Arabic Language Study

I am thankful for the Abbasi program’s support of my language development through a summer travel grant. This support helped me to further develop my Arabic language fluency and to also conduct interviews with Muslim youth on a number of politically salient topics.

I traveled to Amman, Jordan between the dates of June 14th and August 24th in order to develop the Arabic language skills that I will need to conduct research on political violence in the Middle East. I was enrolled in classes at the Qasid Center in Amman, which is a private language institute that I had previously attended on another grant five years ago. I attended classes five days a week for four hours a day, with approximately three or four additional hours of homework in reading, writing, and listening every day. Class centered on verbal communication between students and was conducted entirely in Arabic. Six of the students in the class where Turkish, and three, including myself, were American. We read a number of short stories and novels, and this practice greatly enhanced my reading speed and comprehension. I feel much more confident in my ability to conduct interviews in Arabic and to read through large amounts of primary source material after my immersive summer.

I also had the opportunity to speak with young Muslims from a number of different countries about a range of social and political issues. I spoke to several young Iraqis who held a lot of sympathy for the Saddam regime when there was greater safety and stability in the country, and better economic opportunities. They showed me several videos comparing the training of the Iraqi army under Saddam and the current army, which showed vast differences in their level of professionalism. These insights show how quickly opinions about previous regimes change, and the tradeoff that many are willing to make between political freedom and security. I also had the chance to hear my Turkish classmates’ opinions about the attempted coup over the summer. They were strong supporters of Erdogan and believed that the United States played a role in instigating the coup and in protecting Gulan. While not a representative sample of Turks as a whole, my classmates demonstrated that this skepticism of American foreign policy is widely held in at least some circles of Turkish society.