Picture a Parisian lecture hall. A Moroccan sociologist is at the podium, her French so precise, so accent-free, that the room leans in without a second thought. Weeks later, she’s in Casablanca, moving easily between Darija and Tamazight, making the same arguments with the same fire. A French journalist who caught the talk scribbles down the words “vernacular” and “colloquial,” as if the switch in language had somehow shrunk her ideas. That tiny, almost invisible slight isn’t just one person’s bias. It’s the leftover hum of a colonial machine that spent generations teaching people to measure a mind by how close it sounds to the colonizer’s voice.
Across the Middle East and North Africa, the question of who gets to be called an intellectual still runs along linguistic fault lines laid down under French and British mandates. These weren’t simple preferences for European languages over Arabic, Tamazight, Kurdish, or Turkish. They cracked the whole idea of knowledge in two: the “universal” versus the “local,” the “rational” versus the “emotional,” the “modern” versus the “traditional.” To see how this still works, you have to dig into the specific policies that built those boxes—and notice how they echo, right now, in universities, publishing houses, and the talking heads on your screen.
The Colonial Classroom as a Sorting Machine
In 1938, Albert Sarraut, a former governor-general of French Indochina, put it bluntly: colonial education wasn’t meant to produce “savants.” It was meant to churn out “auxiliaries”—helpers for the imperial administration. That logic was applied with a kind of grim consistency across French territories in North Africa and the Levant. In Algeria, the French state systematically took apart the pre-colonial web of Quranic schools and madrasas. In their place, they built a two-track system: a handful of elite Franco-Arab institutions for the sons (and occasionally daughters) of notables, and a sprawling, underfunded set of “indigenous schools” where Arabic was taught as a foreign language—if it was taught at all.
The message was unmistakable. To be educated was to be educated in French. Arabic, Tamazight, and other local languages got shoved into the corner marked folklore, domestic life, religion. They could carry poetry and piety, sure, but not philosophy or physics. This wasn’t some accidental byproduct. It was the plan. The French historian and administrator Louis Massignon spelled it out in 1922: the aim was to “disarticulate” the intellectual traditions of the Arab world, to cut the nerve between classical Arabic and contemporary thought so that modern ideas could only enter through the filter of French.
Britain’s playbook in its mandate territories was different in style but landed in the same place. In Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt, British administrators pushed English as the language of governance and higher education while letting a certain amount of Arabic-medium instruction survive at the lower levels. The result? A two-tier system where the most prestigious professions—law, medicine, engineering—demanded fluency in English. A bilingual elite grew up whose authority rested, in part, on their ability to stand between the colonial state and the monolingual masses. Intellectual legitimacy got tangled up with linguistic performance in the colonizer’s tongue.
The Mandate Era and the Making of the Bilingual Gatekeeper
The French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon (1920–1946) is a brutally clear example of language policy used to engineer social rank. French authorities set up a network of secular schools—many run by Catholic and Jesuit missions—that taught entirely in French. These schools clustered in cities and were mostly open to Christian and Sunni merchant families. Meanwhile, the state school system, which taught in Arabic, was deliberately starved. By 1943, only 3% of the Lebanese state budget went to education, while French mission schools got fat subsidies from Paris.
The fallout was deep. A Lebanese or Syrian intellectual who wanted to join international debates had to do it in French. Arabic-language journals and publishing houses, lively as they were, got treated as second-string. A structural bilingualism took hold: French was the language of theory, abstraction, authority; Arabic was the language of application, commentary, local relevance. The intellectual who wrote in Arabic was a “commentator.” The one who wrote in French was a “thinker.”
People internalized this hierarchy fast. The Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm remembered, in his memoirs, being a young professor at the American University of Beirut in the 1960s and getting nudged to publish in English or French if he wanted his work taken seriously. Arabic, his colleagues told him, was for newspapers and political pamphlets. Al-Azm pushed back, writing his most famous work, Self-Criticism After the Defeat, in Arabic. But the pressure he described? Scholars across the region still feel it in their bones.
Post-Independence: The Persistence of Colonial Language Regimes
You’d think decolonization would have torn these hierarchies down. Sometimes it tried. Algeria’s post-1962 Arabization policy was an explicit attempt to reverse the linguistic damage of 132 years of French rule. The state poured money into importing Arabic-speaking teachers from Egypt and Syria, rewriting curricula, and making Arabic the language of administration and higher education. But the policy was rolled out with a rigidity that created its own exclusions. Francophone Algerians—often the most educated—found themselves pushed to the margins. Tamazight speakers, already erased by French colonial policy, got erased a second time by a state that equated national identity with Arabic alone.
