Yes, Laura Loomer, Americans Should be Learning Arabic

After the Blue Tsunami, a MAGA influencer weighed in,

While the suggestion was not made in the right spirit, actually for Americans to learn Arabic is a good idea. Learning languages in general is good for you.

If Trump and his cabinet had known Arabic they might not have stumbled so badly in their Middle East policy, since they might have had some vague idea of what they were talking about. For instance, I know Arabic, and am known in policy circles as having generally gotten the Middle East right.

The British Academy writes, “It has been shown that people who speak other languages often exhibit more empathy and a global mindset.”

Gee, maybe if more US politicians knew languages, they might, like, object to actions like Israeli genocide in Gaza because they could imagine Palestinians as people. Being able to talk to people in their own language humanizes them. As for a global mindset, it is important in a leader. If you assume that everyplace is like the place you live, you will make mistakes. Iran isn’t like Queens, New York, for instance.

Only one sitting senator knows Arabic (and Swahili!), Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. She is about to be joined by Abdul El-Sayed. Michigan will be providing both Arabophone senators! One is Jewish and the other is a Muslim. By the way, the number of Jewish American Arabists is legion. S. D. Goitein, Franz Rosenthal, Mark R. Cohen and a host of other scholars have been essential to the academic understanding of Arabic and the Middle East.

Knowing Arabic opens you to a world of great literature, from the Thousand and One Nights to the prose poems of Kahlil Gibran to the novels of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and International Booker Prize winner Jokha Alharthi (a woman, like Scheherazade).

Moreover, there is already a good deal of Arabic in English, so learning the former will make you a better English-speaker, and surely that is the goal of everyone who wants to make America great again.

For instance, our lives are now being run by algorithms. These are steps you take to solve an equation, methodically and in order. As the “al” at the beginning indicates, this is an Arabic word.

It is named for Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His name is from a place in what is now Iran, but he lived in Baghdad and worked for the philosophical House of Wisdom in Baghdad of the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun, the son of Harun al-Rashid, whom many readers know from the Arabian Nights. It is named for him because he wrote a famed treatise on the subject, drawing on Babylonian, Sanskrit and other mathematicians, which was translated into Latin in the medieval period.

Algorithms are essential to Large Language Models or “artificial intelligence.” No al-Khwarizmi, no AI, or as the lexicographer-in-chief calls it, “super intelligence.” (He isn’t and it isn’t).

Al-Khwarizmi also wrote a book on algebra, and so named that discipline in English, too.