Learning Arabic from Egypt’s Revolution – The New Yorker

The vocabulary lists for Arabic lessons reflected both the countrys shifting politics and its enduring difficulties.CreditIllustration by Luci Gutirrez

When you move to another country as an adult, the language flows around you like a river. Perhaps a child can immediately abandon himself to the current, but most older people will begin by picking out the words and phrases that seem to matter most, which is what I did after my family moved to Cairo, in October of 2011. It was the first fall after the Arab Spring; Hosni Mubarak, the former President, had been forced to resign the previous February. Every weekday, my wife, Leslie, and I met with a tutor for two hours at a language school called Kalimat, where we studied Egyptian Arabic. At the end of each session, we made a vocabulary list. In early December, following the first round of the nations parliamentary elections, which had been dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, my language notebook read:

mosque

to prostrate oneself

salah (prayer)

imam

sheikh

beard

carpet

forbidden

On many days, I went to Tahrir Square, to report on the ongoing revolution. If I heard unfamiliar words or phrases, I brought them back to class. In January, after some protesters had become suspicious of my intentions as a journalist, the notebook had a new string of words:

agent

embassy

spy

Israel

Israeli

Jew

The following month, I learned tear gas, slaughter, and Can you speak more slowly? Conspiracy theory appeared in my notebook on the same day as fried potatoes. Sometimes I wondered about the strangeness of Tahrir-speak, and what my Arabic would have been like if I had arrived ten years earlier. But it would have been different at any time, in any place: you can never step into the same language twice. Even eternal phrases took on a new texture in the light of the revolution. After I could understand some of the radio talk shows that cabbies played, I realized that callers and hosts exchanged Islamic greetings for a full half minute before settling down to heated arguments about the new regime. Our textbook was entitled DardashaChatterand it outlined set conversations that I soon carried out with neighbors, using phrases that would never be touched by Tahrir:

Peace be upon you.

May peace, mercy, and the blessings of God be upon you.

How are you?

May God grant you peace! Are you well?

Praise be to God.

Go with peace.

Go with peace.

One of our teachers, Rifaat Amin, prepared a five-page handout entitled Arabic Expressions of Social Etiquette. This supplemented Dardasha, which also featured some lessons about social traditions, including the evil eye, the belief that envy can cause misfortune. In Dardasha, icons of little bombs with burning fuses had been printed next to the kind of phrase that, even during a revolution, qualified as explosive: Your son is really smart, Madame Fathiya. Fortunately, this compliment-bomb was promptly disarmed: This is what God has willed, Madame Fathiya, your son is really smart.

I often heard that phrasemashaallah, this is what God has willedwhen I was out with my twin daughters. Occasionally an elderly person smiled at the toddlers and said, Wehish, wehishBeastly, beastly!which confused me until somebody explained that a reverse compliment is another way of deflecting the evil eye. Rifaats handout taught us what to say when somebody returns from a trip, or recovers from illness, or mentions a dead person (allah yirhamuh, may God rest his soul). Beggars can be deftly rebuffed with a piece of deferred responsibility: allah yisahellik, may God make things easier for you. Theres even a dedicated phrase for anybody who has just received a haircut: naiman. The neighborhood barber said this every time he finished cutting my hair, but I didnt understand until Rifaats tutorial. The first time I responded correctly, the barber smiled, and then for five years we followed the script:

Naiman. With blessings.

Allah yinam alik. May God bless you.

Rifaat was in his fifties, a thin, intense man with eyes that flashed whenever he became animated. He had thick white hair and the dark skin of a Saidi, an Upper Egyptian. Rifaats father had been a contractor who grew up in a southern village known as Abydos, whose region had likely been the homeland of the kings of the First Dynasty, five millennia ago. Rifaat was proud of this heritage, and, like many southerners whose families had risen in social class during the mid-century, he was a staunch NasseriteGamal Abdel Nasser, who had led the revolution of 1952, was another Saidi. Every evening, at ten oclock, Rifaat watched the Rotana channels rebroadcast of a concert from the nineteen-fifties or sixties by the singer Umm Kulthum. Once, Rifaat prepared a class worksheet that included the sentence There is not a real Egyptian who does not love Umm Kulthum.

