Illustrious Persons
On Saturday I went to the Institut Italien here in Rabat to see (drumroll for the French students) Fatema Mernissi. She was speaking about her latest book, L'amour dans les pays musulmans, in the company of the book's Italian translator, a psychologist/literary theorist, and an Italian moderator with hilarious accented French.
Mernissi, as one might expect, is quite the personality. She addressed the audience as "les enfants" and reprimanded one annoying Spaniard who stood up to ask a question but really just wanted to hear herself talk. At the end Lella Fatema signed my program, although I did have to wait for a large multilingual crowd to stop bothering her.
And this morning in MSA I sat next to (drumroll for the Arabic students) Mahmoud al-Batal, none other than one of the three editors of the infamous Al-Kitaab. WHAT? He's apparently teaching us a lesson on Wednesday. I'll have to bite my tongue to keep from telling him that my Moroccan fusHa professor regularly says that the grammar in Al-Kitaab "is not Arabic" by which he means it is, well, too Egyptian for his taste.
1 comments:
I feel horrible that I don't know who either of these illustrious persons are--still sounds amazing. I will, however, probably learn about Al-Kitaab, as I wish to take Arabic at Wes next year. :)
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