Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A key feature of American bigotry toward people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and toward Muslims more generally, has been the demonization by journalists, politicians and interest groups of ordinary, everyday Arabic words.
Arabic words have a proud and positive history in the English language. Consider a few:
Magazine is one of my favorites. It comes from the Arabic word for storehouse, makhzan. In French, it was borrowed as magasin, which just means “store.” From the mid-1600s, books in English that listed things of interest to particular groups of people started using it in their titles, so it gradually took on the meaning of a special interest periodical.
Or how about sequin, a small disk used as an ornament on clothing. It came through the French and Italian from the Arabic sikkah, a die for coining.
Then there is mattress, from matrah a cushion or rug that you lie on. In modern Arabic taraha can mean to broach (a subject) or to posit, since the root has to do with laying things out.
Or what would a nice room be without an alcove, a recessed or arched section or opening? It is from the Arabic al-qubbah, meaning a dome or vault.
And of course we could go into chemistry, algebra, alcohol and a host of other scientific terms, since medieval Muslim science was way more advanced than the European and so was borrowed with alacrity.
But then there are the recent borrowings that have been endowed with negative connotations. Our English word “agony” comes from the Greek for struggling or striving, agonizomai. The Olympic games in modern Greek are called Olympiakoí agónes, So our idea of being in excruciating pain comes originally from the idea of striving hard in a contest. Striving hard in Arabic is jihad. It can be an internal struggle to do the right thing or discipline oneself, or a public struggle to give charity to the deserving. In some contexts it can mean to struggle violently, but that is only one of its meanings. A famous soccer club is called “Nadi al-Jihad,” the “struggle club” or “competitive club.” But in the US the FBI has begun putting the word jihad in indictments for terrorist activity, which is not the connotation of the original. In fact, people give their sons the name “Jihad,” not because they are glorifying violence but because they are naming them for “virtuous struggle.” It is similar to the German girl’s name, Wylda, which means “strive.”
The most recent Arabic word to be demonized is “intifada.” The horrid Elise Stefanik (R-NY) lambasted university administrations for allowing the word to be said on campuses. Since Congress is forbidden to police our language by the First Amendment, they put pressure on private universities and corporations to do it for them.
Congresswoman Lisa McCain in Michigan’s 9th District knew she disliked the word, but didn’t seem to actually know what it was, and kept demanding that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik “denounce the infantada.”
Since it sounded like the Spanish food empanada, her malapropism provoked a good deal of mirth on the internets. I think it would be great if the infantada ended up on the menu in Michigan restaurants.
Since McCain lives in Michigan, which has one of the largest Arab and Muslim populations of any state in the country, I suggest she come to Dearborn for the truly magnificent Lebanese, Yemeni and other food, and talk to some locals about what intifada actually means to them. Alas, she won’t find infantada on the menu, though.
Then on Tuesday a spokesman for President Biden’s White House actually denounced the term “intifada” as “hate speech” and hinted that using it was a form of antisemitism. But Arabic is a Semitic language, so how can a Semitic word be “antisemitic”? I’m confused.
Egyptian Youth Uprising/ Intifadah of 2011, Tahrir Square, Cairo. © Juan Cole.
Intifadah derives from the three-letter root n-f-D. The verb nafada means to remove or to clean. Thus you use it for getting dirt off clothing. “His two hands nafada from something” means he gave up on it.
Arabic verbs are based on three-letter roots, as in Hebrew, and are then put into “molds” to create further meanings and connotations. In Form 7 you slip the equivalent of an “i” before the root and insert a “t” after the first letter.
That gives you intafada, a verb which has many meanings but can denote to “rise,” or “rise up,” or “revolt.”
Intafada al-shay’ means “the thing moved or was disturbed.”
Intafada al-karm means the vineyard became succulent.
Intafada al-sha`b means “the people rose up or revolted.”
It is this last sense that seems to have infuriated the members of Congress. But uprisings aren’t all bad.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an Arabic website. On one of its pages it explains the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The word for “uprising” in the title of the article is — you guessed it — “intifada.”
The Nazis forced Polish Jews into one section of Warsaw in 1940, isolating them from the outside world. Some 400,000 were crowded into small apartments in squalor. Then in September of 1942 the Nazis began deporting them to death camps like Treblinka. Some organized to make a stand and there was a skirmish in January of 1943. In April a full-scale rebellion of the remaining Jews broke out, the Jewish Ghetto Uprising. They engaged in an intifada against the Nazis. Doomed though the effort was, I think we’d all agree that it was a noble intifada.
[This is also the terminology used by the Israeli i24 news site as well as by the German Deutsche Welle , and Swiss.info . That is, it is the standard phrase in Arabic for the Warsaw uprising. After my posting the Holocaust Museum website actually changed their title, using “Muqawamah” or resistance rather than intifadah or uprising. Ironically, Hamas stands for Ḥarakah al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah or the movement of the Islamic resistance, so by trying to avoid the term intifadah the Holocaust Museum has now made the Warsaw Jews into Hamas instead. My link above goes to the Wayback Machine archived site. -added 6/26/25.]
Al-Ittihad [Unity] newspaper in Arabic did a retrospective on the youth demonstrations in France and elsewhere in Europe in May, 1968. You guessed it. They called it an intifada. So does the Arabic service of France 24.
The Arab Spring youth revolt against dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt? An intifada.
Jordan’s al-Ra’i [Opinion] newspaper, ironically enough, refers to the U.S. campus demonstrations against Israel’s Gaza campaign as, yes, an intifada, as do many other periodicals.
Of course, the object of the ire of the US Establishment is two particular moments of popular push back against oppression, the first and second Palestinian intifadas in the Palestinian West Bank against Israeli colonization, in the late 1980s and again at the turn of the century.
This PBS site explains of the first that “The First Intifada was a largely spontaneous series of Palestinian demonstrations, nonviolent actions like mass boycotts, civil disobedience, Palestinians refusing to work jobs in Israel, and attacks (using rocks, Molotov cocktails, and occasionally firearms) on Israelis.” It was largely nonviolent, though, so people denouncing it aren’t denouncing violence but the failure of the Palestinians to acquiesce in their own oppression and slow-motion ethnic cleansing.
In short, the paroxysm of anti-Palestinian bigotry that has swept the United States, no doubt deriving in some large part from a bad conscience over our complicity in their genocide, has now advanced to the point where an attempt is being made to outlaw perfectly ordinary words such as “uprising.”
I predict that it will fail, and that what the Arab world is applauding as the “intifada” of the American universities will only derive further energy from the attempt to suppress them.
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