But Rifaat had other qualities that seemed out of place in Egypt. He was Muslim, but he drank alcohol, avoided mosques, and didnt fast during Ramadan. He said that the hajj was a waste of money that would be better spent on the poor. Since his teen-age years, he had followed a mostly vegetarian diet, a rarity among Egyptians. Rifaats siblings told me that their father had often shouted at him when Rifaat refused beef and lamb, but he held firm. Even as an adult, one of the few meat dishes that he ate was chicken prepared by his older sister, Wardiya, who had a special way of removing the skin.

Wardiya sometimes delivered meals to Rifaats apartment, because he was a man without a woman. A decade earlier, he had had lymphoma, and she had cooked for him weekly. At one point, briefly, he had been engaged to a foreign woman, but he seemed happy that it hadnt worked out. He lived alone, which is also unusual in Egypt, and Wardiya told me that she disagreed with Rifaat about two things in particular: religion and his belief that men and women are equal. But he had persuaded her to give the best possible education to her daughtersin his words, this was a weapon. If her husband lets her down, then shell have a weapon in hand, Wardiya explained. She can rely on herself.

Rifaat was natural in the presence of women, which was one reason Leslie and I had classes with him. Cairo is notorious for sexual harassment, but the male response to women also runs to the opposite extreme. If Leslie and I were together in our neighborhood, polite men often addressed all conversation to me, carefully avoiding eye contact with my wife. But there wasnt any such bias with Rifaat, who had taught many foreigners; in the late nineteen-eighties he had even served as a private tutor to the actress Emma Thompson, who was filming a movie in Cairo. For our classes, Rifaat prepared lessons that often reflected his social criticisms, to the degree that boorish men could be denied names:

Huda: What are you tired about? You dont do a single thing at home.

Her Husband: What do you mean?

Huda: I mean that you should help me a little with the housework.

Her Husband: Look, your work isnt necessary, and you spend half your salary on transportation and the other half on makeup.

Several times, Rifaat mentioned that Umm Kulthum, who had married late in life and never had children, had probably been a lesbian. He admired such iconoclasts, and he deeply valued personal freedom, but he also idolized Nasser, who had thrown dissidents and intellectuals into prison. Rifaat supported the Tahrir movement, and he believed that Egypt needed serious social change, but he drilled us on the Arabic Expressions of Social Etiquette. Over time, I came to see the complexities of his character as quintessentially Egyptian. The country has a dominant religion, a powerful nationalism, and family structures that tend to be close to the point of claustrophobia. But theres also a counter-strain of individualism, and many people are simply natural-born characters. Rifaats quirks and inconsistencies seemed so innate that his siblings had wisely chosen to embrace them.

He took great pleasure in Egyptian Arabic, which shares the national tendency to combine opposites: tradition and novelty, order and chaos. Before moving to Egypt, Leslie and I had enrolled in the Middlebury College summer program, where we spent two months studying fusha, the classical Arabic that is used as a literary and formal language across the Arab world. In Cairo we switched to Egyptian colloquial, which has a weak literary tradition but a vibrant character. Whereas scholars of fusha have always taken pride in its purity, Egyptian Arabic is muddied by many tributaries. Some words come from Coptic, the language that descended from Pharaonic Egyptian, and there are many imports from Greek, Persian, Turkish, French, and English. Rifaat loved neologisms like yeshayar, which took the share from Facebook and conjugated it as an Arabic verb. But he could also apply lessons from the classical language to what I heard on Tahrir. He told us that the word for tank, debeba, derives from an Arabic root that means to step heavily. The terms for west and strange share another root. Its not because Westerners are weird, Rifaat said, and gave his own theory. Its because thats where the sun sets, and its a mystery where it goes.

The language is wonderful for Wanderwort. Arabic imported shah from the Persians, and then the phrase al-shah matthe king diedwas introduced to English as checkmate. One morning in class, Rifaat taught the word for mud brick. In ancient hieroglyphs it was djebet, which became tobe in Coptic, and then the Arabs, adding a definite article, made it al-tuba, which was brought to Spain as adobar, and then to the American Southwest, where this heavy thing, having been lugged across four millennia and seven thousand miles, finally landed as adobe.

