Thesun 2009-04-09 Page15 A Morons Travails With Languages

theSun

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| THURSDAY APRIL 9 2009

INTERVIEWS VIEWS

youngish black dude who spoke a little English was a supermarket assistant. I was so relieved when he said – yes monsieur, can I help you? Yes, I was a moron supermarket. Not a for almost three huge supermarket but months. Desperately enough to intimidate trying to skin off my me because I had no moronic existence, I Rais Whine clue what was on the hung out all the time shelf. I could not read by Hishamuddin Rais in a café listening to a word of French. I the sound of the new had no idea what the word for salt language, like I did when I was in was in French. A flashback – how I the special Malay class with one wished I was back in my local kedai difference – this time I was all kampung where the loose salt was alone. stored in a gunny sack. I could see Later in the year, I entered the and even taste it. language laboratory of my new Like Sherlock Holmes minus university where I saw a huge sign my magnifying glass I went from on the wall above the entrance shelf to shelf trying to find a packet door: Learning another language is of salt. Impossible – none of the entering into another world. What writing made any sense. Panic a profound statement. welled up. I would not be able Suddenly I felt I was no longer to seek aid from anyone in the a moron but a bloke entering a supermarket. How could I explain new world of wine, cheese, pretty to the Walloons when the English women and with the ability to had been their enemy since they differentiate a French rubber from lost the Battle of Waterloo. This was a tapper. my rubber tree experience. Yet, until today, I’m still unable While I was in a state of panic to dissect as to why Jack and Jill and despair, someone was observ- fetch that pail of water from a well ing me from a distance as I was on top of a hill. Maybe it was just bending down reading one box to silly Englishness and has nothing another from shelf to shelf. This to do with Descartes.

A moron’s travails with languages AT THIRTY I became a full-blown moron. It was history that turned me into a moron. I was forced to be a political refugee in Belgium. Guess what? I didn’t know where Belgium was and had no clue about my adopted country – zut! Suddenly, I found myself thrown into deep winter and unable to communicate with anybody. I felt like a total idiot. Then, I recalled a similar experience when I was nine years old – darjah empat – I had joined the special Malay class. This was a schooling system where selected pupils from sekolah umum could be transferred to a government English school. As a village boy I had an inferiority complex not being able to communicate with the other pupils who had entered the English medium school in standard one. They were four years ahead in the English medium. My only consolation – my classmates were all from the same boat – 23 of us. We kept on communicating in Bahasa Melayu to the

displeasure of Mr Manjeet Singh our class teacher who taught us English. For the first year we were parroting Mr Manjeet: this is a man and this is a pen – a man and a pen. There was no geography, history or anything else but – this is a man and this is a pen. When sound and image sync into word, theoretically it stays forever in our mind. Only then did we move on to our next lesson – parroting rhyme and verses (sic) not even poems. It was here I met Jack and Jill who went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. I was amazed how these Mat Salleh kids had their wells on top of a hill unlike my perigi on lower ground. Well, why bother at that fragile age – we were not debating logic or philosophy we were just aping the sound of words from our teacher. I remember in one lesson we were supposed to introduce ourselves in English – about our village and our family. The majority of us came from the kampung – sons and daughters of lower ranking

civil servants, rice farmers and rubber tappers – basically orang kampung. A boy in front of me stood up and said, “My father is a rubber tree.” I could hear some giggling in the classroom. Mr Manjeet a brilliant pedagogue was unaffected by that sentence. He politely corrected the boy and introduced the word “tap” and “tapper” to us. I had the same “rubber tree experience” on my first month in Belgium. I rented an attic room above a gardening shop in a bourgeois Catholic Belgian town next to my future university. On the first evening while trying to cook a hot meal I ran out of matches. The supermarket was closed so I went to a café and used sign language to get a box of matches with several francs in my hand. The café owner understood what I wanted and gave me a box without taking a single franc. All I could say was merci beaucoup. The worst was yet to come. Three days later I ran out of salt. I immediately went to the local

I entered the language laboratory of my new university where I saw a huge sign on the wall above the entrance: Learning another language is entering into another world. What a profound statement. Suddenly I felt I was no longer a moron.

Can Obama turn rhetoric into reality of peace? EPAPIX

comment by Patrick Cockburn THE START of the Iraq war in 2003 marked a crucial break between the US and almost all the states of the region. “None of Iraq’s neighbours were pleased by the American occupation of Iraq,” says the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari. Long-term US allies like Turkey astonished the White House by refusing to allow US troops to use its territory to invade Iraq. Barack Obama, who made his first official visit to the country this week, is now trying to disengage from Iraq without appearing to scuttle or leave anarchy behind. He is trying to win back old allies, and, as he made clear in a speech in Ankara, to end the confrontation between the US and Islam which was president Bush’s legacy. It is not easy for Obama to reverse the tide of anti-Americanism or bring to an end the wars which Bush began. For all the Iraqi government’s claim that life is returning to normal in Baghdad the last few days have seen a crescendo of violence. The day before the US president arrived, six bombs exploded in different parts of Baghdad, killing 37 people. And as much as Obama would like to treat the Iraq war as ancient history, the US is still struggling to extricate itself. The very fact that the president had to arrive in Iraq by surprise shows that the conflict is refusing to go away. The Iraqi prime minister and president remain holed up in the Green Zone most of the time. The American president could not fly into the Green Zone by helicopter because of bad weather but the airport road is still unsafe and Baghdad remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The Iraqi political landscape too was permanently altered by the US invasion and it will be difficult to create a stable Iraqi state which does not depend on the US. Opinion polls in Iraq show that most Iraqis believe that it is the US and not their own government which is in control of their country. One change which is to Obama’s advantage is that the American media has largely stopped report-

