Minutes before class is scheduled to begin, Georgetown University graduate student Hana Zabarah clears her throat several times. Zabarah explains to her students that teaching two sections of intensive first-level Arabic for 12 hours a week has aggravated her sore throat.
This semester, to accommodate rising student demand, Georgetown’s Arabic Department has added two new sections of first-level Arabic, one of which Zabarah is teaching. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, students from universities across the nation have shown a growing interest in Arabic, Islam and Middle Eastern studies classes.
At Georgetown, since last fall, enrollment in First Level Modern Standard Arabic I has tripled, as has the number of first-year Arabic majors.
“There’s increased interest because [since Sept. 11] the government has been urgently looking for Arabic speakers,” Arabic professor Margaret Nydell said.
According to a May 28 report in The Washington Post, a lack of Arabic-language experts in U.S. intelligence agencies has left major intelligence documents untranslated, revealing an urgent need for Arabic linguists.
Since Arabic-language skills are in such high demand – with job openings in both government and the private sector – most students are studying Arabic for “career reasons,” Nydell said.
Michael Callen (SFS ’05) said he is taking first-year Arabic because he hopes to work in developmental economics in North Africa, where Arabic is widely spoken. Through learning the language, Callen said he hopes to expand his knowledge of the iddle East in general.
“It is a region of the world where I have a limited understanding, and hopefully learning the language will give me more access to it,” he said.
The university is also offering courses to satisfy students’ intellectual curiosity about politics, religion and economics in the Middle East.
Center for Contemporary Arab Studies professor Michael Hudson and assistant professor Samer Shehata are teaching “The U.S., ideast and the War on Terrorism,” a class that was first offered last spring. The class attracts students who find media coverage of the Middle East “woefully incomplete” and “want to go behind the headlines,” Shehata said.
People at the university level are more likely than the general public to question what the media present as fact, Shehata said. He said that since Sept. 11 there has been a lot of misinformation on Islam and the Middle East, evident just by the questions reporters were asking, Shehata said.
“They would ask me what page in the Koran advocates suicide bombing!” he said, exasperated.
“There is considerable interest on the part of students . in taking a more academic approach to the issues . and [gaining] a broad overview of the modern development, history, society and economy of the Middle East,” Hudson agreed.
Sitting in his office in CCAS, which boasts an authentic Middle Eastern brass coffee table placed over a colorful embroidered rug, Hudson said he expects his class to go beyond addressing obvious questions such as “Why is there so much hostility in the region?” He plans to explore the relationship between terrorism and U.S. involvement in conflicts in the Middle East.
A desire for a deeper understanding of Islam is what encouraged ary Beth Sullivan (COL ’05) to register for “Islamic Religious Thought and Practice.”
While she took a world religions class that briefly discussed Islam as a senior in high school, Sullivan said the class did not delve very deeply into the region. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Sullivan’s interest in Islam increased. “Sept. 11 drew attention to the fact that Islam is such a large part of the world,” Sullivan said.
Sylvain Mansier (MSB ’05) decided to take “Islamic Religious Thought and Practice” as his theology requirement to gain a “basic understanding of the faith.” Mansier said he was especially interested in learning about Islam since the perpetrators of the attacks seemed to have had religious motivations. “I thought it was appropriate to learn about the background of these people, from the Middle East to Afghanistan,” Mansier said. He hopes the course will give him a “better vantage point to view and analyze what Islam is all about.”
Interest in Middle East studies, Islam and Arabic has also increased among graduate students, Liz Keperferle, academic program coordinator at CCAS, said.
According to Keperferle, the number of applicants to CCAS’s graduate program has doubled since Sept. 11, and she expects the numbers will be even higher in the coming year. Keperferle said this is good news for the university, since a bigger pool makes the process more competitive.
“Sabah Al-Khayr! Good morning,” Zabarah greets the 13 students who made it to class late Wednesday morning. “How was the homework?”
“It was difficult,” a student replies in Spanish.
“Wrong language!” she replies, laughing.
As Zabarah dictates vocabulary words, a few distracted students look out a White Gravenor window and strain to hear the music being played at a memorial for the victims of Sept. 11.
