I was cleaning up my office this morning when I came across my Hans-Wehr Arabic-English dictionary. This beaten-up, well-thumbed volume traveled with me throughout my military career; it’s become a keepsake. It even still has the words “STOLEN FROM PFC OSBORNE” in faded black magic marker on the page ends, a vestige of my days in the Defense Language Institute’s Basic Arabic Course, where books left unattended could easily grow legs and disappear.
Among the first words we learned in that 63-week, 8 hour-a-day immersion was madrassa. You’ll recall the way Faux Noise seized on that word last January:
Madrassa is a “verbal noun” born of this root, and it means, quite simply, “school.” When Arabs look at a picture like this:
It is only in the west, and only in recent years, that this word has taken on a scary meaning.
Indonesia is not an Arabic-speaking country. Nevertheless, the spread of Islam also meant the spread of Arabic, expecially as it was the language of the Qur’an. Given the spread and impact of Latin via Catholicism, it’s perfectly understandable how the Indonesian word for school would become madrassa.
It was during the 1990s, when the Taliban rose up in Afghanistan, that the word gained a new meaning. Taliban, meaning “students,” was a direct reference to the way Salafists recruited orphaned boys into their movement by opening religious indoctrination camps and calling them “schools” — madrassas.
It is a terrible crime to twist a word in such Orwellian ways. It is also terribly ironic to see the word thrown as political mudball by ignorant clods. Yet that is precisely what conservatives do deliberately every day: look what they have done to the word “liberal,” for instance.
Indeed — speaking of Orwell — the destruction of words and their meanings is a hallmark of regressive, totalitarian regimes, which is why it is so vital that words get rehabilitated whenever possible.
I’m just sorry this one had to wait until I found my dictionary.