ing the conflict because they no longer have the money to do so and a majority of Americans think the war was won. But the danger for the president is that if there is a fresh explosion in Iraq, he may be blamed for throwing away a victory that was won by his predecessor. The rhetoric with which the US conducts its diplomacy is easier to change than facts on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament in Ankara was a carefully judged bid to reassure the Muslim world that the US is not at war with Islam. Everything he said was in sharp contrast to George Bush’s bellicose threats post 9/11 about launching a “crusade” and to the rhetoric of neo-conservatives attacking “Islamo-fascism” or claiming that there was a “clash of civilisations”. The leaders of states with Muslim majorities appreciate the different tone of US pronouncements, but privately wonder how far Obama will be able to introduce real change. Turkish students at a meeting with Obama in Istanbul yesterday voiced scepticism that American actions in future would be much different from what they were under Bush. Reasonably enough, Obama replied that he should be given time and “moving the ship of state is a slow process”. But he also cited the US withdrawal from Iraq as a sign that he would match actions to words. Istanbul, on the boundaries of Europe and Asia, is a good place for the US leader to declare a more conciliatory attitude towards Islam. The city is filled with grandiose monuments to Christianity and Islam, though religious tolerance was more in evidence under the Ottoman empire than since the foundation of the modern Turkish state in 1923. Obama paid visits to the great Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia and was shown the splendours of the Blue Mosque by turbaned clerics. But the female students wearing short skirts and without headscarves asking Obama questions in fluent English on Monday give a misleading impression of the balance between the secular and the

religious in modern-day Turkey. The reality is that secularism is dying in Turkey’s rural hinterland and is on the retreat even in Istanbul itself. Butchers selling pork are few compared to 20 years ago. Obtaining alcohol is quietly being made more difficult, except for foreign tourists, by high taxes on wine and expensive liquor licences for restaurants. The old middle class may be resolute in their defence of the secular state. But the so-called “Anatolian Tigers”, the new companies which have led Turkey’s spectacular economic growth, are generally owned and run by more conservative families where the women wear the veil. “Socially Turkey is becoming far more Islamic,” said one expert on Turkey, “although the ruling Justice and Development Party is moving cautiously.” Obama’s effort to make a U-turn in American policy towards the Islamic world will ultimately depend on how far he changes US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians,

Respectful ... Obama and Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan (right) touring the Blue Mosque in Istanbul on Tuesday.

The leaders of states with Muslim majorities appreciate the different tone of US pronouncements, but privately wonder how far Obama will be able to introduce real change.

the occupation of Iraq, the confrontation with Iran and Syria and the war in Afghanistan. The Iranians, for instance, note that despite Obama’s friendlier approach to them the US official in Washington in charge of implementing sanctions against them is a hold-over from the Bush administration. The American confrontation with Islam post 9/11 always had more to do with opposition to foreign intervention and occupation than it did with cultural differences; the most ideologically religious Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia supported the US and it is doubtful how far Al Qaeda fighters were motivated primarily by religious fanaticism. The chief US interrogator in Iraq, Major Mathew Alexander, who is credited with finding out the location of the Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says that during 1,300 interrogations he supervised, he came across only one true ideologue. He is quoted as saying that “I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the No 1 reason they had decided to pick up arms and join Al Qaeda was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorised torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay.” This diagnosis by Alexander is confirmed by the history of Islamic fundamentalism across the Muslim world over the past 30 years. It was the success of the Iranian revolution against the Shah in 1978/79 which began an era when political Islam was seen as a threat by the West, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s appeal to Iranians always had a strong strain of nationalism and his exiling by the Shah in 1964 was because of his vocal opposition to extra-territorial rights for US military personnel in Iran. The success of political Islam over secular nationalism in the Arab world has largely been because of the former’s ability to resist the enemies of the community or the state. In Egypt the nationalism of Nasser was discredited by the humiliating defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. In Iraq, for all his military bravado, Saddam Hussein was a notably disastrous military leader. All the military regimes espousing

nationalism and secularism in the Arab world began or ended up turning into corrupt and brutal autocracies. In contrast, political Islam has been able to go some way towards delivering its promises of defending the community. In Lebanon, Hizbollah fighters were able to successfully harass Israeli forces in the 1990s where Yasser Arafat’s commanders had abandoned their men and fled. In Gaza this year, Hamas was able to portray themselves as the one Palestinian movement committed to resisting Israel. In Iraq, Al Qaeda got nowhere until it could present itself as the opposition to the US occupation and as an ally, though a supremely bigoted and murderous one, of Iraqi nationalism. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has the advantage of fighting against foreign occupation. Secularism in the Arab world and in Afghanistan, on the other hand, has the problem that it is seen as being at the service of foreign intervention. It is why secularism and nationalism is ultimately stronger in Turkey than it is in almost all other Islamic countries. Kemal Ataturk and the Turkish nationalists successfully defended the Turkish heartlands from foreign attack between 1915 and 1922. This gave secularism and nationalism a credibility and a popularity in Turkey which they never had in Iraq, Egypt or Syria. Obama’s aim of ending the confrontation between the US and the Muslim world is both easier and more difficult than it looks. It is easier because the confrontation is not primarily over religion or clashing cultures. But the confrontation is over real issues such as the fate of the Palestinians, the future of Iraq and the control of Afghanistan. And even if Obama wanted to change the US political relationship with Israel, it is not clear that he has any more political strength at home than George Bush had to do so. If these concrete issues are not resolved then America’s confrontation with the Muslim world may remain as confrontational and difficult as it was under Bush. – The Independent