In the 19th century, American protestant missionaries working in the Ottoman Empire established the oldest lasting institutional connections between the US and the Islamic world. The missionaries’ religious, racial and civilizational arrogance foreshadowed and prefigured later American traditions of Orientalism and exceptionalism. The schools and universities they founded facilitated later paternalistic and imperial American projects in the region. They presented themselves as the human family’s oldest and wisest siblings, setting out to enlighten their benighted brethren overseas. The mission’s most important polemicist, Henry Harris Jessup, wrote that ““Intellectually, the land was in utter stagnation… it was in general true that there were in the land neither books, readers, nor schools, as such… The Oriental mind seemed asleep.” He and his colleagues, he implied, would awaken it. However, the missionaries spent a great deal of time learning at the feet of those who they claimed to be irreparably ignorant. This paper explores how these American missionaries learned to speak Arabic, and how the process of learning changed them. The work of crossing this language barrier was longer and more arduous than their sea voyages, and it forced them into close relationships with native speakers whose goals and beliefs sharply differed from their own. Spending hours each day drilling under the tutelage and discipline of cash-strapped Muslim scholars and former feudal administrators, and further honing their skills by reading classical poetry, histories, and treatises on rhetoric, they adopted a local set of hegemonic ideas about how Arabic should be read and written that valorized the classical language of the Qur'an, a tongue as different from 19th century Syria's spoken vernacular as Latin is from Italian, and as closely tied to Sunni Islam as Latin was to Roman Catholicism. This learning led them into paradox. They created a “vernacular” Bible in a classical, ecclesiastical language that most ordinary Syrians couldn’t understand, and fostered a system of purportedly transformative common schools with curricula little different from the Ottoman Empire’s traditional Islamic maktabs. The story of American missionaries’ language-learning shows us how the first Americans working in the Middle East found themselves remade by the society they wanted to remake, and raises questions about how language-learning practices shape present-day scholars of the Middle East.

This paper argues that the first generation of Arabic-language newspapers, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, were focused on providing their readers with a perspective that was equally local and equally global from its inception; the local could mean imperial, urban, or provincial and in contrast, the global extended far beyond the local, spanning Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. This first generation is best represented by three papers in particular: Hadiqat al-Akhbar (Beirut), al-Jawaib (Istanbul), and Al-Ra’id al-Tunisi (Tunis). This paper will begin by looking at questions of form or how content was framed within these early newspapers themselves: newspapers organized material in a way that emphasized the dual importance of the local and the global. The paper will then focus on the issue of power, which when framed through this local-global perspective, reveals a nuanced understanding of shifts in power dynamics in the colonial age. Next, the theme of utility will be examined. Most newspapers emphasized repeatedly in a multitude of ways that their purpose was to provide information that was useful for the general public in the service of the nation. This ties back into the idea of the local: the nation was ultimately not a reference to the nation state but rather how newspapers saw their own locales. In addition, this paper makes two implicit arguments. The first is that the history of the Arabic-language press should eschew the traditional focus on Egypt (and specifically Cairo) and should look elsewhere, both regionally and globally; the first Arabic newspapers came from Beirut, Tunis, and Istanbul, setting the standard for an industry that would span five continents. The second is that an intellectual history of the Arabic press is necessary to understanding the press as a social, cultural, political, and economic institution; to that end, it uses an intellectual history methodology blending textualism, contextualism, and conceptual history in the vein of the Cambridge School and Reinhardt Koselleck.

