Cold War language programs reframed Arabic study as a propaganda and policy tool

Evidence

In the social-science order of things, language study is a mere tool for higher aims, certainly not for reading literary texts. In 1958, for example, the Middle East Institute—a quasi-governmental body founded to oversee and sponsor research interest in the Middle East—produced a Report on Current Research. The contribution “Present State of Arabic Studies in the United States” (done, interestingly enough, by a professor of Hebrew) is prefaced by an epigraph announcing that “no longer is knowledge of foreign languages, for instance, the sole province of the scholars in the humanities. It is a working tool of the engineer, the economist, the social scientist, and many other specialists.” The whole report stresses the importance of Arabic to oil-company executives, technicians, and military personnel. But the report’s main talking point is this trio of sentences: “Russian universities are now producing fluent Arabic speakers. Russia has realized the importance of appealing to men through their minds, by using their own language. The United States need wait no longer in developing its foreign language program.” Thus Oriental languages are part of some policy objective—as to a certain extent they have always been—or part of a sustained propaganda effort. In both these aims the study of Oriental languages becomes the instrument carrying out Harold Lasswell’s theses about propaganda, in which what counts is not what people are or think but what they can be made to be and think. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 740

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later Islamophobia readings on how policy objectives instrumentalize knowledge of Muslim societies; also parallels Milgrom’s institutional analysis of how knowledge-serving institutions arise to fill functional gaps. — connects to: Foundations and state built area studies to serve Cold War empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 240; Cold War legislation mobilized US universities to produce imperial knowledge; The 1958 National Defense Education Act enlisted universities in Cold War empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 745 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does the 1958 report’s framing of Russian language competition compare to Cold War-era Area Studies programs more broadly, and what did that mean for who got funded to study Arabic?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 740