Ext 5050/43 ‘Formation of an Arab Centre in the Middle East for providing selected British officers with knowledge of Arabic, Arab countries and Middle East problems’ [‎56r] (111/190)

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7. It is pertinent to ask whether this task of making
modern Arab life linguistically accessible to an English
man can be achieved or even approached within a year # It is
ture that the Orientalist in England spends a far longer
time before he considers himself to have achieved mastery.
But the factors making for this protracted delay disappear
when the scene is shifted from an English to an Arabic
background and when the object of study is a set of modern
living situations and not an obscure, unfamiliar mediaeval
scene. What an Orientalist calls the difficulty of learning
Arabic is only partially a matter of language. It is
princi^/«Lly the difficulty of understanding a set of ideas
and expressions far removed in time, space and mental
horizon from any sefc of ideas with which he is already
familiar. But to learn modern Arabic in an Arabic speaking
country abolishes that remoteness. An Englishman who has
learnt the structure and basic vocabulary of Arabic still
requires years of training before he gets an insight into
a line of Mutanabbi or a paragraph of Ghazali. He needs
little except daily alertness to understand A1 Ahram, an
official speech or broadcast, for these express aspects
of life which are congenial to a modern mind and which lie
within his daily observation.
Onee the structure of the language has been carefully
explained a year’s reading on the modern current themes
with which a British representative would have to deal,
can produce a satisfactory resu3it.
The lectures syllabus no less than the modern
language depends on a Middle Eastern environment. A small
proportion of them chiefly history and Muslim theory, could
conceivably be given with equal authority ^way from the
Middle East. But these subjects are only Included at all
for the light they throw on modern situations and movements,
and these are to be described by men in close and actual
contact with the aspects of modern life with which the
Centre is concerned. The authority derived from actual
or very recent experience can only be claimed by lecturers
who come to the sutdents in the very midst of the problems
about which they are to speak. Thus the affairs of each
country will be described by men actually responsible for
their administration or for the representation of their
country's interest in them.