In Lebanon, things got even more tangled. The 1943 National Pact, an unwritten deal that sliced political power along sectarian lines, didn’t mention language directly. But it reinforced the link between French and Christian communities, and between Arabic and Muslim communities. The linguistic landscape that emerged kept French as the prestige language of the elite, while Arabic was the language of the street and the state. English, meanwhile, was quietly creeping in as the language of business and tech, adding another layer to the cake.
In both cases, the colonial-era link between language and intellectual authority didn’t break. It just reconfigured itself. Today, a Lebanese academic who publishes in Arabic still gets asked, “But have you published in English or French?” The question isn’t innocent. It carries the assumption that serious scholarship needs a European language, that Arabic is a vehicle for local concerns, not ideas that travel.
The Economics of Intellectual Production
These linguistic hierarchies aren’t just cultural. They’re material. The global publishing industry runs on English and, to a lesser degree, French. The academic journals that hand out prestige and career boosts are overwhelmingly in these languages. A 2019 study in the British Journal of Sociology found that scholars from the Global South who publish in English get cited far more often than those who publish in their native languages—even when the research quality is a wash. That creates a huge incentive to write in the colonizer’s tongue, reinforcing the very hierarchies that postcolonial intellectuals often set out to critique.
Then there’s the economics of translation. Works written in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish rarely get translated into European languages unless they fit a certain mold: political Islam, women’s oppression, “East-West” encounters. A Moroccan philosopher writing in Arabic about Spinoza? Less likely to be translated than a Moroccan novelist writing in French about the veil. The market wants difference, not complexity. So the intellectual who works in a local language gets squeezed twice: first by the global publishing industry, and then by the expectations of what a “local” intellectual is supposed to produce.
This has real consequences for who gets to speak and who gets heard. When international media outlets need commentators on Middle Eastern affairs, they overwhelmingly dial up scholars who publish in English or French. These scholars are often sharp, but their perspectives are shaped by the linguistic and institutional worlds they move in. The Arabic-speaking scholar who publishes in Beirut or Cairo, deep in regional debates, rarely gets the call. Their expertise gets treated as parochial, while the London-based academic’s expertise gets treated as universal.
The Maghreb: Where Language Wars Are Fought in the Classroom
If you want to see the colonial linguistic legacy in its rawest form, look at the Maghreb’s classrooms. In Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, the question of what language children should learn in has been a political battleground for decades. Each country took a different road, but all three are still caught in the push-pull between French, Arabic, and Tamazight.
Morocco’s 2011 constitution recognized Tamazight as an official language alongside Arabic—a historic moment for the country’s Amazigh population. But implementation has crawled. French remains the language of instruction for scientific and technical subjects in most universities, a policy that stretches back to the protectorate era. In 2019, the Moroccan parliament passed a law bringing French back as the primary language of instruction for these subjects, reversing a decades-old Arabization policy. Supporters said French is the ticket to global knowledge and economic opportunity. Critics called it a neocolonial move that would deepen class divides, since only students from elite, French-speaking families would be able to keep up.
Algeria’s language politics are even more charged. The state’s aggressive Arabization push in the 1970s and 1980s was partly a reaction against the French colonial legacy, but it also sidelined Tamazight speakers, sparking protests and a long fight for recognition. Tamazight was finally recognized as a national language in 2002 and an official language in 2016. Yet French is still the de facto language of business, science, and elite education. Many Algerian academics still publish in French to reach an international audience, while Arabic-language research often gets dismissed as ideological or second-rate.
Tunisia, often praised for its education system, has its own contradictions. The state has kept a bilingual Arabic-French system since independence, but the quality of French instruction swings wildly between wealthy urban schools and poor rural ones. The result is a linguistic divide that maps right onto class and regional inequalities. A Tunisian student from a privileged background in Tunis or Sousse will likely be fluent in French and have a path to universities in France or Canada. A student from the interior may struggle with French and find their options narrowed, even if their intellectual abilities are just as sharp.
Who Is the “Real” Intellectual?
These structural inequalities breed a nagging anxiety about authenticity. The intellectual who works in French or English often gets accused—sometimes fairly—of being cut off from their own society. The intellectual who works in Arabic often gets dismissed—sometimes unfairly—as provincial or ideological. This double bind is a direct inheritance from the colonial era, when the very category of the “intellectual” was defined in opposition to the “traditional” scholar.
Think about the figure of the ulama, the religious scholars who were the backbone of pre-colonial intellectual life in the Arab world. Colonial administrators and Orientalist scholars systematically painted the ulama as rigid, dogmatic, hostile to reason. It was a caricature, but it did a job: by discrediting the existing intellectual class, colonialism could present itself as the bearer of enlightenment. The new, Western-educated intellectual was set up as the opposite of the alim: secular, rational, modern. That opposition still shapes debates about who counts as an intellectual in the region today.
