Talking About Language Learning and more with Mohammad Ali Mojaradi

A Q&A conversation about language and other topics with the owner of Persian Poetics, author of a forthcoming book on Jalaluddin Rumi, and "Sharghzadeh" on Twitter

People who follow this Substack or my Twitter (sorry, “X”) account will probably be aware that I am very interested in languages and enjoy studying them as a pastime. I was always of the view that immersion was necessary for learning a language, but over the past few years I developed a system for self-teaching without immersion that I discovered works quite well, and have written about in the past. Over the past five years I’ve managed to teach myself intermediate Persian and Turkish, while greatly improving my Urdu. I’m learning Levantine and classical Arabic presently, and life permitting, I hope to become conversant this year.

Muhammad Ali Mojaradi is someone I first met on Twitter and have also met in person on occasion, and he shares my interest in this subject. Mojaradi teaches Persian online at the website Persian Poetics, and has a forthcoming book of English translations of the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi coming out later this year.

I plan to share Q&A conversations with interesting people in future on this page, and I initially wanted to talk to Mojaradi about language learning specifically. But we wound up having a very interesting conversation also touching on history, religion, urbanism, life in America, and more that I wanted to share below.

Our exchange has been lightly edited for clarity.

Can you tell me a little a bit about your background and how you got into teaching?

I grew up as an Iranian-American in Detroit with a tenuous connection to Iran through my elders and some diaspora spaces. As I got older, an identity crisis emerged, leaving me feeling that I am not American—or that I didn't want to be American. It was post-9/11 and I had faced bullying and exclusion because of my identity. The alternative was to be Iranian like my parents, but like many immigrants I discovered that I wasn’t really Iranian either. My poor Persian speaking skills, and worse, my illiteracy, were also a source of shame. My family would visit Iran often, and at a certain point I reached an age where I was conscious of my inability to read the language. This experience was very frustrating. My Persian was the “kitchen table” version of language that most children of immigrants speak. Sure you’re functional, but at a very basic level that is only endearing for children, once you’re an adult, it begins to sound “cringe,” as the kids say.

Back in Detroit I was shaping up into a bad kid. Marginalization pushed me into unproductive subcultures and places. My friends were up to no good, getting arrested, using drugs, even selling them. It was clear early on that I was not on a good path. The school was trying to reach me, to figure out what was going wrong. Eventually I decided to just leave America, so at age 15 I moved in with my grandparents in Tehran. Going to school in Iran straightened me out. It also improved my Persian, which I began to speak at a native level. In adulthood I moved back to the Middle East, first in Jordan, then Iran, which is where I started teaching Persian professionally.

Can you tell me a bit about your own journey as a language learner and what first piqued your interest in it?

My native languages are Persian and English. French and Spanish I studied in grade school. My Arabic is proficient, but it’s a language you can never perfect – what people say about it being second only to Chinese in difficulty is probably true. But at this point I can say that I speak it at a near-native level. Arabs here in Kuwait, where I live today, often think I am an Arab, perhaps from Syria or Jordan, because of my vaguely Levantine accent, although I am able to code switch into Gulf Arabic if needed.

My native Detroit is home to a large Arab population, the largest concentration in North America surely, if not in the largest in the West. Although I never lived in Dearborn specifically, my childhood was marked with weekly visits to local cultural centers, and eventually I did attend the first two years of college at the University of Michigan’s Dearborn campus. 

The Arabic language in Dearborn today is like Italian in Little Italy during the 1920s; it’s just in the air. Even if most people can speak English, there is a critical mass of Arabic speakers that ensures the second and even third generations speak the language at some level. Almost everyone I knew was Arab, and Arabic was always spoken around me. You can’t fully participate in Middle Eastern diaspora life without the language. My dad always regretted not learning Arabic. He’s a freelance architect, almost all of his clients are Arabic speaking. The feeling of missing out was mutual, I hate the feeling of not knowing something. I made a commitment to learning Arabic, which ultimately resulted in winning a scholarship to study for a year in Jordan.

I’ve written a bit about what worked for me in learning languages with self-study, can you tell me a bit about your own style of learning, teaching, and what you’ve found effective?

Successful language learning starts with your niyyat, or intention. In Islam, we have to make an intention before we embark on a spiritual action. We have to do the same when it comes to learning a language. What are you trying to get out of this experience? My niyyat was to gain a deeper understanding of my religion and culture. Many people start to learn a language and quit along the way, because they don’t have a solid understanding of their own goals and intentions.