Surprisingly few Coptic words survive in Egyptian, a fact that reflects how quickly the natives adopted Arabic, despite a reputation for resisting outside cultures. Egyptians began to convert to Christianity not long after the time of Christ, but most people never learned the languages of their successive foreign rulers: the Ptolemies, the Romans, the Byzantines. In 640 C.E., the first Arab army arrived in Egypt, which was a province of the Byzantine Empire. The Arabs had only four thousand soldiers, but within two years they had conquered the country. By 700, Egyptian state archives were using Arabic. After another hundred and fifty years, Coptic had essentially vanished as a daily language in Lower Egypt. By the tenth century, a bishop named Severus complained that even Egyptian Christians could communicate only in Arabic.

Across North Africa, language, rather than religion or military force, created the most powerful bond of the new empire. Natives recognized the benefits of speaking the tongue of the Arabs, who rarely learned other languages, and who were more tolerant than previous overlords. For the people in the provinces in the Near East, the Byzantine emperor was somebody who did taxation and persecuted heretics, Kees Versteegh, a Dutch Arabist and the author of The Arabic Language, told me recently. There was no love lost between them and Byzantium. He continued, And the Arabs had the advantage of not caring about the exact faith the Christians had. They didnt care whether they were Nestorians or Arians or what have youas long as they paid their taxes, they were left in peace.

Because of this dynamic, Arabic spread much faster than Islam, and the language played a crucial role in Western scholarship. During the early ninth century, the Mutazila school of Islamic theology promoted a rationalist exploration of faith and other subjects, and Arabs searched out the works of the ancient Greeks. These were hard to find in the West, because the Romans, who read Greek easily, had never translated most books into Latin. After the Roman Empire collapsed, the ability to speak Greek disappeared rapidly in Western Europe, and knowledge of the classics was essentially lost for centuries.

Even in Byzantium such works werent highly valued. The Arabs reported that they found Greek books in poor conditionin their view, the Byzantines didnt respect their own heritage. The Muslims had the classics translated into Arabic editions, which became accessible in Western Europe in the late eleventh century, after Christians began to reconquer the Iberian Peninsula. Soon Arabic became the language through which Westerners rediscovered Greek works on medicine, science, and philosophy. At the University of Paris, medical scholars called themselves arabizantes, and some of our modern terms were originally filtered through the language. Retina and cornea come from Latin translations of shabakiyya and qarniyya, Arabic words that were themselves translated from Greek texts.

When complex ideas pass through so many lenses of language, distortions are inevitable. Eventually, Western scholars rediscovered the original classics in Byzantium, learned Greek, and claimed that many translations were flawed. By then, the rationalism of the Mutazila school had been superseded by more dogmatic interpretations of Islam. And Renaissance scholars came to view the Arabs as the defilers of classical texts, not their preservers. The motivation for learning Arabic also changednow Westerners did so primarily to argue with Muslims, and to try to convert them to Christianity.

On many mornings, Leslie and I were the only students at Kalimat. After the Arab Spring, there was a flurry of foreign interest in Arabic, and the school was busy for our first year. But then the Egyptian political climate worsened, and foreign-exchange programs were cancelled. By the spring of 2013, Rifaat was often upset. He had founded Kalimat with one of his siblings, and he loathed the Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidate, Mohamed Morsi, had won the first democratic Presidential election in Egyptian history. As a Nasserite, Rifaat blamed the rise of Islamism on Anwar Sadat, the President who had succeeded Nasser.

Under Nasser, very few women wore the hijab, Rifaat often told us. He was endlessly nostalgic about the cosmopolitanism of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and he approved of Nassers harsh repression of Islamists. Under Nasser, the government had executed Sayyid Qutb, a Brotherhood member and theorist of jihad, whose death inspired generations of radicals. After Sadat came to power, in 1970, he tried the opposite approach, seeking to accommodate the Brotherhood and other Islamists. According to Rifaat, this had only encouraged Egyptians to become more narrowly religious. During the spring of 2013, when President Morsi was clashing with many of the countrys institutions, Rifaat often arrived at class with lists of bitter phrases for us to translate:

Im not in a good mood.

He put me in a bad mood.

Show me the new bag which you bought yesterday.

Are you really stupid or just acting stupid?