Historians of empire have increasingly stressed the importance of hierarchical relations and institutional overlap for the survival of colonial regimes. A finely-tuned politics of knowledge underwrote many colonial administrations, and language skills were the linchpin of these systems. In this vein, my paper charts government recruitment of interpreters from across the Mediterranean basin in order to fulfill the diverse needs of the budding French colony in Algeria (1830-1848). I draw upon personnel files and archived correspondence from the French Ministries of War and Foreign Affairs and the Algerian Government General to illustrate the improbable ties that brought together philologists from the prestigious School for Oriental Languages in Paris; consular dragomans working in the Levant; retired Mamluk imperial guards from Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egypt Expedition; and illiterate tradesmen from Mediterranean port towns, forming the imperial interprétariat. The administrative politics of knowledge that I trace in mid-nineteenth-century Algeria, however, is a far cry from the “unbroken arc of knowledge and power” of Said’s Orientalism. Interpreters’ varied language skills and discomfort with certain types of translation meant that they were not interchangeable cogs within the bureaucratic machinery. Moreover, interpreters remained locked in competition, jockeying for promotions and haranguing their superiors for pay increases or relocations. The newly-constructed corps coexisted uncomfortably at best, and in open hostility at worst. Established interpreters demanded the dismissal of newcomers to the administrative order, citing their moral unfitness and lack of professional credentials, while these local subjects chided their foreign-born co-workers for their inability to grasp the Algerian dialect. I sketch out the growing pains of the Algerian colonial administration as reflected in the stilted career trajectories of some of France’s most renowned Orientalists, showing how administrative necessity opened the door of opportunity for a new cadre of functionaries——men who found official favor through their local cultural knowledge and flexible communicative practices. In doing so, I illuminate the tenuous corporatism of a transnational interprétariat upon whose cooperation the establishment of an operative colonial administration depended.

Problem: Spaced repetition as a principle for effective learning is not controversial. It has been validated in the literature through well-documented research studies for decades, yet few textbooks in any field of study have adopted this method, and perhaps even fewer instructors use it in the classroom. Chances are high many have never heard of it. Why has such a well-established method, and one so well suited to vocabulary memorization, been so ignored by educators, including Arabic language instructors? The question is especially pertinent when we consider the challenge Arabic learners face in memorizing a sufficiently large vocabulary to reach fluency in the language. Thesis: Spaced repetition software (SRS) applies the principle of spaced repetition to a computer-based flashcard program that optimizes the intervals at which students review their learning material. This paper seeks to answer why such programs, which have existed since at least 1987, are not routinely a part of foreign language courses, and it outlines a method of implementing SRS for vocabulary acquisition in college-level Arabic courses. Methods: While the validity of SRS is well documented, its practical application in the Arabic language classroom is not. I apply this proven technique to Arabic vocabulary acquisition in college-level courses and recommend a practical plan for instructors to implement it in their classrooms. I also highlight my own successes with this approach through a comparison of test and quiz results from a number of my classes both before and after implementing SRS, and an analysis of questionnaires that demonstrate students’ attitudes toward SRS. Finally, I address some of the challenges that arise with SRS, offer suggestions for boosting students’ success, and recommend techniques to motivate them. Implications: The literature, test results and students’ own experiences all point to SRS as one of the best methods for helping students acquire and retain a sufficiently large Arabic vocabulary to succeed both in their language studies, and in their lives as Arabic speakers. A surprising benefit of SRS is that as it increases vocabulary retention, it decreases time spent studying, thus freeing students to engage in applied language learning.

This paper aims at investigating the sociocultural and political significance of multilingual printing in late nineteenth-century Egypt. I specifically focus on the case of the Italian, Cairo-based newspaper Il Cosmopolita (est. 1890), a self-declared “polyglot” publication featuring Italian, French, English, Arabic, Ottoman, and Greek. By surveying the strategic uses as well as discursive championing of multilingualism in the publication overtime, I expose the newspaper’s implicit tension between the legitimizing potential associated with polyglot inclusiveness, and its inscription within a hierarchy of languages with Italian, and the interests of the Italian community in Egypt, at its top. This tension, I suggest, unfolded in three mutually reinforcing areas: language selection according to the imagined public, multilingual proficiency as a key site for personal affirmation, and polyglotism as a conduit for the safeguarding of Italian interests locally. I thus demonstrate that a notion of cosmopolitan coexistence between different linguistic communities was championed by the newspaper as a viable political project aimed at contrasting the perceived jeopardy of the Italian press in Egypt and of the country’s political ambitions, in particular vis-à-vis British colonization. In fact, Il Cosmopolita attempted to build a series of shifting and at times conflicting alliances with various local linguistic groups, in particular the British administration and the Egyptian community at large. From this perspective, language selection and foreign language proficiency ultimately emerged as uniquely productive conduits for voicing political and cultural tensions in the colonial context. As a broader historical intervention, this paper lays the basis for a systematic survey of multilingualism in colonial Egypt, and an assessment of multilingual expertise as a defining trait of the press in the country at large. Moreover, by focusing on this European, non-colonizer printing venture, I problematize a dichotomy between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized,’ to instead expose the intricate network of political and cultural aspirations and projects that intersected in the Egyptian fin de siècle.