EXPOSING ARABS TO IDEALS OF AMERICA A WORTHY GOAL

Saturday, March 13, 2004

The development of civil society in Iraq is hindered by the fact that few Iraqis have any experience of life except under an astonishingly brutal dictatorship. What's perhaps worse is that they have little knowledge about how other countries have created and sustained a civil society.

Juan R.I. Cole wants to do something about the second problem.

Cole is a professor of history at Michigan, a specialist in the history of the modern Middle East and South Asia, and editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. His idea: The "Americana in Arabic" Translation Program.

His goal is to locate and fund qualified Arab translators, to arrange for the printing and distribution of inexpensive editions of books "by great Americans and about America" in Arabic (see www.juancole.com/trans.htm).

He plans to start with selections from the writings of Thomas Jefferson, which is an excellent choice, and continue with other Founding Fathers, as well as more recent figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Susan B. Anthony. Also desirable, he says, would be books about, for example, "the history of the American Jewish community and other important minority groups about which most Arabs know nothing." Scholarship about the Middle East that would be of interest to the Arab world, Cole notes, is rarely translated and not widely distributed.

Cole is working to establish the Global Americana Institute as a nonprofit, nonpartisan entity to carry on the work, and I wish him well.

It's interesting, however, that this may well be the only thing Cole and I would agree on. Judging from the rants he posts on his main Web log, it appears he belongs to one of those hermetically sealed academic circles in which everybody holds essentially the same views, which they perceive as so self-evidently correct that anyone who disagrees with them must be lying or worse.

In a post Thursday, for instance (which, by referring to "Bushies" in the first sentence, signals to discerning leftist readers that he is truly one of them and turns everybody else off), he demands to know why Douglas Feith, whom Cole calls Undersecretary of Defense for Planning (actually, it's "for Policy"), hasn't been impeached. "Feith's Office of Special Plans, a Neocon Pentagon operation linked to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's similar rogue office, briefed high White House officials without the presence or knowledge of George Tenet" on reports from the Iraqi National Congress, he says.

And Ahmad Chalabi's nephew "works for the same Israel-based law firm as Doug Feith (when Doug is not in office) and has set up a Baghdad branch of it."

All of which, supposing it's even true, is supposed to prove what?

Actually I believe there is no established procedure for impeaching undersecretaries, but never mind. Cole wants to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney as well. "Either they lied or they were so gullible that neither should still be in office," Cole wrote.

I tell you, it's a fever swamp over there on the hard left.

Anyway, returning to the serious question of what is published in Arabic, the dearth of material on American history and politics is unfortunately common in other areas as well. In a recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporter Daniel del Castillo documented the unhappy state of scientific education and research across most of the Arab world.

He cites a 2003 United Nations report that said "no more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium, equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year," and that 16,000 industrial patents were granted in South Korea from 1980 to 2000, compared with 370 in Arab countries during the same period.

There is virtually no money for research, and few opportunities for careers in science, so few students earn scientific degrees and when they do they are likely to leave for another country where their prospects are better. If they've been taught in Arabic, moreover, the transition may be difficult, because the scientific literature is mostly in English and it is so vast that most of it will never be translated.

One researcher, originally from Syria, earned his doctorate in France and now works in the United States. He told del Castillo, "It was a nightmare for two years learning a new vocabulary in French and then in English." And he was so far behind in his studies he had to do a year of remedial work before he could start graduate school. "There were technologies in my field that I had never heard of."

Can such enormous gaps be bridged, or even narrowed? I don't know, but spreading lots of good books around is a fine start. When I came home from Shanghai in 1988, I left with my students my copies of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I hope they are still being read.