I recently wrote about Bahrain Polytechnic’s advertisement for tutor positions. The human resources manager have just replied my email. I’m pleased that they did, and that my comment did not go unnoticed.

Thank you for the email you sent to our web address recently.  Your points were noted and we changed the wording on our documentation immediately.  I can assure you there was no intention to offend or discriminate.  I can also assure you that despite the wording, we have received applications and made appointments that encompass a wide range of nationalities. The fact that we have many different nationalities on our staff is a reflection of our recruitment practice.

Today the Tutor advertisement was taken off the web to give us the opportunity to finish processing the 100s of applications we have been fortunate enough to receive. We would, however, still welcome your application. If you require an application form please let me know.

I really came to discover this term very recently. During my trip to Chicago I was invited to a family dinner by a really nice local family who worked in Chicago Public Schools. The father had started to learn Arabic and was reading translated Arabic poetry.  It was a pleasant night, and we came to talk about education in Bahrain. He asked if we had Madrasahs.  I said we sure did, quite surprised at the question, but he was surprised in return.

He asked if I’ve ever been to one, and confusion was sweeping over me. I reassured him that I did, and pointed out that illiteracy was not a problem in Bahrain: almost everyone goes to school, girls included. The topic was still not dropped, as he asked what exactly was taught in madrasahs, and whether we had the chance to study anything apart from Islam and the holly scripts. I looked up, still confused, partly shocked, half-realizing what exactly was going on.

“Sir, I went to a public school, a government-run public school, not a religious one. We did science, mathematics, some history and geography, but all in Arabic. We did English as a second language and we once a week had an Islamic education class which students did not take seriously”.

With this, there was a sense of relief from everyone. I did not point out what caused the miscommunication, and we went on to discuss why students did not take that class seriously.

After that incident I realized how widespread the term was- it was everywhere. As a matter of fact it is no longer written with a capital M. It’s written with a small letter m, a proper term in the English dictionary that  is in short used to describe religious, terrorism-breeding schools  .  The word, a derivative of the route “daras”, meaning “to study”, in the mind of an Arabic-speaking person simply means the place of study, that is, school. It’s a secular term, subscribing itself to no particular religion or  political agenda.

I recounted the details of what happened to a Columbian friend, who laughed, and shared his bit of language malfunction: once on a trip to Louisiana he asked a Mexican (in Spanish) the directions to take a certain bus. He later on found out that “taking a bus” the way he chose to say it then- which was perfectly alright in Columbian Spanish- meant having intercourse with the bus to Mexican ears.

Bahrain Polytechnic's Ad

Qualifications
• a recognized qualification in tertiary teaching;
• ENGLISH tutors must have a recognised qualification in teaching English for speakers of other languages;
• a relevant technical specialist qualification or a bachelors degree (minimum);
• a native speaker of English with excellent communication skills in English, both verbal and written;

I came across a very disturbing advertisement for tutoring posts in Bahrain Polytechnic. The Advertisement was for multiple tutoring vacancies in subjects ranging from Accounting to Electro Technology for degree-level students, and I found it really shocking that they would blatantly state that “Native speakers will be given preference” on the website, and reiterate that in the application document under “Qualifications”.

There are way too many things that are wrong with this I’m not sure where to start. First I’m unsure how being a native English speaker is a “Qualification” as such. Fluency and good command in English are things that can be thought of as qualifications, but a person’s mother tongue?

Second, I have absolutely no idea what being a native English speaker can possibly add to an Accounting, Mechanical Engineering, IT or Marketing tutors, and would really love to hear the insights from the Polytechnic about maybe revolutionary studies that they came across that shows that successful, renowned higher education institutions only hire“native English speakers”, in a country, I shall add, where English is commonly spoken yet remains a second language for most?

I tried to look at this from so many ways to make it look less disturbing or put a positive spin on it but I just couldn’t. They could have easily demanded good command of English, fluency, had proper criteria to measure or quantify that, and even if “native” was their shortcut into all of this I don’t think it’s acceptable. It is offensive, to my “non-native English speaking” Bahraini self and others.

I wrote to the Polytechnic, I don’t know if my email would mean anything, especially in terms of actual change of recruitment policy, but I sure hope they get the message that, despite English being my second language, I sure can manage to articulate how I feel about their advertisement.

I was flipping through all the lame radio channels in my car, when I heard the voice of a young lady introducing herself in language that was so far away from my daily life and so deep into my childhood that it brought with it nothing but nostalgia. I stopped my search for a bearable song and intently listened to the stranger on the radio introducing herself. I did not know why or what is it in her voice that made it different. The way she vocalized her vowels and consonants, her intonation, the neutral accent that made it almost impossible to guess where she came from, and the innocence of her voice; where all things that took me back to the days I watched a TV show called Al-Manahil as a kid.

All the way to my house I indulged in listening to Haneen recite her poem, light and rhymed, beautiful words of a 23 year old Algerian student whom I listened to for the first time. I loved it. For once I wished my journey home would last longer. When I googled her name I realized she was a contestant of the Prince of Poet competition aired in Abu Dhabi TV. Amongst my search I came across Tamim Al-Barghouthi, another contestant who made me spend the rest of the night replaying his poem, Al-Qudus.

I felt attached to the sound of the language he used. He sounded as if he came from long ago, from a time where people spoke Arabic for their daily life, from an old historical TV show whose actors did not replace one consonant with another, from a cartoon dubbed for kids when dialects were not used for cartoons. “There are still such poets” I told my younger brother, and I was both happy and amazed with the realization that, yes, there are still some people who can write a poem that both has such a deep meaning and rhythm. I could think of nothing but how much this language means to me, how strong the feel of belonging and identity is, how all those contestants living hundreds of miles apart can still feel there is something that ties them together, regardless of how different they all are.

While helping a European colleague learn Arabic I remember him once suggesting that standard day Arabic should no longer be one language. The difference between all spoken Arabic accents is so vast that it’s time they are all classified as different languages- Bahraini, Egyptian, Iraqi, Lybian and so on. I disagreed. “They are all subsets of the mother language”, I argued. “If you can speak the mother language, you can easily understand its subsets”. That was the virtual reason for why I refused to believe they are different languages.

The real reason, however, was much deeper than that. It was far deeper than mere linguistics. Although no nationalist, I did not want Bahraini to be a different language, I wanted it to be just a variation of the great mother Arabic, I wanted that tie with the past and present, I wanted the glory of the once upon a time great language of Imru’ al-Qais and Al-Mutanabbi. Having a Bahraini language would mean having to start from now, it would mean leaving behind the rich history- regardless of good or bad. It would mean that no longer can I say that we were or were not, that no longer can anything belong to me, but to them, the Arabs, and I still want to be one.