In the summer of 2019, I sat in a Parisian seminar room listening to a visiting professor from a Gulf university present his research on medieval Islamic philosophy. His French was immaculate, his Arabic citations precise. Yet the first question from the floor, posed by a young French doctoral student, wasn’t about his argument. She asked him to “clarify his positionality in relation to the Western canon.” The subtext hung in the air like smoke: you speak our language, but are you really one of us?
That moment, small and unremarkable as it seemed, laid bare a centuries-old architecture of intellectual legitimacy. Colonial language policies didn’t just impose French, English, or Portuguese on conquered populations. They built a ranking system for thought itself—a hierarchy that decided which languages could carry abstract reasoning, which could produce theory, and which were fit only for folklore, emotion, or the merely personal. That ranking has outlived empire. It’s still with us, quietly deciding who gets to be an intellectual and who remains a native informant.
Inventing the “Dialect”
Before the French army set foot in Algiers in 1830, Arabic was already a language of mathematics, medicine, jurisprudence, and astronomy across North Africa and the Levant. It wasn’t a vernacular scrambling for prestige against French; it was a fully formed intellectual medium with its own traditions of commentary, disputation, and innovation. The colonial project needed to dismantle that status, and language policy was one of its sharpest instruments.
In Algeria, the French administration methodically reclassified Arabic as a “langue étrangère”—a foreign language—on its own soil. At the same time, the spoken forms were demoted to mere “dialectes,” unworthy of formal instruction. This wasn’t a neutral bit of linguistics. It was a deliberate operation to cut Algerians off from their own intellectual lineage, to make the classical Arabic of Ibn Rushd and Ibn Khaldun unreachable except through French mediation. The message was blunt: if you want to think seriously, you’ll do it in French.
Similar scripts played out across the British and Portuguese empires. In India, Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education declared that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” English wasn’t positioned as one language among many. It was the only vehicle for reason, science, and progress. Indigenous languages got romanticized as vessels for poetry and spirituality—lovely, yes, but fundamentally incapable of rigorous analysis.
The Bilingual Thinker as a Suspect Figure
This history leaves intellectuals from formerly colonized regions caught in a particular kind of double bind. Write in French or English, and you gain a global readership. Metropolitan institutions take you seriously. Your work gets shelved under “theory” instead of “area studies.” But you also risk being read as inauthentic—as someone who abandoned their own tradition, performing a kind of linguistic ventriloquism.
The Moroccan critic Abdelfattah Kilito has written sharply about this predicament. In his essay “Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language,” he describes the strange discomfort of the Arab writer who chooses French. That choice is never read as purely aesthetic or practical. It’s always a political and psychological statement. The French reader, Kilito notes, often approaches such texts with a mix of condescension and suspicion: condescension because the writer is seen as having “chosen” a superior language, suspicion because the writer might be smuggling alien concepts under the cover of perfect grammar.
What rarely gets said is that this “choice” is often no choice at all. In Morocco, as in Algeria and Tunisia, the post-independence state kept French as the language of higher education, science, and technical fields well into the late twentieth century. Becoming a doctor, an engineer, or a philosopher meant, by structural necessity, becoming fluent in French. The decision to write in French was made long before any individual author put pen to paper. It was baked into the architecture of the university system, the publishing industry, and the international networks of intellectual prestige.
The Lebanese Exception and Its Limits
Lebanon often gets held up as a counterexample—a place where Arabic, French, and increasingly English coexist in a lively multilingual intellectual culture. And it’s true that Beirut has produced remarkable thinkers who move fluidly between languages: Amin Maalouf writing novels in French steeped in Arab history, Elias Khoury crafting Arabic prose that engages deeply with European modernism.
But even here, the hierarchy holds. Walk through the bookshops of Hamra, and you’ll find that French and English titles command higher prices, get reviewed in more prestigious venues, and are more likely to be translated into other European languages. An Arabic-language novel that wins the International Prize for Arabic Fiction gets celebrated regionally. Translate it into French and publish it with Actes Sud, and suddenly it enters “world literature.” The Arabic original is treated as raw material; the French translation is the finished product.
The Untranslatable and the Unthinkable
Colonial language policies didn’t just decide which languages were prestigious. They shaped what could be thought in the first place. Every language carries a particular epistemology—a set of assumptions about what exists, what can be known, and how knowledge should be organized. When one language gets elevated to the status of universal reason, its epistemology becomes invisible, naturalized as simply “the way things are.”
Take the Arabic term ‘aql, often translated as “reason” or “intellect.” In the Islamic philosophical tradition, ‘aql isn’t just a faculty for logical deduction. It’s a luminous substance that connects the human soul to the divine, a mode of knowing that encompasses both rational demonstration and spiritual intuition. Translate ‘aql as “reason,” and you strip it of its metaphysical architecture, forcing it into a Cartesian framework the original term was designed to transcend. The translation is linguistically correct and philosophically catastrophic.
This isn’t a problem of bad translation. It’s a structural feature of a global intellectual economy where certain languages are presumed to contain universal concepts, while others contain only local particularities. When a French philosopher writes about la raison, she’s doing philosophy. When an Arab philosopher writes about ‘aql, he’s doing Arab philosophy—a subfield, a regional specialty, something that needs explaining and contextualizing before it can be taken seriously.
