Today at Brown

As an historic linguist, Mohamed al-Sharkawi not only teaches Arabic as a foreign language, he also studies how the Arabic language developed throughout the world. He says the former helps with the latter.

“If you can answer how a language developed, you can find very good keys as to how to teach the language more effectively,” he said. “The cases of language development show how languages behave and how we behave toward them.”

A 1993 graduate of Ain Shams University in Cairo, Al-Sharkawi received an M.A. in teaching Arabic as a foreign language from the American University in Cairo in 1997 and a Ph.D. in Arabic languages from the Roadboud University Nijmegen in Holland in 2005. He comes to Brown from the American University in Cairo, where he has taught Arabic at the Arabic Language Institute since 2004. Previously, he taught at Cairo University, the Catholic University Nijmegen in Holland, and the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Al-Sharkawi has also worked at the Rehabilitation Center for the Blind and the Oyoun Misr Eye Society in Cairo.

Al-Sharkawi’s publications include a groundbreaking journal article on the Arabic Braille system. He says the long-awaited research made a big impact in the way he showed how the Braille system deals with problems in the Arabic writing system, such as short vowels. He also authored a controversial book, Arabicization in the First Century of the Islamic Era (2007), which drew a scenario for the Arabicization process that “not everyone agrees with” in the scholarly community. Additional publications include two articles in Language, three entries in volumes of The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, and several translated books.

Al-Sharkawi believes the “best education for a scholar is to teach” — and at Brown, he will be meeting a rising demand. According to Elsa Amanatidou, director of the Center for Language Studies, enrollment in Arabic language courses has more than tripled since being offered here for the first time in 1996.

“Mohammad al-Sharkawi’s presence will enrich the Arabic curriculum and enable our students to draw on his demonstrated expertise in teaching and research,” Amanatidou said.