Why Arabic Language Is Non-Negotiable: A Field Epistemology Manifesto
- Vanessa Chamma
- Jun 3
- 9 min read
Middle Eastern geopolitics cannot be learned from an armchair. On the structural failure of analysts who have never read a line in Arabic — and what that costs the world.
VANESSA CHAMMA | Oriente History | International Relations & Arab World Studies
Classical Arabic script in a manuscript. The language is not a methodological detail — it is the epistemological key to the Arab world.
I. The Problem No One Wants to Name
There is a silent pathology running through the study of International Relations in Brazil — and, to varying degrees, across much of the Western academic world. It does not appear in graduate program syllabi, it is not debated at area conferences, and it is certainly not found in the handbooks that train analysts, diplomats, and specialized journalists every year. But anyone who has genuinely left the office and gone into the field — with real linguistic immersion, with primary sources in the original language, with the dust of Beirut on their shoes — recognizes it immediately: we are producing Middle East specialists who have never read a single line in Arabic.
This is not a minor critique. It is a structural one.
Imagine a historian of colonial Brazil who cannot read Portuguese. An analyst of Chinese politics who depends on English translations to understand Communist Party documents. A Holocaust scholar who has never consulted a German archive. The anomaly would be immediately apparent — academically indefensible. And yet this is precisely what occurs, systematically and without embarrassment, in Arab world studies across Brazilian and many Western universities.
Arabic is not a methodological detail. It is the epistemological key without which the analyst remains, permanently, a hostage to mediators — and mediators have interests.
II. What Is Lost in the Chain of Translations
Every translation is an interpretation. Every interpretation carries a frame. Every frame serves someone.
When a Western analyst reads about Hezbollah in a Foreign Affairs article, they are reading a source that has passed through at least three filters before reaching their eyes: the filter of the anglophone reporter or researcher who gathered the information; the editorial filter of the publication — with its own geopolitical line; and the filter of access, which determines which Arabic sources were consulted, in what context, and through what mediation.
Each of these filters is legitimate in itself. The problem arises when the analyst, at the end of that chain, believes they are reading reality — when they are reading, at best, a carefully edited representation of it.
FIELD NOTE — BEIRUT, 2006 |
The author spent time in Lebanon during the 2006 conflict. One of the most revealing experiences was not military or political — it was linguistic. Following Hassan Nasrallah's speeches in the original Arabic — with their Quranic references, their specific prosody, their mobilization of collective Shia memory — and then reading the transcripts and analyses published in English and Portuguese was like watching the same play performed in two entirely different theaters. What reached the Western reader was, at best, the semantic skeleton of the speech. The rhetorical musculature — which was precisely where its mobilizing power resided — had been discarded in translation as non-transportable material. |
This is not a problem of poor translation. It is a problem of translation that is structurally impossible without deep cultural formation. And that is why classical Arabic is not optional for anyone who intends to seriously analyze the Middle East. It is a prerequisite.
"Every translation is an interpretation. Every interpretation carries a frame. Every frame serves someone".
III. The Illusion of the Armchair Expert
The field of International Relations has a peculiar relationship with empiricism. Unlike anthropology or ethnography, which place the researcher in direct and prolonged contact with their subject of study, IR has historically tended to build its academic prestige on theory — and theory, by definition, operates at a safe distance from reality.
This has produced a generation of "specialists" whose knowledge of the Middle East is structurally mediated: mediated by translations, by think tanks with agendas, by secondary sources citing other secondary sources until the empirical origin of the knowledge becomes untraceable. What presents itself as analysis is frequently the recirculation of consecrated narratives — consecrated not for their precision, but for their convenience to the centers of power that finance and disseminate them.
The practical result is what might be called a superficiality radar: the ability to identify immediately, in any text on the Arab world, whether its author has been in the field, reads Arabic, consulted primary sources — or constructed their argument from a cognitive map drawn by others.
