November 14, 2007
Students of Arabic Learn at a Syrian Crossroads
By THANASSIS CAMBANIS
DAMASCUS, Syria — This sleepy capital has long been a popular destination for foreigners who want to learn Arabic. Drawn by the charmingly well-preserved old city, an easily understood Arabic dialect and dirt cheap tuition prices subsidized by the government, thousands of foreign students enroll in language institutes here every year.
Some students are not Muslim; others are devoutly so, bent on deepening their Islamic faith during a year or two in Damascus.
The two drastically different pools of students intersect at the secular Arabic Teaching Institute for Non-Arabic Speakers, tucked away on a back street behind a row of embassies in the modern Mezze quarter.
Women in full niqab covering that reveals only their eyes mingle in the hallways with European students in form-fitting T-shirts and skirts. The institute is one of a handful that can sponsor foreign students for Syrian residency, so even deeply religious students who prefer to study in a more religiously observant environment, like the renowned Abu Noor mosque’s strict conservative school, must take some of their classes at the avowedly secular institute.
In a tightly controlled society whose government strictly limits foreign visitors, language study is a notable exception, an oasis of relative openness. Officially, the government has strained relations with America, but it also has long been hostile to Islamists. The foreign student roster, however, is crammed with both.
“We are ambassadors of sorts,” said Ahmad Haji Safar, the institute’s director. “The students who come here can take back a real image of Syria, not the caricature they see in the media.”
A trim 40-year-old who wears a stylishly tailored white suit with a black shirt, Mr. Safar looks as if he would be just as comfortable at a cafe in France — where he lived for 12 years — as behind the imposing desk where he receives students with a bowl of candy.
The director has brought with him from France decidedly modern ideas about education, and he has enthusiastically signed up with the education minister’s project to overhaul and modernize higher education in Syria.
The institute’s barren classrooms overlook a paved courtyard. The most modern item in sight is the portrait in the lobby of President Bashar Assad, who took power in 2000.
Mr. Safar, however, is overseeing a renovation to take the institute into the modern age: Wi-Fi Internet across the campus, language labs with the latest computers and video-conferencing equipment and a companion package of CDs and Internet tutorials so students can continue learning Arabic after they leave.
Still, his 300 students have to contend with the Syrian state’s arcane bureaucracy, which requires students before they register to run a gamut that includes an AIDS test, medical exam and registration at a bank.
“It’s like being under Communism again, although Communism in my country worked better,” said Jana Breska, 27, a student from the CzechRepublic.
“You waste so much time in the queue,” added her friend, Asma Chehade, 23, from Poland.
During breaks, students tend to cluster by nationality or religion. There’s little mixing between the openly devout — proclaimed by Islamic skullcaps for the men and veils for the women — and the secular. Americans and Europeans smoke in the front of the school. Korean, Japanese and Chinese students chat standing in a circle in the lobby. A veiled American from California paces in and out of the courtyard.
Mr. Safar believes the mix of religious and non-religious students is one of the school’s strongest points.
“A religious student who comes here has to improve their Arabic, not study religion,” he said. “Language, here, is not a tool of religion or of the imams.”
A big part of the draw of this language institute is its price tag: free, according to the director, for a majority of the 300 students admitted, who get waivers or scholarships from the Syrian government. Full tuition is only $200 for a three-month course.
Those who would prefer a more religious environment, like Marina Antonova, 19, who wears a tightly fastened gray head scarf, say the school requires a necessary compromise.
Ms. Antonova, a devout Muslim from the Russian republic of Tatarstan, spent two years at the Abu Noor language institute, which is affiliated with a mosque and prepares students for careers in Islamic jurisprudence.
In October students had a chance to audit different sections of the language courses. In the upper-level classes, they could choose between a veiled teacher and one whose head was uncovered. Most of the religious students in the uncovered teacher’s section shifted to the class taught by the professor with the head scarf.
Ms. Antonova said a devout Muslim like herself was obliged to choose the better teacher, but could opt for a religious teacher over a secular one if the quality of their instruction was the same.
While Ms. Antonova said she was uncomfortable with the freewheeling student body at the institute, she said she needed to acquire broader Arabic language skills; the complex grammar and syntax of the Koranic Arabic taught at the mosque would not suffice for her to return to Russia and work as a translator.
She will miss Syria’s Islamic mores when she goes home, she said, noting that prejudice against religious Muslims is rampant in many parts of Russia.
“People here are better, more moral,” Ms. Antonova said. “They have ethics. At home, there are far too many problems.”
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