If I meet one more Mfalsaf...

One of the things I love about Arabic is that it has certain idioms that just hit the spot.   The idioms speak volumes about a situation or a personality often with one word.  One of these idioms is “mfalsaf” (مفلسف ) a colloquial term derived from “falsafeh” which translates to philosophy.  A person who is mfalsaf is one who dives too deeply into every argument made in their presence, squeezing every last drop of fun out of any conversation (sort of like a smart ass).  Mfalsafeen (plural) are a breed of people who I just can’t stand to be around.  Here’s why...

When a mfalsaf is around I find it very hard to converse freely.  I tiptoe around topics that I feel might induce a falsafeh diarrhea, which is pretty much impossible with a mfalsaf around.  These people are very good at what they do.   Another downfall of having a mfalsaf around is “super joke analysis”.  They can’t take a joke for what it is, they have to go into the details and tell you how it doesn’t make sense.  As if it proves their intellectual superiority if they point out “It’s impossible to be so short that you can see someone’s feet on their drivers licence... plus wouldn’t they zoom in on the face anyway?”  They are also guilty of “super Hollywood movie analysis,” they would often be heard saying “dude, it’s impossible to survive that crash, do you know how many G’s that is?  Humans can take only 5 G’s before....”

At work a mfalsaf will never answer your question. They will go into debates (often with themselves) reaching no conclusion and leaving you more confused than before you asked the questions.  If you happen to be having a conversation and they’re around they will intervene with useless, irrelevant comments, which serve only in breaking the train of thought and continuity of the conversation.  For all I know they probably have wet dreams about the number of intellectual breakthroughs they made the day before. 

A typical mfalsaf argument is “I don’t have to prove that god exists, you have to prove that he doesn’t exist”. Booooooo. Most of mfalsafs’ arguments begin with “well technically...” or “provided that...what you’re saying could be true”. Mfalsafeen are in desperate need of chill pills. 

So how o you deal with a mfalsaf? If you try to give them a taste of their own medicine they will take you on and go falsafeh diarrhea on you, and that can get messy.  If you simply agree with their argument in hopes of shutting them up, you’re encouraging them to continue their quest.  So that leaves us with the only option of ignoring them.  When they throw the “technicaly speaking” at you, you just let it slide.  They might try harder to be involved in the conversation, turn your back to them. Hopefully Pavlovian Conditioning will teach them to keep their comments to themselves.  I strongly believe that mfalsaf is a yet undiagnosed psychological syndrome, one that many engineers seem to suffer from.

Maw3id 3arabi

The concept of showing up on time seems to be very hard to get for more people than I had originally thought. I’m generally a punctual person. I’m rarely late for an appointment no matter what the nature of meeting is. At work I was always on time, in fact most of my stress came from trying to get to work on time on a snowy day, or when the highway is jammed, rather than from getting it from the actual work. When going out with friends, picking someone up, or just meeting a few classmates for a lab, I’m on time more often than not. Naturally, a punctual person would expect others to be just as punctual, and naturally the punctual person is disappointed. This is especially true if the punctual person is an Arab. Now before you start blaming me for generalizing, I want to clarify that my views here came from personal experience, so Arabs here translates to people that I know, or have met.

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard "I will be there in half an hour", only for the person to show up more than an hour later. I have often canceled going on errands to be home on time, only to be disappointed. Other times we meet up at a friend’s place to go out at a specified time, only to find out the person still needs to shower and get dressed. Is it so hard to plan ahead of time?

Take the other day for example. A bunch of us decide to meet up a coffee shop to talk over an important proposition. The meeting involves 4 people including me. Person A calls me to set up the time, and he tells me he’s going to call person B and C to communicate to them all the details. To cover my tracks, I call person C to make sure he knows the plan, but he doesn’t pick up. I call person B half an hour before meeting asking him if he needs a ride, and he tells me that person C is picking him up. I make sure B knows what time the meeting is taking place. At 2 minutes past the specified time I pull into the parking lot finding it empty. I wait in the parking lot for person A, B and C to show up, for about 10 minutes before trying to call person A. Person A doesn’t pick up, so I try person C (person B doesn’t have a cell). C doesn’t answer. Twenty minutes past the meeting time I get a call from C, telling me he just got out of the shower and two of his friends just came in to play video games. He casually invites me over to play with them. Long story short, I went home half an hour later, and the meeting didn’t happen. It turns out there was a miscommunication between B and C about the meeting time and location, and A almost got into a car accident on the way to coffee shop. Dramatic, but I chose to believe the story.

This also happens on a family level. I especially hate it when a family promises to come over at a certain time, only to show up hours later. Food gets cold, normal movement in the house stalls, and quite frankly I want to get back into my comfortable sweat pants. Of course when the family shows up, there are no apologies for being late, since it’s expected. After all it’s a maw3id 3arabi (Arabic meeting).

This sort of thing happens all the time, sometimes I tolerate it, at other time I give everyone a piece of my mind. But one thing that will always tick me off is when people pronounce ahead of time “I’ll come over at 9… maw3id 3arabi.”

Perhaps I should relax a little, sometimes I think instead of expecting everyone to be on time, I should just change my expectations and become like them. I have tried being late with people who are late with me, and although it definitely removes the stress of making it somewhere on time, it still feels wrong. Ghandi said “be the change you want to see in the world” but I’m afraid the world is beginning to change me.

Unforgettable time

The camping trip was amazing.. non-stop laughs and memories bil shwal as they say..
this picture sums it all up..

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

Direct Idiom Translation

I think some of the funniest things for any bilingual person to do is to directly translate idioms from one language into another. So here’s my crude attempt at doing so..

Arabic Idiom: Ra2bti saddadeh (you can rely on me or I got your back)
Direct Translation: My neck is a cork

Arabic Idiom: 3ala rasi (It’s my pleasure)
Direct Translation: On my head

Arabic Idiom: Sa7a (bless you)
Direct Translation: Health

Arabic Idiom: ta3abak ra7a (a courteous way to say “no problem”)
Direct Translation: Your tiredness is comfort [to me]

Arabic Idiom: sho jab la jab (there’s no comparison)
Direct Translation: what brings to bring

Arabic Idiom: Il ird b3en immo ghazal (said to one who believes all that’s associated with him/her is the best)
Direct Translation: A monkey in his mother’s eye is a gazal

Arabic Idiom: mitl il sha3ra min al 3ajeen (said to note how easy something is to do)
Direct Translation: Like a hair out of dough

Arabic Idiom: tehriya bil hana (said to someone who’s showing you a new article of clothing or shoes they just bought)
Direct Translation: wear it out in happiness

Arabic Idiom: Mabrook (congratulations, a more common way of saying the idiom above)
Direct Translation: Blessed

Arabic Idiom: m7ammelni jmeleh (said to someone who did something good to you and keeps reminding you of it)
Direct Translation: Load me a beautiful

Arabic Idiom: Ma bisadi2 il khara gher la yara (said to someone who won’t believe what your saying to them)
Direct Translation: The shit won’t believe until he sees

Well, that’s all I got for now. I’m sure more will cross my mind, and perhaps some will comments with funny ones they thought of.

technorati tags: langauge, arabic, english, idioms, translation, idiom