The politics of Arabic language education: Moroccan immigrant children's language socialization into ethnic and religious identities

This paper focuses on issues of reproduction and the manufacturing of national/ethnic and religious identities in the deterritorialized space of the Moroccan immigrant diaspora. More specifically, this paper examines Moroccan immigrant children's language socialization into pan-Arabic and Islamic identities in relation to the teaching of the Arabic language to these younger generations of Moroccans, who have either already been born in Spain, or who immigrated to Spain with their parents when they were toddlers. Moroccan immigrant children in this study attend Arabic language classes in a Spanish public school—a relatively new program jointly funded by the Spanish and Moroccan Ministries of Education—and in after-school religious classes in a small oratory-mosque run by a local Islamic cultural organization. In this paper, I address similarities and differences in linguistic and literacy practices between these two contexts, paying particular attention to how the internal dynamism of the Moroccan community itself organizes adults’ socializing efforts in relation to language education, especially where there may be some conflicting interests in achieving literacy by religious and secular elements of the children's communities of origin. Comparing language and literacy practices in the fields of Arabic language classes at the school and in the mosque allows us to trace homologies, or similarity of organization in linguistic and cultural (re)production, across these two settings, but also to uncover different kinds of strategies teachers engage in and the differential effect pursued by putting these strategies to use in the classroom. Outlining both, processes of homology and heterogeneity, is particularly important to understand the degree of redundancy in language socialization practices, as well as the possible areas of disjuncture that may impinge upon children's ability to negotiate commonality of belonging in their multiple communities.