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Agreed, Mark. Thanks for your previous comment, too, though I think you forgot to explain the political dimension? 🙂

It’s so amazing, this power of language (and not only language as in English or Arabic, but also sub-discourses within a language) to influence power and knowledge. It’s not new to talk about it, but it never fails to fascinate me, and how in our everyday lives we are sort of forced to submit to it so that life can go on. It is always easier to learn the dominant language in order to participate in knowledge-production. Does it make sense to resist, to subvert? You just gave an example of medical knowledge being originally in Arabic then some group of people changing it to Latin and reclaiming it, so to speak. One of my biggest issues (which you allude to in one of your comments) is this whole change in the Arab world from knowledge production to knowledge consumption. Well, all kinds of consumption, really, not just knowledge: also culture and economic physical goods. Thinking more deeply about all this now, and how my personal pedagogy but also my overall advocacy should emphasize these aspects. I’ll email you something I wrote recently about cultural aspects of critical thinking…