Bill Fitzgerald
The F train rushes into the station. I step on. It's the early morning, and the sun has just slipped above the Manhattan skyline, looming just across the water from my house on Roosevelt Island. The train quickens and I begin my favorite ritual of the early morning. I sit down, place one ear against the window sill, sprawl my legs out, and try to attain every ounce of shut eye that I can get. I begin to think of the pre-calc midterm just eight stops away, the interminable bother of my teachers, and I cherish this tranquil moment. As I daze in and out, I begin to listen to my fellow train riders. I listen to long vowels stretch off of the tongues of my Lebanese neighbors. Sabaah arrives punctually into my ears as the stops pass by. I listen to Arabic flowing through the cracks and crannies of the subway car, and I am mesmerized. It is an extraordinary notion that one can find the beauty in a language without understanding it. After many mornings a midst a daze of Arabic, I am intrigued, uplifted, and motivated. I feel the need to learn this language and delve into it's beauty. Not only this, but to search and find everything I can of this Arabic culture, which is misunderstood and thought to be arcane by Americans. So I am beginning to learn. I use a few apps, read through articles online, and try to find the roots of this language. As I go through lessons and articles regularly, I am beginning to realize the profound negligence of the media in depicting Arabic for it's beauty. The word Islam and terror walk hand in hand along the vast majority of magazine and newspaper pages. When a central belief of Islam is in the House of Peace, the right way called upon by Allah, the western world depicts Islamic societies as just the opposite, when a small percentage are to blame for the atrocities at hand. I feel like my beginning to learn Arabic is me giving back a small token to a communities that are so subject to racism, so subject to the day in and day out hum of the radio, citing the most recent casualty from U.S. intervention. So I continue to learn.