Thursday, April 12, 2012

A Long Day

Today was a long CIEE-ing day. CIEE -If I have never mentioned this here- is a company where all my friends has worked, a company that facilitates a Jordanian Life for American students who come to Jordan in order to learn Arabic.

Normally with CIEE we try all kinds of  Jordanian experiences, things that maybe for being ''locals'' we have never done. For example today we went to the Jordanian Diplomacy Institute and their we had a conversation club.

It was mediocre. I thought that students of the Diplomatic Program are gonna be politically amusing, and they would lead a more challenging conversation.

So, some mental notes that I have taken about the institute:
*I hate being obliged to dress formally :(((.

*Sometimes people look pathetic as they reject a new idea without even considering it. They look weak and sad as they find themselves unable to defend what they think is right , or what they have been taught as kids and never actually assessed later on.!! 


After that we went back to the university. I went to pick up me Oud , it was with Fares. We hung out on the stairs with the entire deanship group, but something weird happened today. A guy was asking about the syntactical explanation of  a verse in the Quran. I participated in the conversation because I love Arabic syntax ,its so challenging and it has been the only type of ''math'' that I excelled at.

But the verse was so hard. We were almost ten people trying to analyse it. So Batool had to call her brother in Law Motasem -who is majoring Arabic literature along with a BA in Sharia'a- and he explained it to us.

Nothing weird so far no? Later in the conversation I found out that the guy who was asking about the explanation is christian and he was claiming that Quran has grammatical mistakes that we - the Muslims- ignore in order to make our book look perfect. 
See this meme?
That was my reaction. It is not that I dont respect people's opinions but the way he was insisting on the alleged ''syntactical mistake'' was so pathetic! Why? because if your Arabic is not good enough you cant come and criticise Quran.
I am not saying so because I am a Muslim, but because I am an Arab who happens to be great in Syntax. Quran has the greatest syntactical structure that I have ever seen. Not only me, but many many other learners of Arabic, both muslims and non-muslims.

Here is a thing , and the other is that the Deanship is the last place where I thought that I would witness such a conversation. In the Deanship people mostly debate if God exists, so witnessing a debate about ''which religion is better'' was kind of a variation on the show.

Anyway, Good luck buddy with your syntactical search and have fun with the youtube videos that discuss such mistakes. heheheheheh :p

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