The radar fires on recognizable patterns. The armchair analyst tends to treat Hezbollah as an Iranian proxy and nothing more, ignoring the decades of social entrenchment in southern Lebanon, the organization's function as a parallel state, its necessity-legitimacy among populations the Lebanese army never protected. They tend to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a territorial dispute — ignoring the theological, demographic, and collective memory dimensions that no map can capture. They tend to read Arab leaders' pronouncements as empty rhetoric, because they do not understand the system of references within which that rhetoric operates — and for which it is extraordinarily precise.
This is not intellectual bad faith. It is structural epistemological limitation.
IV. Classical Arabic as an Instrument of Analytical Sovereignty
Classical Arabic — or fusha, the language of historical documents, theological texts, formal press, and high-register political speeches — is not a philological curiosity. It is the instrument that allows the analyst to access directly the sources that construct political reality in the Arab world, without depending on any external mediation.
Mastering classical Arabic means being able to read Nasrallah's pronouncements as his listeners heard them. It means being able to consult the founding documents of Hamas, Fatah, and the Arab League without passing through the filter of institutional translators with geopolitical affiliations. It means being able to access the Arabic press — Al Jazeera, Al-Monitor, Al-Hayat — and compare what is being said internally with what is being transmitted to the West. The difference, frequently, is abyssal.
This analytical sovereignty is not an academic luxury. It is an ethical necessity for anyone who claims to speak with authority about populations that have their own voice — and whose voice is systematically replaced, in Brazilian and Western academic and journalistic discourse, by the voice of those who interpret them from the outside.
"There is something profoundly colonial about the figure of the Middle East specialist who cannot read Arabic — not in the sense of malicious intent, but in its structural dimension".
There is something profoundly colonial about the figure of the Middle East specialist who cannot read Arabic. Not in the sense of malicious intent, but in the structural sense: the production of knowledge about the Other without the mediation of the Other, without access to their sources, without immersion in their reality. It is the same epistemological pattern that produced centuries of academic Orientalism — and that Edward Said had already dismantled with surgical precision in 1978. Nearly five decades later, the pattern persists.
V. The Field as Methodology, Not Adventure
There is a misguided romanticism surrounding the idea of "going into the field." In Brazilian IR academic circles, empirical work abroad is frequently treated as an optional complement — the interview chapter that enriches the thesis, the study trip that humanizes the argument. The analytical core, however, remains theoretical.
This hierarchy needs to be inverted.
The field is not methodological decoration. It is where theories are tested and where most of them reveal their limits. It is in the field that the analyst discovers that the categories with which they arrived do not correspond to the categories through which reality is actually organized. That the division between "moderates" and "radicals" that structures much of Western academic production on political Islam does not map onto any distinction that the actors themselves recognize as meaningful. That the boundary between armed resistance and social organization is not a line, but a gradient that can only be understood from within.
The field is also where primary sources acquire a dimension impossible to replicate in any office. Interviewing a field commander from southern Lebanon is not the same as reading their testimony transcribed in a third-party study. Witnessing the operation of a hospital maintained by Hezbollah is not the same as reading health coverage statistics in UN reports. The difference is not merely one of descriptive richness — it is one of epistemological quality. The field reveals what analytical categories erase.
That said, fieldwork without linguistic and theoretical preparation is glorified tourism. The combination that produces genuine knowledge is deep linguistic immersion — classical Arabic and, ideally, a dialectal variant of the region under study — combined with systematic fieldwork and dense reading of primary sources. This combination is demanding, costly, and slow. And it is the only one that produces analysis that withstands the test of reality.
VI. What the Major Media Does Not Report — and Why
Coverage of Middle Eastern geopolitics by mainstream Brazilian and international media is not merely superficial due to operational constraints — lack of time, correspondents, editorial space. It is superficial because depth, in this case, would be politically inconvenient.
