mustaghrib (pl. mustaghribeen in Egyptian Arabic) Europeanized, Westernized
mustaghrab (pl. mustaghrabeen) strange, odd, queer, quaint, unusual, extraordinary, curious, peculiar
- A Dictionary of Written Modern Arabic, Hans Wehr
“…an Arabist, one of the most loaded words in America’s political vocabulary. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries an Arabist was merely a student of Arabic, like a Hellenist or a Latinist. But with the birth of Israel…the word ‘became a pejorative for he who intellectually sleeps with Arabs’, someone, that is, assumed to be politically naive, elitist, and too deferential to exotic cultures. The word almost presumes guilt.”
-Arabists;The Romance of an American Elite by Robert Kaplan
“Dhahaba al-arabu bahthan ‘an maa’in” “The Arabs departed, searching for water”
There were two notable student types frequenting the garden at the American University in Cairo in 1979, the year that Egypt made peace with Israel- mustaghribeen Francophone co-eds and mustaghrabeen American students of Arabic. If anyone had called us Arabists in those days, we would have asked in what century they were living or maybe punched them in the nose.
Each sat on opposite sides of the snack bar and barely mixed- the Americans, aptly, around a marble Mamluk-style fountain outside Oriental Hall and the Egyptians, aptly also, beside the campus’ clay courts that could have been at the French Open.
The co-eds wore skin tight jeans and strappy high heels with coifs and maquillage to the max. I remember that we Americans just wore jeans and had no time to comb our hair. Arabic study is not easy and often gets in the way of one’s looks. We were a mixed group of graduate students planning careers that required Arabic fluency, and dhahaba al-arabu bahthan ‘an maa’in- a typical sentence in the first year Arabic primer, correctly declined, conjugated, and inflected- does not translate itself without a lot of hard work.
Kathy become an Arabic bibliographer for top libraries and then entered the foreign service. Sharon became an anthropologist specializing in the Nuer. Paula became a medieval historian, eventually publishing a scholarly article on the Islamic law question, Where in a mosque do hermaphrodites pray?- a topic that she first presented in our colloquial Arabic class that had us all pouring through dictionaries- and Laurie became a political scientist.
Even later once they had greatly improved their Arabic, none would have called themselves Arabists or even Arabistes. And I doubt that the co-eds would have called themselves mustaghribeen ever, because for them to say Merci Awi, a code-switching Egyptian’s way to accept their drink from a sufragi with a “Thank you very much”, is a verbal act of neither east nor west- it just sounds right when sitting in the AUC garden at tea time and you can’t decide where you are or who you want to be
Where budding Arabists would sit, “searching for water”