrong, I always enjoyed hearing about the battles, and legendary stories of the chivalrous men, who shaped our history in many ways. I just didn’t want to be forced to listen to them under the “Arabic class” banner, especially when the stories are told in English (out of respect of the two Urdu speaking students who were there to learn Arabic).

If coordinators of the school were true to their beliefs they would be honest, and at least called the course “Islamic Studies with a bit of Arabic” class. I certainly don’t want to be taught Arabic under the banner of Islam, and I most certainly don’t want to learn Arabic by non-Arabic speakers. It’s a shame that people refer to this school as an Arabic school. Arabic is a language that pre-dated Islam for centuries. Christians spoke Arabic, Jews spoke Arabic, and all Idol worshipers spoke Arabic. By putting all the effort on making this pseudo-Arabic class mainly a religion school, the organizers have alienated many people who want to learn Arabic from other religious backgrounds, including Arabs and non-Arabs.

My final result of the course was a 70 something. I did very well on the Arabic part of exam, but bombed the religion part. That mark was my lowest mark of the year; it stood as a scar on my transcript. That same semester at regular school, my English mark was the second highest in the class.

This post comes in light of a new development in the local Arab community. Recently a new group of people, including an authentic Arabic teacher from Damascus, pooled some money together to make an Arabic class. Today I heard they’re teaching religion as part of the curriculum.

technorati tags: , Arabic, school, canada, langauge, Islam, religion