The process of teaching Arabic music and music theory to non-Arabophone audiences involves two separate and interrelated problems: translation of the language of Arabic theory to render it legible to students, and development of the aural skills to apply musical abstraction to sonic practice. Of these, musicians and teachers invariable acknowledge the second as the more difficult task. Despite ongoing progress in the translation of the over 11-hundred years of musical theorizing available in the Arabic language, the aural/oral nature of the tradition makes the direct connection of theoretical concepts to sound difficult, especially in the initial stages for non-native musicians. Moreover, the English translation of theoretical language absent direct sonic referent has the potential to create false precision, as the mathematical clarity of intervallic and maqam-degree concepts give the illusion of isomorphism with English lexical equivalents. More plainly, the note C is not rāst, and rāst is not a C; even if he occasionally said “Do”, ʿAbdel Wahab’s “Do” was not Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Do.” This paper describes an attempt to circumvent the problem of musico-linguistic incommensurability in Ali Kisserwan’s recent work Liqa ͑ al-Harimayn - Alḥān Moḥamad ʿabd al-Wahāb li-Umm Kulthum (Meeting of the Great Pyramids - The Compositions of Mohammad ʿAbdel Wahab for Umm Kulthum) translated by [this author] and Lama Zein. The availability of this corpus of 10 “long songs” (~400 pages or six hours of transcribed music) from the heart of the Golden Age tradition, and Kisserwan’s accompanying analyses, make it much easier for Anglophone students to link Arabic music-theoretical concepts directly to sound. After detailing the choices and compromises involved in our “English” version of Kisserwan’s analyses, I argue for a musicological and pedagogical practice of minimal or even non-translation, bypassing English to link Arabic theoretical language directly to that musical corpus. To conclude, I posit the (Arabic) theoretical language of Arabic maqām not simply as an addendum to the Western music theory curriculum, but as a solution to some of the other longstanding problems of that curriculum: specifically an underdeveloped English vocabulary for the practice and analysis of linear motion and improvisation.