Translation as Gatekeeping
Translation, often celebrated as a bridge between cultures, also works as a gatekeeping mechanism. The decision of what gets translated, by whom, and into which languages is deeply political. Works that confirm European expectations of the “Arab world”—novels about oppressed women, political repression, or the trauma of migration—are far more likely to get translated than works of abstract philosophy, literary experimentation, or historical scholarship that don’t fit the expected narrative.
The Franco-Lebanese writer Venus Khoury-Ghata, who writes in French, is widely translated and celebrated in France. Her contemporary, the Arabic-language novelist Hoda Barakat, received less attention in French literary circles despite winning the International Prize for Arabic Fiction—until her work was translated into French, at which point it became legible to the Parisian literary establishment. The pattern is consistent: Arabic is a language to be translated from, not a language in which world literature is written.
Resistance and Reclamation
But the story isn’t only one of loss and subordination. Across the Maghreb and the Mashreq, writers and thinkers have developed sophisticated strategies for reclaiming intellectual agency within and against colonial languages.
The Algerian novelist Kateb Yacine, after years of writing in French, made a dramatic turn in the 1970s toward popular theater in Algerian Arabic, declaring that French was “a war booty, not a national language.” His later plays, performed in markets and village squares, were acts of linguistic reterritorialization—an insistence that serious intellectual and political work could be done in the language of the street, not just the language of the lycée.
More recently, the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri undertook a massive project of rereading the Arab-Islamic philosophical tradition in Arabic, deliberately bypassing the French academic frameworks that had long mediated access to that tradition. His four-volume Critique of Arab Reason is a sustained argument that Arab thought can be its own method, that it doesn’t need validation from European epistemology to be rigorous or relevant.
These aren’t nostalgic returns to a pre-colonial purity. They’re strategic interventions that recognize the damage done by colonial language policies while refusing to accept that damage as permanent or total. They treat Arabic not as a wounded language in need of preservation, but as a living intellectual medium capable of innovation and critique.
The Contemporary Academy and Its Linguistic Gatekeeping
In today’s globalized university system, the colonial language hierarchy has been rebranded but not dismantled. English, in particular, has become the de facto language of international scholarship. To publish in a “top-tier” journal, to be cited widely, to participate in major conferences—all of this requires not just competence in English, but a particular kind of academic English, with its own rhetorical conventions, its own citational practices, its own unspoken rules about what counts as a legitimate argument.
Scholars who write in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish face a brutal choice: publish in their own language and remain invisible to the global academic community, or publish in English and accept the epistemological constraints that come with it. The result is a brain drain not just of people, but of ideas. Concepts that can’t be easily rendered into academic English simply disappear from the international conversation.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s the cumulative effect of decades of institutional decisions: which languages are taught in doctoral programs, which journals are indexed in major databases, which presses have the resources to distribute globally. The system doesn’t need to explicitly exclude Arabic or Persian; it simply needs to treat English as the default, and the exclusion happens automatically.
Toward a Multilingual Intellectual Commons
What would it mean to take seriously the idea that Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and other languages of the region are not merely vehicles for “local knowledge” but fully capable of producing universal theory? It would require, at minimum, a radical restructuring of how intellectual work is evaluated and circulated.
It would mean that French and English departments in European and American universities would need to engage with Arabic-language scholarship not as an exotic supplement, but as a central part of their disciplines. It would mean that translation would be valued as a form of original intellectual labor, not as a secondary service. It would mean that the question “Why don’t you write in English?” would be met with the same incredulity as “Why don’t you write in Arabic?”
Most fundamentally, it would mean abandoning the assumption that some languages are naturally suited to theory while others are suited only to poetry, politics, or personal testimony. That assumption is not a fact about language. It is a residue of colonial policy, and it can be undone.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did colonial powers focus so heavily on language policy?
Language was central to the colonial project because it determined access to institutions, social mobility, and the very categories of thought. By controlling which languages were used in schools, courts, and administration, colonial powers could create a local elite that was linguistically and culturally dependent on the metropole, while simultaneously devaluing indigenous knowledge systems. Language policy was a form of epistemic violence that complemented military and economic domination.
Is it possible to write authentically in a colonial language?
This question itself reflects the colonial legacy it seeks to interrogate. The notion of “authenticity” in language is often a trap, implying that there is a pure, uncontaminated linguistic space to which one can return. Writers from formerly colonized regions have long demonstrated that colonial languages can be appropriated, transformed, and made to carry experiences and concepts they were never designed to express. The issue is not whether individuals can write authentically in French or English—they can and do—but whether the global intellectual system recognizes that authenticity when it appears.
How does the privileging of European languages affect knowledge production today?
The dominance of English and French in academic publishing means that research conducted in other languages is systematically marginalized. This creates significant gaps in global knowledge: important findings in medicine, agriculture, climate science, and the humanities may never reach international audiences if they are published in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish. It also distorts research priorities, as scholars in the region often choose topics that will appeal to English-language journals rather than those most relevant to their own societies.
What can be done to create a more equitable intellectual landscape?
Structural change requires action at multiple levels. Universities can recognize publications in multiple languages for hiring and promotion. Funding agencies can support translation initiatives and multilingual journals. Scholars can cite work in languages other than English, challenging the assumption that important research only appears in European languages. Readers can seek out work by thinkers writing in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, recognizing that these traditions offer theoretical resources that are not simply derivative of European thought.