University of Oregon Moves Arabic to Religious Studies Department

This comes from a report in the university’s own newspaper, so the student-reporter finds people who are generally upbeat about this oddball move.

Only instructor Mohamed Jemmali allows himself to say, “It’s a little weird to move a language under a religious field.” But Jemmali goes on to say that he understands how the departments can help each other, and so on, and don’t fire me, and so forth.

Arabic student Beshara Kehdi sandwiches her critici6sm between two compliments. Only the criticism here:

…I think people will falsely believe that Arabic and Islam are one thing instead of looking at Arabic as the language of a broader Middle East.

Indeed. Lastly, the university’s rationale:

Arabic is being folded into the religious studies department because the department can support Arabic students reading advanced literature and documents, most of which are Islamic in nature.

Hunh?

6 Comments

  2. I am baffled, personally. And it seemed like the instructors and students were too polite to be quoted as saying: HELLO! THIS IS S-T-U-P-I-D.

    ياني ، غبي

  3. the next move will obviously be to merge religious and natural sciences.

    are these people for real???

  4. What I love is how everyone’s trying to be upbeat about it.


  6. I chimed in on the Earth Calling Oregon entry, so I thought I’d say that you could go there to see the rationale for the decision.

    I just want people to know that it’s not as if we did not think about this move and to point out that there is no, true and natural home for Arabic at the U of O. So, this is the closest we can get.

    هذا أحسن الموجود فقط

    It’s nice to see that there are people in the world paying attention to such things though!

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