Rifaat preferred to create materials for class, but I had insisted that we finish Dardasha first. Ive always liked language booksone of the joys of studying as an adult is that you can appreciate their subtext. In the mid-nineties, when Chinas economic reforms were starting to take hold, I had worked in Sichuan province, where I studied a government-produced book called Speaking Chinese About China. In the text, a basic sentence that appeared in Chapter 3 (He works very hard at his job) became more complex in Chapter 4 (Everyone is working very hard; as a result, the output has been doubled) and then reached new heights of sophistication in Chapter 5 (We have realized that only by developing production can we raise the peoples living standard). This was one of my most useful Chinese lessons: its possible to speak with increasing complexity while repeating the same simple ideas over and over. Grammar functions as a kind of spice, similar to the way that Sichuanese cuisine uses strong flavors to create satisfying meals that actually contain little meat.

Fifteen years later, I entered the world of Dardasha, which had been written by Mustafa Mughazy, an Egyptian linguist at Western Michigan University. After the Chinese, textbook Egyptians seemed remarkably uninspired by development. There were no production quotas, no economic plans, no infrastructure projects. The word factory did not appear in the book. People said things like Ya hag, Im an engineer and after five years of university, Im working as a waiter in a restaurant. The Chinese book had been cagey toward its foreign readers, expressing nothing negative about China, but the Egyptian text wasnt shy about bad behavior. It even included a sample dialogue of a bizarrely tenacious wrong-number conversation. From my perspective, phone etiquette was one of the eternal mysteries of Egyptian civilizationLeslie and I fielded countless calls from people asking for strangers, or demanding weird things, or saying nothing at all.

Mostly, Dardasha was full of families, talking and laughing, bickering and joking, being generous and being ridiculous. Husbands could act worse than children:

Ali: Whats for lunch today?

Fatma: Stuffed chicken, just the way you like it.

Ali: I dont want chicken. Every day, we have chicken.

Fatma: Fine, what do you want, Ali?

Ali: I dont know. But I dont want chicken.

Fatma: Tomorrow, God willing, Ill make whatever you like.

The book also wasnt shy about the challenges of Cairo life. It introduced the conditional tense with open-ended sample sentences:

If only I knew who was calling the telephone every day...

If only I could see the child who rings the doorbell and runs...

If only I knew which of the neighbors listens to loud music all night long...

One exercise was entitled You Are Irritable: Work in pairs and ask your partner the following questions to find out whether he/she has an irritable personality or not:

You have an appointment with a friend at five oclock. At six oclock your friend is still not there. Do you get angry and leave?

You are on the Internet and each time the telephone rings and the same man calls with a wrong number. Do you get angry on the telephone?

For Rifaat, the answer was always: Yes. He was the most asabi person I knew, although its hard to translate a word thats so specific to the Egyptian experience. The English irritable lacks contextit seems unfair to describe somebody as asabi without also conveying everything in Egypt that might make a person asabi. Perhaps its best to say that this word describes the type of man who teaches Arabic by asking his students to translate the following: It seems no one in this country knows how to celebrate without a microphone and five loudspeakers.

For Rifaat, preparing class materials was cathartic. He arrived each morning bursting with enthusiasm for a new lesson about poverty, or rape, or children who have been recruited into criminal rings. He wrote devastating little character sketches that began with sentences like Fareed is a very lazy worker who does not keep his appointments; he is always late. Once, we studied a puff-piece interview of Suzanne Mubarak, the Presidents wife, from before the revolution. She was asked what she ate for lunch (In fact, I dont have lunch, but if I do I just eat a small plate of fruit) and for dinner (I usually dont have dinner at all, but if it happens, its just a cup of fruit juice). By the time we finished this inane conversation, Rifaats eyes were flashing: These people stole millions of dollars, but all she eats is fruit!

One morning in May, 2013, we studied suicide. By then, protests against Morsi had crystallized into a movement that called itself Tamarrod, or rebellion. The following month, Tamarrod organized a massive protest that resulted in a military coup led by Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Minister of Defense. In class, we compiled a sunny vocab listpoison, gunfire, frustration, depression, repressionand Rifaat explained that suicide had never been common in Egypt, but now it seemed to happen more than it did in the days of Nasser. He claimed that it is physically impossible to commit suicide after listening to Umm Kulthum. In any case, Rifaat would never do it. Because death is coming anyway, he said, smiling. Its coming soon enough.

