For the past 25 years, the William & Mary Middle Eastern Music Ensemble has been introducing students to the Arab world and Middle East, and their Diasporas though music. As a forum for exploring the varied histories, repertoires, performers, composers, contexts and audiences for this music, students learn through experience as they tenuously tap out and then fully embrace rhythms, melodies, musical forms, song lyrics, and the terminology of musical discourse. The ensemble routinely works with guest artist/scholars who bring their languages, musical repertoires, and cultural demeanors into our mix, requiring the group to collaborate in new ways toward the common goal of transmission through rehearsal and then performance. While the ensemble has performed repertoire in Farsi, Greek, Ladino, and Turkish, the lingua franca of the group is Arabic. By literally putting Arabic into their bodies and intentionally performing song lyrics, ensemble participants are invited into the cultures and biographies of songs, artists, and communities. They then share this knowledge, however kinesthetic, visceral, and emotional it is, with audiences -- from their peers and professors, to communities of heritage, who attend our concerts (and often sing along!). The effect of learning Arabic through “techniques of the body” (Mauss) can have profound impact, as is demonstrated by the millions of non-Arabic speakers who study the Qur’an worldwide. In addition to expanding their worlds, the embodiment of Arabic, however rudimentary can lead to serious language study, to travel and work abroad, to new relationships (including love and marriage), to enlightening political reorientation, to empowering insights on family heritage, to creative endeavors, and even to moments of tarab-enhanced spirituality. This paper investigates the aesthetics of language performance through the rehearsal of music and draws on a quarter century of teaching and learning in the context of a university-based ensemble. The presentation also incorporates lessons from more than two decades of ethnographic research and musical performance in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim majority country in the world, and one where the experience of Arabic through speech, recitation, song, and music is key not only to religious ritual and education but to civic and social life as well.