The Palestinian thinker Edward Said spent much of his career pulling these dynamics apart. In Orientalism (1978), he showed how European scholarship on the “Orient” was never a neutral hunt for knowledge but a project of domination. What gets less airtime is how Said’s own position—an English-speaking academic at Columbia University—shaped his reception. Said wrote in English, for a Western audience, using Western theoretical frameworks. That let him be heard, but it also meant his critique of Orientalism sometimes got read as a performance for the very audience he was critiquing. The paradox isn’t a flaw in Said’s work; it’s baked into the linguistic and institutional landscape he had to navigate.
Resistance and Reclamation
But the story isn’t just about domination. Across the region, intellectuals have found ways to resist, subvert, and reclaim language as a site of struggle. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in Arabic, but his work got translated into dozens of languages, and he became one of the most widely read poets on the planet. His insistence on writing in Arabic was a political act, a refusal to let the colonizer’s language define his voice. But it was also an aesthetic choice: Darwish believed that Arabic, with its deep metrical traditions and its bone-deep connection to the landscape of Palestine, could carry things no other language could.
In the Maghreb, a new generation of writers and scholars is poking holes in the French-Arabic binary by working in Darija and Tamazight. The Moroccan novelist and poet Mohamed Choukri wrote in a raw, stripped-down Arabic that pulled in the rhythms of spoken Darija, scandalizing the literary establishment in the 1970s. Today, social media has cracked open new spaces for writing in vernacular languages—Algerian Darija on Facebook, Tamazight on YouTube. These platforms don’t erase the colonial hierarchy, but they do create parallel spaces where different kinds of intellectual authority can take root.
In academia, there are growing calls to decolonize knowledge production by valuing multilingual scholarship and putting real money behind translation. The Arab Council for the Social Sciences, founded in 2010, has made Arabic a central part of its mission, funding research and publications in the language and building networks of scholars who work primarily in Arabic. These efforts are small in scale but big in ambition: to construct an intellectual infrastructure that doesn’t depend on the linguistic gatekeepers of the global North.
The Unfinished Business of Decolonization
What does it mean to decolonize the intellect? It’s not as simple as swapping French for Arabic, or English for Swahili. The colonial project wasn’t just about imposing a language; it was about imposing a whole relationship between language and knowledge. It taught that some languages are vehicles for universal thought and others aren’t. It taught that the intellectual who speaks the colonizer’s language is modern, while the one who speaks the local language is traditional. It taught that translation is a one-way street, from the center to the periphery.
Undoing those lessons takes more than policy tweaks. It takes a shift in how we size up intellectual work. It means taking seriously the scholar who writes in Arabic about political theory—not as a “case study” but as someone contributing to universal debates. It means recognizing that the philosopher who works in Tamazight isn’t a folklorist but a thinker. It means building institutions—journals, universities, funding bodies—that don’t penalize scholars for writing in their own languages.
This isn’t a call for linguistic nationalism. The point isn’t to retreat into monolingual enclaves but to build a genuinely multilingual intellectual sphere, one where ideas flow in multiple directions and no single language holds a monopoly on authority. The colonial era fractured the intellectual landscape of the Middle East and North Africa. The task now is to stitch it back together—not by pretending the fractures aren’t there, but by learning to think across them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did colonial powers focus so much on language in their education policies?
Colonial administrators knew that controlling language meant controlling access to power, knowledge, and social mobility. By making the colonizer’s language the medium of higher education and administration, they created a class of intermediaries whose status depended on the colonial system. At the same time, they devalued local languages and the intellectual traditions tied to them, making it harder for colonized peoples to draw on their own cultural resources to push back.
How does the colonial language legacy affect academic publishing today?
The global academic publishing industry runs on English and French, which means scholars from the Middle East and North Africa often have to publish in these languages to get international recognition. This creates a structural bias: research published in Arabic, Turkish, or Persian is less likely to be cited, translated, or pulled into international debates. It also pressures scholars to frame their work in ways that appeal to Western audiences, sometimes at the cost of engaging with local intellectual traditions.
Is the solution to abandon European languages entirely?
No. The goal isn’t to reject French or English but to challenge the hierarchy that puts them above local languages. A truly decolonized intellectual sphere would be multilingual, valuing scholarship in all languages equally and investing in translation so ideas can move freely. The problem isn’t the use of European languages; it’s the assumption that they’re inherently better suited to serious intellectual work.
What can individuals do to challenge these hierarchies?
Readers can seek out and cite scholarship published in Arabic, Tamazight, Kurdish, and other regional languages. Academics can push their institutions to value publications in these languages when making hiring and promotion decisions. Publishers and editors can commission translations and create spaces for multilingual dialogue. Small actions, multiplied across institutions, can start to shift the norms that keep linguistic inequality in place.