After English Before Bed

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 16:40

You know how it goes, just before you fall asleep you have an idea that gets between you and the dreamland calling you into sleep. I had just one epigrammatic thought last night and so thinking it would diminish its power, so I could fall off to sleep, I scribbled it down. Last night it didn't go that way though. Upon writing that very thought down the idea I set to paper set off a synaptic chain reaction of thoughts in my tired brain so that sleep eluded me until dawn. Here is that thought:

After English, Arabic is perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of languages.

The thoughts that followed that gem of an idea were more sinister and all too true and kept me awake like old Christmas time Scrooge waiting his night-time unwelcome spirited visitors.

If the English language sparked off the crusades and set the world on its disasterous course of history toward this present modernity regarding the rise of "foreign policy" as a tool to control other peoples resources - arbitrarily carving up other lands and other cultures with the blood of bystanders caught in the way of the history of the unfolding of Western greed. Then perhaps despite all attempts at vilifying the Arabic cultures, languages and religion - perhaps Arabic still stands as the antidote to the highly infectuous disease the English language has on the human mind.

Of course the Majestic Arabic language of old is an infection on the human mind too but perhaps it is a healthier infection. It only takes listening to a native Arabic speaker talk at length in another language to get a glimpse at the power of reasoning that the Arabic language has. Arabic require the capacity for a long attention span by both the speaker and the listener which is why the BBC and other Western media conglomerates can't cope with an Arabic speaker as interview subjects. This is why I for one am eagarly anticipating the coming new media giant of Al Jazeera broadcast around the world in English.

English as a language has devolved itself by its consummerist tendencies into short breaths of useless soundsbytes to control other human beings. Arabic by its linguistic nature requires the capacity for extended lengthy thought and reasoning. No other language has the power to change the structure of human mental reasoning than the Arabic and English languages. Of course Shakespeare proved the superiority and potential of the English language but capitalism and greed reduced English to a marketing tool.

Therefore Arabic remains the antidote of our Anglophone consummerist syndrome. Classical Arabic is still very much kept alive by Islam and the Muslims and the modern adaptation of Standard Arabic still retains Arabic's lengthy thought analysis process that is more capable of reasoning and finding solutions to the problems of the world brought about by Western and Anglophone syndromes.

The greatest gift the Arabic language has given the rest of world trapped in the consummerism and exportation of the West is that in even only attempting to learn a small part of the Arabic language one learns the capacity of ones own mind. At first when I began to study to Arabic I was humiliated by how quickly I would forget one new phonetic sound, character or word. I learned very quickly that to learn Arabic was going to be a humiliating process at understanding the limits of my own mental capacity. At the same time Arabic taught me a new mental structure with which to reason and think and build a better mind. For Arabic is a whole different way of thinking and using ones brain. Any artist can use Arabic as a tool to open ones mind and to begin to see the world differently. Thus for artist who are blocked Arabic is a wonderful remedy to a mental condition. It is for this reason that I maintain that perhaps Arabic might hold the antidote to the present global downward spiral into corporate greed and exploitation of other lands resources for which wars are made for profit. It is time the West began to learn how to listen in the ways that Arab are known for thinking, reasoning and lastly speaking. If nothing else this could become a step towards peace for the wars that the Anglophone of the incorporated Western world has set upon the Arabic speaking peoples of Iraq and Palestine.