Salam/Pax survived

Salam/Pax, the cosmos’s most famous Iraqi blogger, survived the Karbala bombing, and also has written beautifully (though oh too briefly) about the whole experience of having been there for Ashoura.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Riverbend wrote a lovely and to me very heartening short post about the after-effects of the Ashoura bombings…
I meant to get the ref to her post up here earlier. Sorry about that. I seem to recall that both she and Salam have written in the past that they have “mixed”, Sunni-Shiite heritages. Maybe I’m wrong about her.
What burns me up is that in the midst of all that emotional period– Ashoura, the bombings, their aftermath, Sunnis and Shi-ites trying to figure out how to get back together again, etc– Paul Bremer was out there pursuing his inherently divisive agenda of trying to get everyone to sign off on his pointless little interim constitution.
Has he no cultural or emotional sensitivity? (Silly question.)

8 thoughts on “Salam/Pax survived”

  1. Helena,
    Yes, River’s background is mixed, as is that of many Iraqis, particularly in urban families. Sunnis Shi’as, Kurds and occasionally Turkomen have always intermarried. Marriages between Christians and Muslims DO happen, but not very often.
    As for that ass Bremer – just don’t get me started. He has admitted that before taking up his post as ruler of Iraq, he didn’t even bother to read the literature on the country which was produced and provided to him by his employers in Washington. Can you imagine that? He couldn’t even be bothered to learn the bare minimum about the country he was going to rule! He recently admitted that, despite the daily Arabic lessons he has been receiving since becoming ruler of Iraq, he just can’t seem to learn the language – it’s just too, too difficult for him. Of course, given that he is hermetically sealed from any real contact with any real Iraqis, I guess it doesn’t matter.
    I admit to feeling some grim satisfaction over seeing that this self-proclaimed “terrorism expert” (kind of smacks of opportunism, doesn’t it?) is supposedly now swimming in a sea filled with terrorists – at least alleged ones – and yet he hasn’t got a clue who they are, where they’re coming from, or what to do about them.
    PS If Bremer has been getting his Arabic lessons from one of the Occupation Authority (aka CPA) Arabic “experts” it’s no wonder he hasn’t learned a thing. I recently took a look at a few things on the Arabic section of their website, and almost died laughing. The average Iraqi third grader could do better than that! The level of Arabic is astonishingly poor, and there are some truly priceless gaffes on there too.
    Well, I am rambling a bit, but this also reminds me of something I saw last summer from the always brilliant, articulate and insightful Ricardo Sanchez. He said the reason the occupying forces were not publishing lists of Iraqi detainees, as required under international law, was that they had “spelling issues” with the names. I almost fell off my chair laughing! Aside from the obvious idiocy of using that excuse in a country filled with a highly literate population of native Arabic speakers, Arabic is one of the easiest and most straightforward languages in the world to spell. A below average American student with a couple of months of Arabic instruction could manage it – unless his name was Paul Bremer, of course.

  2. Hmmm…. While I have to say that the U.S. does seem to have a bizarre cookie-cutter image of how to introduce “democracy” into any arbitrary foreign country, I also have to say that Arabic is not a particularly easy language to learn for English speakers. Professor Wheeler Thackston, from Harvard, who has published texts on the Arabic language, and is famous for being a brilliant linguist (he speaks 20 languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Uzbec, Syriac, etc.), once said to an introductory Persian class he was teaching that learning Arabic would “take twelve years of your life.”
    Whatever Bremer’s faults, whatever level of arrogance he may be bringing to his task in Iraq,and whatever political issues there are with his presence to begin with, I can’t fault him for not spending the 3 – 4 hours a day it would take to get to a solid, elementary level of Arabic in the months that he’s been there.

  3. Vivion, hi!
    I’m not saying that Paul/Jerry Bremer, parachuted into Baghdad last summer at a moment’s notice after the “Garner plan” feel flat, should have had his nose in an Arabic-language primer since then… I do think, though, that if he has any hope of being effective he would make sure to have on his staff people well versed in all the linguistic and cultural context of trying to administer a place like Iraq… People who could tell him that trying to foist a (for him) significant political document onto the country during Ashoura might be akin to trying to do the same thing during Christmas in a devoutly Cathloic country.
    Actually, I don’t agree with Wheeler Thackston. I studied fus-ha with the Jesuits in Beirut till my money ran out (okay, till after my money ran out). After less than six months I got hired by Reuters as an Arabic-English translator… Okay, they were desperate… Okay, my great, native-Arabic-speaking colleagues there totally helped me out, supported me in every way, and enabled me to keep the job. (Including making their Arabic handwriting even a little bit legible to me till I got the hang of reading the scrawled version.)
    When I went to Najaf and Karbala a few years later, wrapped in an abaya, everyone there thought from my voice I was a visiting Lebanese Shi-ite, which was cool.
    Too bad all those synapses have become a bit rusty in the years since then, eh?

  4. Vivion,
    How long learning Arabic takes depends on a number of things, including your aptitude, how much time you put in, what level of expertise you want to achieve, and – this is a big one – whether you are learning written Arabic (fus7a) or spoken (3amiya). Spoken Arabic is far simpler to learn, although Americans do find some of the consonants challenging to pronounce. Even if they never learn to pronounce those particular sounds, though, most people will understand them. Most Arabs are simply blown away when an American makes an effort to speak Arabic and will fall all over themselves to be helpful.
    I have been helping my 70-something friend to learn fus7a. She attends one class a week and I meet with her for a couple of hours each week to go over the lessons. She is still very much in the beginning stages, the classes are held intermitently, and she doesn’t study every day, but she is making obvious progress. She understands very well what she hears, and she can give simple replies that make sense. She needs lots of work on her reading fluency, but I have developed a way of working on that that seems to be working pretty well.
    If Bremer is taking one lesson a week learning spoken Iraqi Arabic, AND if he were making an effort to use the language at least a little bit, he should be able by now to communicate very nicely, at least in the day to day stuff.
    Frankly, based on his obvious lack of interest in and awareness of the real concerns of real Iraqis, I’m not sure why he even bothers with the lessons.

  5. Oops – I just spotted a mistake I meant. From what I have been told, Bremer is talking one lesson a day, not one lesson a week.
    As I pointed out above, the level of Arabic proficiency at the Occupation Authority is extremely poor. At times you wonder whether you are reading a translation done by one of those free translation sites on the internet. So, one has to wonder just who Bremer is taking his instruction from.

  6. Helena – actually, I was responding to Shirin’s first post.
    Shirin — well, of course everyone has a different level of aptitude with languages. And my guess is that Professor Thackston doesn’t think that you have *learned* a language until you have completely mastered it. And — the underlying point remains that the US has decided to run a country without putting a high priority on knowing anything about it (unlike the Brits, who at least decided that their empire builders had to know the local languages).
    So, ok, I agree with everyone — but as someone taking Persian who gets brief glimpses into Arabic in the process, it certainly seems scary!! Glad to hear, tho, that it’s not impossible….

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