Al Kitab

Hello, I’m joining Caitlyn and Chris representing Team Fatima Zahra, the little-known (but very cool) Moroccan cousin of Maha and Nisreen…okay, so obviously al-Kitaab never gave us a Moroccan version of our favourite crowd-phobic Egyptian. And that’s probably because students of Arabic are usually warned off Moroccan, even/especially by other Arabs. The most common responses I got when telling people I was studying Arabic in Morocco were “You’re learning French,” “come back to Jordan when you want to learn real Arabic”, and “you’re learning African” (…okay). ...

يدغدغ “ydaghdagh“ As I was discussing Arabic grammar over some Stellas with friends the other day (before you think to yourself ‘wow this girl is a total nerd’: 99% of you have done this before. do not lie.), I said that during my year with CASA I discovered a love for words with 4 letter roots in Arabic, like يهمهم and يوشوش (both onomatopoeias for whispering) as well as يدغدغ (MSA for ‘to tickle.’ not entirely sure how this came up in a graduate level Arabic class, but. you know.). Then my friends informed me that in Egyptian, يدغدغ means ‘to smash’ as in ‘I’m going to smash your head in.’ Probably something you wouldn’t say in an actual fight, but definitely lies within the realm of siblings threatening to beat each other up. ...

Today’s guest post includes a very exciting announcement made by our new friend Chris. Nisreen frustrated about the perennially high degree of humidity in her native New York This is Nisreen. Nisreen is a chronically lonely Syrian-American living in New York, with a Syrian father and a Palestinian mother. She is, in fact, Maha’s doppelganger – and Maha’s falling in love with her cousin out of sheer loneliness, and Nisreen’s parallel love story with her own paternal cousin, might well have been avoided if they’d only managed to meet one another instead of spending all their time looking woefully into a camera and monologuing about their respective misery. ...

Following up on our earlier explanation of a bunch of MSA words that sound ridiculous when used in real life, here are a few more: 1. بدون Albeit a nice sounding word, no one says this in real life. In some dialects of Shami you might order your coffee من دون سكر (without sugar) but in Egypt من غير is most common. ...

Many of you have been asking a very profound question regarding the name of this blog: “I don’t get it. Who’s Maha?” And this is something that I’ll admit I should have addressed from the get-go. To answer this question, I could list for you all the conventionally important biographical facts about Maha, like how she is a character in the book (it is literally called ‘the book:’ Al-Kitab) used for Arabic language education in America. I could tell you that Maha is a Palestinian-Egyptian woman living in the United States, that her father works as a translator with the UN, and that her grandfather was an army officer. I could also tell you that Maha admits on camera that she often feels lonely, that she is jealous of her friend Leila’s pool, and even hints that she is wistfully in love with her first cousin. ...