Spring Bulletin 2012 - The Park School

Freddy and his girlfriend, Emily, visiting the desert monastery of Mar Musa outside Damascus, Syria, in 2009.
helps too. There are markedly different
dialects of colloquial Arabic as it is spoken
from Egypt to Syria, Iraq to Morocco. The
written language, both the classical Arabic of
the Quran or the more standardized Arabic
used in modern media and literature, is based
on a root system of three or four letters,
which unlocks the vagaries of vocabulary,
grammar, and syntax — but also opens up
what seem like endless lists of word variations.
I have studied Arabic because I wanted to
understand the contemporary Middle East,
beyond what one reads or hears on the news
in America. Particularly as a journalist, to be
able to have casual conversations and pick
up on the nuances of expression, rather than
relying on a translator and so never having
those opportunities, Arabic was essential. At
Oxford, where I’m completing my masters in
modern Middle Eastern studies, Arabic
lessons are more traditional: we translate,
mostly recent newspaper articles and passages
of modern Egyptian literature, and transcribe,
often Al Jazeera newscasts and television
talk-shows.
After I left Syria in 2009, I went back to
Cairo to work as a freelance journalist, before
coming back to America to work at The Nation
in New York. I started writing for the magazine
as a fact-checker, and since leaving New
York for Oxford in 2010, I’ve continued to
write about the Middle East for The Nation,
the Los Angeles Review of Books, Abu Dhabi’s
The National, and other publications. I went
back to Egypt in the summer and winter of
2011 to interview architects, planners, and
preservationists for my Oxford thesis, on how
the Mubarak regime used urban planning
as a tool of authoritarian rule and control.
Debates about how to plan Cairo’s urban
future, and how to preserve its rich architectural
past, have been rekindled by Egypt’s
on-going revolution and the possibilities of
democratic transition.
Future plans lie between academia and
journalism. After graduating from Oxford this
summer, I hope to work as a journalist or
Middle East-related researcher back in the
United States, keeping an eye on the on-going
Arab revolutions and uprisings, particularly in
Egypt and Syria. I want to adapt my master’s
thesis on Cairo urbanism into a longer piece
of writing, a kind of narrative non-fiction
with updated reporting from Egypt. I’d love
to live in the region again, whether Cairo or,
someday hopefully, Damascus after the end of
the Assad regime.
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