He disapproved of the cowardice of carbon monoxide. If he absolutely had to kill himself, he would do it like Cleopatra, with the bite of a kubrathis word, he noted, sounds the same in Arabic and English, with a shared Latin root. He ended class by handing us a new series of sketches, entitled Victims of the System:

When Ibrahim was a 16-year-old high school student doing well in school he enjoyed the full confidence of his family and the freedom to come and go as he pleased. His friendship with a teacher only increased his familys confidence in him. And Ibrahim was so proud of his friendship that when his teacher asked him to help to rob the flat of a girl who had refused to marry him, he did not hesitate....

There has never been a great variety of materials for teaching Egyptian Arabic, whose status is best conveyed by its name: ammiyya, a word that means common. In contrast, the traditional written form of Arabic is called al-lugha al-arabiyya al-fusha, the eloquent Arabic language, or, for short, al-fusha: the eloquent. Western academics call it modern standard Arabic, although the language retains strong links to the time of Muhammed. Back then, Arabic lacked a strong written literary tradition, and, in the eyes of believers, the Prophets illiteracy is evidence of the divine nature of the Quran. Even a skeptic like Rifaat told us that the Quran is so beautiful that it could only have come from God.

After Islam began to spread, scholars established rules for the written language. Such a project isnt uncommon for a new empire. In China, the Han dynasty, which was founded in 206 B.C.E., codified and standardized the Confucian, or Ruist, classics, a process that helped set the terms for the writing system. By taking these centuries-old texts as their model of proper Chinese writing, the Han prescribed an idealized languageclassical Chinesethat was probably never spoken in day-to-day life.

Early scholars of Islam had a similar instinct to draw on the past, but they lacked an equivalent wealth of historical material. So the Arabs went to the desert instead. They sought out Bedouins, who were believed to speak a purer form of Arabic than people in cities, where language had been corrupted by contact with outsiders. Grammarians employed Bedouins as referees in language disputes, and the lite sent their sons to live with nomads so that they would learn to speak correctly. During the tenth century, a lexicographer named al-Azhari was so blessedal-hamdulillah!that he was kidnapped by a Bedouin tribe. This experience allowed him to produce a dictionary, The Reparation of Speech, whose introduction, in a kind of grammatical Stockholm syndrome, effusively praises the kidnappers: They speak according to their desert nature and their ingrained instincts. In their speech you hardly ever hear a linguistic error or a terrible mistake.

To some degree, this standardization of written Arabic worked at cross purposes with the spread of the spoken language. In provincial places like Egypt, natives learned Arabic in informal ways, and in the process they simplified the grammar. In response, scholars moved in the opposite direction, developing a beautifully logical but extremely difficult version of the language. Charles Ferguson, an influential linguist who taught at Stanford, argued that theres no evidence that the language of the Quran was ever anybodys mother tongue.

Over the centuries, fusha remained separate from daily speech, which kept it remarkably stablea river that stopped flowing. But, in the nineteenth century, when the pressures of colonialism and modernization intensified, some Egyptians felt that fusha was inadequate. There had always been some writing in colloquial Egyptian, and a number of intellectuals advocated for expanding this practice. But traditionalists feared further cultural damage. It will not be long before our ancestral language loses its form, God forbid, an editor at the newspaper Al-Ahram wrote, in 1882. How can we support a weak spoken language which will eliminate the sacred original language?

Such debates occurred in other parts of the world that also struggled with the transition to modernity. In China, political movements in the nineteen-tens and twenties helped end the practice of using classical Chinese, replacing it with the northern vernacular now known as Mandarin. But this change was easier for the Chinese, whose language was effectively limited to a single political entity. Most important, classical Chinese wasnt tied to a religion or a divine text.

During the late nineteenth century, the leaders of the Nahda, or Arabic Renaissance, decided to modernize fusha without radically changing its grammar or essential vocabulary. New terms were coined using traditional rootstelegram, for example, comes from lightning. (Isnt that cute? Rifaat said in class.) Qitar, the word for train, originally was used for caravan. Other neologisms were even more imaginative. Lead camel was an inspired choice for locomotive, as was sound of thunder for telephonethe ideal image for Egyptian phone etiquette. Sadly, these words failed to stick, and nowadays one is forced to answer wrong numbers on a loanword: tilifun.

