9/11 kickstarts Arabic studies

AUSTIN (KXAN) - She stands in front of a group of students at the University of Texas at Austin. She is tall, blonde and a native of Houston, Texas.

So the sounds that emerge from her mouth are jarring at first, if you're not prepared for them. You see, Jennifer Nation had lots of friends growing up in the Bayou City who spoke Arabic. She loved them and they her. Still there was a barrier, an inability to understand her friends and their culture, because she couldn't speak their native tongue. During her junior year at U.T., Nation decided to do something about that.

"So many of us in the United States don't know anything about this entire civilization and its history and its people," she said. "And I felt that that was something that we were really lacking and I wanted to contribute to changing that."

Nation enrolled in the Arabic Flagship Program, authorized by Congress and supported with federal funds, and after a rigorous three-year period of study, she spent another year working and studying in Egypt. Now back in Austin, she is fluent in the language and working as a teaching assistant at U.T., instructing young people now enrolled in the flagship program. She is also pursuing a job with the U.S. government which has many openings for people who can speak Arabic well.

"Maybe working for a think tank would be something that I would want to do down the line, is focusing on research and making recommendations for policy in the region, that sort of thing," she said.

At U.T., the director of the flagship program is Mahmoud Al-Batal, a naturalized American citizen from Lebanon, who escaped the horrors of civil war in that country and wound up teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. On September 11th, 2001, the attack on the United States by Arabic-speaking terrorists changed his world.

"After September 11th, I mean, the field of teaching Arabic faced the challenge of training thousands and thousands additional students of Arabic at a time where we did not have the qualified personnel to do the training," said Al-Batal. (go here to see the full interview with Al-Batal)

That's where the flagship program entered the picture. Al-Batal says there were only 5,000 Arabic students in the U.S. Now the number is 30,000. There are not enough native Arabic speakers available to do the job, so Americans are being trained to do it and a host of other tasks related to relations between English and Arabic speaking peoples.

"As an American, I feel that we lag way behind the rest of the world in knowing languages and cultures of the rest of the world," Al-Batal said. "I believe that we Americans have a long way to go to prepare our students to partake in the world in which they live. For us as Americans to succeed in the world, to understand, to change the way that people think of the United States, that we are not the super power only. After all, we are a nation that has a rich history, that has tremendous things to offer to the world. We are not a nation that goes and fights wars in the world. We are not just all about military power. We are also about humanitarian understanding, about cultural understanding, about cross-cultural communication." (go here for the full interview with Al-Batal)

Al-Batal acknowledges that the process will ultimately mean greater security for the U.S.

"Security is very important," he said. "I do understand, I mean, I'm not an idealist; I'm a pragmatist and I understand that also for the security needs of the United States, that we need to have experts, military experts, soldiers who understand the languages and the cultures of the world."

That, he argues however, is just the beginning.

"We need languages because we need to be engaged, active citizens of the global village in which we live," he said. "And this is within the spirit that the flagship program has been established. The vast majority of people who are taking Arabic are Americans who really, genuinely are interested in understanding the culture, Arab culture, Islamic culture, understanding Islam, understanding why the Middle East is always in the news, why are we always bombarded with these images of Arabs and Muslims and people from the Middle East who are affecting our lives in one way or another and who are part of our American life. If we go to the big cities, we find that there are hundreds of thousands of people from the Arab world in the big cities and even in the small cities of the United States. So most of our students are not just basically doing it because they want to get a job, because they want to really contribute to this effort of reaching out to the world as Americans and trying to understand." (go here to watch the full interview with Al-Batal)

It's not just Arabic, though, Al-Batal believes. After all, during the height of the Cold War, American universities were turning out Russian speakers by the thousands. Who knew then that Arabic would soon be in high demand?

"We have to be thinking