English in the Gulf serves mainly technical and professional ends
Evidence
Said, however, is insistent on this point of the civilizing ethos. He recounts a visit to a national university in one of the Gulf States and, having registered the fact that the English Department attracted the largest number of students, goes on to bemoan two things: that so many students took English not for its literature but as a technical language needed for professional advancement; and that English, such as it was, existed in what seemed to be a seething cauldron of Islamic revivalism’. Both these laments deserve some comment. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 403
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: English is the mandatory working language of all global trading floors — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 109; Gulf students rationally chose technical English over its literature — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 897