In Algerian schools, the French had at one point tried to replace fusha with the national dialect. British authorities never attempted this in Egypt, but some Englishmen proposed that vernacular writing might improve literacy rates. Over time, Arabs came to associate any encouragement of vernacular writing with colonialism. By the nineteen-fifties, allegiance to fusha was critical to pan-Arabism, because the language created a bond across the Arab world. But Nasser, the greatest pan-Arab of all, also understood the power of Egyptian Arabic. He often began a speech in fusha, and then sprinkled in Egyptian, until, by the climax, he was declaiming entirely in the language of the people. Such speeches, though, had to be heard in order to be appreciated. In Egypt, statements by political figures are often translated into fusha before theyre printed in a newspaper. There are some exceptions, like the interview with Suzanne Mubarak, which used Egyptian to portray the Presidents wife as accessible and humble. (I just eat a small plate of fruit.)

Translation into fusha can clean up a politicians words. For example, in April, 2016, President Sisi discussed political reform with representatives of different sectors of society. Speaking Egyptian, he stumbled: The ideal shape that you are calling for, that idealism is in books, but we cannot take everything you think about with paper and pen and then ask the state for it, no, it wont happen... but we are on a pathway in which were succeeding each day more than the day before. In Al-Ahram, the quote appeared in fusha as: Idealism exists in books, but were walking the pathway of success, and we will succeed day by day. Any Egyptian would know that Sisi hadnt actually been using fusha. Few people can really maintain speaking modern standard Arabic all the way through, Mahmoud Abdalla, the director of Middlebury Colleges summer Arabic program, told me. He said that even linguists like himself, or well-trained imams who have memorized the Quran, will make occasional grammatical errors if called upon to speak the language spontaneously. This is why they slow down when they speak fusha, he said. Theyre afraid to make mistakes.

After the coup, Rifaat wanted to have faith in Sisi. In January of 2014, when it was rumored that Sisi would run for President, Rifaat had Leslie and me study a pop song entitled All of Us Love Sisi:

The world says you remind us of Mandela, and of the leader of the nation, Gamal [Abdel Nasser]... .

That spring, Sisi ran, and Rifaat voted for him. But the new Presidents anti-terrorism campaign included a crackdown on every sort of potential opposition, and tens of thousands of people were imprisoned. Sisi seemed to favor flashy megaprojects rather than coherent economic strategies, and by the spring of 2015, Rifaat was increasingly asabi. He was suffering from a slow-healing sore on his foot, and a couple of doctors had been unhelpful; in class, he often railed against the Egyptian medical system and the general decline of society. Sure, Nasser was a dictator, but at least it worked, he said. But if youre a dictator, and things still dont work, then whats the point?

One morning, a middle-aged woman who lived in the same building as the school stopped by, and we chatted for a while. She was dressed in expensive clothes, and she complained about the young people who protested against Sisi. They should give him a chance to fix things, she said. Rifaat nodded, but then the woman started to gripe about the poor, and how the government subsidized their food and electricity. Rifaats face darkened; his eyes bulged. He managed to keep silent until she left.

These are the people who ruined everything! he exploded. They grabbed everything under Sadat and Mubarak! We were never like that.

Leslie and I often teased Rifaat about his nostalgia, but that morning he seemed too upset. In recent months, his playful pessimism had deteriorated into something more demoralized. One of the tragedies of modern Egypt is its failure to create a large, vibrant middle class, which had been the heart of Nassers social vision. His government built community centers to encourage theatre and other arts, and the education system was expanded on a massive scale, with millions of Egyptians attending college for free. But the prospect of future prosperity turned out to be a mirage. Schools grew too quickly, without proper reforms or teacher training, and Nassers brand of socialism was an economic disaster. Egyptians could go to college, but they couldnt find jobsthats why engineers in Dardasha worked as waiters. Thats also one reason that, during the eighties and nineties, violent Islamist groups gained followers on Upper Egypts campuses, where rural students realized that their aspirations were hopeless.

For Rifaat, who saw himself as staunchly middle class, Egypt had become a lonely place. The education system had collapsed, and most citizens remained poor; for decades they had drifted toward religion. Meanwhile, the lite had turned away from the rest of society, moving to gated compounds and educating their children in international schools. Tahrir represented a brief convergence: most organizers were upper class, and millions of the poor had followed their lead. But it didnt lastafter the initial rush, these groups couldnt bridge the vast gulf that separated them.

In the fall of 2015, Leslie and I took time off from class. It was our fifth and final year in Egypt, and we were busy with research outside Cairo. A few times, I e-mailed or telephoned Rifaat, who said that he was looking forward to our return. But his foot had worsenedonce, when I called, in late November, he sounded close to tears.

