“When I began teaching, there were only four elementary Arabic courses offered,” Bahkou said. “I helped develop four additional courses, and in 2010 we were approved to offer a minor in Arabic.” It wasn’t long before students who had completed Bahkou’s more advanced courses told him they wanted to continue their studies in Arabic. “The minor in Arabic evolved into a major purely due to student demand,” he said. “There were already courses offered in Middle East culture and history, so creating a new major was a matter of combining these with a language component.”
The requirements for Baylor’s new major are quite rigorous. Interested students must first develop a foundational proficiency in the Arabic language as a prerequisite to even declare the major — no easy task for nonnative speakers. “There are eight required credits of Arabic that aren’t even applied to your degree,” Dr. Abdul-Massih Saadi, assistant professor of Arabic, said. “The idea is that students have to be able to read, write and understand elementary Arabic so that they may continue their study.” Arabic and Middle East Studies major Katherine Matthews, a
Baylor freshman, had studied only one other language –– Latin –– before exploring Arabic. “To say it’s challenging is an understatement,” she said. “My eight years of studying Latin was mostly on paper or translating ancient documents. But actually learning a different script and hearing Arabic as it is spoken today has been truly enlightening.” Matthews hopes to one day enter the U.S. Air Force as a Second Lieutenant with enough Arabic language proficiency to become a translator. Besides preparing for careers in the military and with intelligence agencies, Baylor students earning continued on next page >>