Covering Hezbollah with rigor would require explaining why a significant portion of Lebanese citizens — including many who profoundly disagree with the group's political agenda and regional alliances — recognize in it the only force that has actually defended Lebanese territory. That narrative does not fit within the binary frameworks of "terrorist group vs. Israeli democracy" that structure the majority of Western coverage.
Covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with depth would require accessing the historical archives of the British Mandate period, the internal documents of the Oslo negotiations, the reports of Israeli human rights organizations such as B'Tselem that systematically document what official communiqués deny. It would require reading Palestinian newspapers, listening to leadership pronouncements in Arabic, understanding the internal divisions that facade agreements attempt to conceal.
This level of depth is not impossible. It is inconvenient. And inconvenience, in mainstream journalism as in institutionalized academia, tends to be managed through omission — not through outright falsehood, but through selective framing that transforms the partial into the total, and the convenient into the consensual.
The function of the genuinely trained analyst — with Arabic, with fieldwork, with primary sources — is not only to produce more precise knowledge. It is to tear open that convenient consensus and name what it conceals.
VII. A Manifesto for IR Education
This article is not a neutral academic diagnosis. It is an argument.
The teaching of International Relations — in Brazil and across Western institutions — requires a deep epistemological revision in the study of the Arab world and the Middle East. That revision rests on three demands that should be non-negotiable in any serious program in the field.
First: linguistic formation as a requirement, not an option. No graduate program that claims seriousness in Middle Eastern studies should accept dissertations or theses on the Arab world written by researchers without reading competence in classical Arabic.
Second: the valorization of fieldwork as a central component of formation, not an optional complement. Cabinet research on realities that demand physical presence and cultural fluency systematically produces second-rate knowledge.
Third: the radical diversification of primary sources used in formation. IR curricula on the Middle East that depend predominantly on anglophone publications are teaching students to see the Arab world through the eyes of the centers of power most invested in shaping it.
The armchair produces intellectual comfort. The field produces knowledge. Only those who understand the difference between the two are equipped to analyze, with honesty, the Middle East that actually exists — rather than the one that is convenient to imagine.
VIII. The Cost of Superficial Knowledge
Superficial knowledge of the Middle East is not an abstract academic problem. It has concrete consequences. Foreign policies are formulated on the basis of mistaken analyses. Entire populations are represented — in the media, in academia, in diplomatic forums — by voices that have never heard them directly, in their own language, on their own territory.
Brazil occupies a peculiar geopolitical position that could make it a genuinely useful mediation actor in the Middle East. But that potential will only be realized if the country invests in forming analysts, diplomats, and journalists with the real capacity to understand the region — not to reproduce the narratives of those who have dominated it for decades.
The superficiality radar is not an instrument of intellectual arrogance. It is an instrument of epistemic responsibility. And its calibration begins with a simple but demanding choice: learn Arabic, go into the field, and read what the populations of the Middle East say about themselves — before deciding what to say about them.
ACADEMIC TAKEAWAYS |
Linguistic epistemology as a condition of analysis - The absence of classical Arabic competence is not a minor gap: it is a structural limitation that compromises any analysis produced. |
The chain of mediations as systematic distortion - All knowledge produced through translations carries the frames of its mediators, with a documented history of geopolitical alignment. |
The field as a test of theories, not their illustration - Field epistemology is the moment when theories are put to the test and frequently reveal their limits. |
Analytical sovereignty as a political project - Forming analysts capable of directly accessing Arab world sources is a project of national intellectual autonomy. |
📚 REFERENCES
SAID, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979 [1978].
SAID, Edward W. Covering Islam. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
CHOMSKY, Noam; HERMAN, Edward S. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
KHALIDI, Rashid. The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020.
NORTON, Augustus Richard. Hezbollah: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
FISK, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation. London: Fourth Estate, 2005.
HOURANI, Albert. A History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
GEERTZ, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
B'TSELEM. Available at: https://www.btselem.org
Vanessa Chamma is the founder of Oriente History. She has reported from Lebanon, speaks Arabic, and holds a degree in International Relations with a focus on the Arab world.
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