That winter, we took a long vacation in Upper Egypt. Afterward, I texted Rifaat, hoping to schedule a class. He didnt respond, so I calledno answer. I telephoned one of his brothers who worked at Kalimat. There was a long silence after I greeted him.

Rifaat, he said at last, itwaffa.

The word hit me all the harder because Rifaat was the one who had taught me what it means.

Language reform wasnt an issue during the Arab Spring. Such debates were crucial to the Arabic Renaissance and to Pan-Arabism, but after that the question was effectively settled, at least in terms of policy. Egyptian textbooks are written in fusha, which remains the standard language for newspapers and most other publications. Still, writers and scholars occasionally point out problems, and, in 2003, Niloofar Haeri, a linguistic anthropologist at Johns Hopkins, published Sacred Language, Ordinary People. In the book, Haeri refuses to use the academic term modern standard Arabic, instead referring to fusha as classical Arabic.

Modernity, in my eyes, means that it should be somebodys mother tongue, Haeri told me. Thats part of how I would understand a modern languagethat its contemporaneous with its speakers. She noted that while places like German Switzerland also practice diglossia, the use of two languages, the difference is that both Swiss German and High German are living, spoken languages. The majority of Arab children are put in a position that I cannot think of an equivalent for any other group of children in the world, she said.

Haeris book points out the discomfort that many Egyptians feel with fusha. Their relationship to the language tends to be passivemost people understand it well, because they hear it frequently, but they struggle to speak it. And writing fusha requires a step that isnt necessary in most languages. You are translating yourself into a medium over which you have far less mastery, Haeri told me.

After Haeri published her findings, she was attacked by many Western scholars of the Middle East. She believed that her backgrounda Muslim woman from Iran, who was trained in linguistics rather than in regional studiesmay have made her more willing to tackle an issue that is politically sensitive in Middle Eastern studies. But there have always been Egyptians with a similar opinion. Leila Ahmed, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School who grew up in Cairo, described her childhood hatred of fusha in a memoir, A Border Passage. She remembers shouting at an Arabic teacher, I am not an Arab! I am Egyptian! And anyway we dont speak like this! Her book was attacked harshly by the critic Edward Said, who saw it as part of the Orientalist perception of Arabic. In an essay that was published posthumously, Said wrote, Reading Ahmeds pathetic tirade makes one feel sorry that she never bothered to learn her own language.

Ahmeds point, of course, is that fusha is not her language. It wasnt Saids, either. He grew up in Jerusalem and in Cairo, and, in the essay, he acknowledges that, despite having spoken Palestinian and Egyptian Arabic at home, he never became comfortable with fusha. He relates the experience of giving a lecture in Cairo, as a celebrated scholar, only to have a young relative express disappointment with Saids lack of eloquence. Said describes himself as still loitering on the fringes of the language.

But he doesnt address the larger question: if even educated people struggle with fusha, what does that mean for everybody else? More than a quarter of Egyptians are illiterate, and the rate is significantly higher among women, who are less likely than men to be in environments where fusha is used. Comfort is another issue. People dont write, because there is linguistic insecurity, Madiha Doss, a scholar of Arabic linguistics at Cairo University, told me.

The difficulty of fusha may have contributed to the tradition of using foreign languages to educate Egyptian university students in technical subjects. This had been the practice under the monarchy, but it was continued under Nassers expansion of higher education. At public universities, math, medicine, and some hard sciences are taught in English. Centuries ago, Europeans needed Arabic to learn medicine, but nowadays even Egyptian medical students dont use Arabic texts. What happens is that you reserve Arabic for traditional knowledge, Doss said. And it becomes more conservative.

The situation also makes for difficult transitions. After a math student enters a public university, he begins using formulas with Latin and Greek letters, and reading them from left to right, the opposite direction of what was done in his public-high-school classes. Then, in his junior year, the curriculum changes to English. Hany El-Hosseiny, a math professor at the university, told me that each of these shifts disorients students, whom he believes should be taught entirely in Arabic. But this needs a lot of effort that was not made for the past hundred and fifty years, El-Hosseiny said. We have to translate a lot, and we have to write original works in Arabic.

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Learning Arabic from Egypt's Revolution - The New Yorker