To give you an analogy: If you are driving and find yourself in traffic, your purpose for driving becomes important. If you are driving to work or class, you are going to push and persevere through that traffic, no matter what it takes. If you’re just driving around for fun and  with no specific destination in mind, once things get difficult, which is inevitable in language learning, you’ll probably just turn around. The same is true for my classes, students who begin committed to a clear goal succeed.

You have to engage with any language you learn on several levels. Don’t just sign up for an hour of lessons a week and leave it at that. You have to revise what you learn, listen to music, watch movies, make friends who speak the language, even spend time in an ethnic enclave. The more points of contact, the better. Try to simulate the experience of being an immigrant in a new country, immersed into the target language.

My teaching is unique in that I have a focus on poetry. I haven’t seen anyone else doing this, although that was traditionally how Persian was taught. The modern pedagogical wisdom of teaching languages to adults, which uses material originally designed for children, is very misguided. I had a student who could barely read at first, only speaking the kitchen-table Persian I mentioned. I encouraged her to start immediately with Rumi. She was very slow at first, but now her reading is very fluent, and she is not just reading poems but even translating them on her own

Language learning is difficult, and I know many who have tried and failed. I never felt discouraged because I always kept my niyyat in mind. Learning Persian and Arabic was part of my journey to shape an identity for myself, and that is a very strong motivator. So much of the human experience and our culture is bound up in language. From a Muslim perspective, if you don’t know at least one of the major Islamicate languages—whether Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or Urdu—much of your tradition and history remains inaccessible to you.

On social media, you’re well known for being a critic of Muslim societies and contemporary Islam. Can you expand a bit more on some of these critiques, and what you think is behind the relative stagnation of much of the Muslim world?

We Muslims are unaware of our history. We don’t have a clear picture of what happened in our past, or whatever we do know is fabricated or fanciful, and we have no real understanding of what is happening in the present nor what our situation is. We live with fantasies about the past and present. It logically follows that we don’t know what the future should look like. Muslims in the West often have particularly delusional ideas about our history. We think that a caliphate will save us, but they don’t know that many of the caliphs we idolize had very different conceptions of religion than them, many of them were Sufis, some of them sponsored sects of Islam seen as heretical by the mainstream today, a great many of them were drunkards or pursued sexual relationships with young boys. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There is a very low level of understanding, and what we know is highly sanitized. A defeated people will rarely engage with their history in a serious, critical way. Now of course in the West we often find ourselves on the other end of the spectrum, which is not good either.

After living in the Muslim world for the last five years, I belive that despotism is a major part of our crisis. It’s not just about unelected rulers, despotism poisons every aspect of society. Our own households are tiny dictatorships, where the father, or sometimes the mother, rules with an iron first. The same is true for most other things, that’s why businesses often fail when the founding father passes away, because, absent the dictator, the remaining sons cannot run the show. The same poisonous mindset follows us to America where our mosques are often run as personal fiefdoms. Despotism is why Muslim countries are often poor, because instead of having an open, transparent, rule-based economy where anyone can freely participate, the economy is run as a private fiefdom for the privileged few. There is a culture of intellectual poverty because rulers discourage any type of critical thinking. Urban planning is abysmal, because rulers are rightfully afraid that walkable streets in dense cities are a hot-bed for revolutions, as we have seen in past decades, so they prefer giant highways and shopping malls where their citizens are atomized and surveilled.

Are societies run in this way ever going to see a good day? I don’t think so. Those who maintain that Western Muslims are obliged to “make hijrah” by moving to live in a Muslim country have no idea what it's like to live in these countries. Even assuming that your Western money and citizenships can shield you from the worst of the third-world conditions, no amount of money will make you free. It’s unbearable to live in a society where you are unable to express your opinion. Even worse, to raise your children with the fear of intelligence agencies, telling them what they can and cannot say, for fear of what could happen to them or your entire family. That’s not a psychologically healthy environment.

It seems obvious that when people are doing poorly, they should be subject to harsh and unsparing critique, for their own good. But I’ve noticed that Muslim societies and communities are often quite intolerant of this kind of criticism, suppressing it or taking it defensively. I’m not really part of any Muslim community outside of family and friends, but I’m curious how do you deal with this as someone who comments regularly on these issues?

Sometimes we can feel like we are a rare sane person in a community mired in mass delusion. In general, despite their terrible conditions, Muslims are completely incapable of handling any serious critique. Instead, we prefer to be told that we are perfect, and that any problems we have are the fault of others. I’ve become persona non grata among many Muslims for my commentary. I have heard talk of sermons in mosques given to refute my points, even blogs dedicated to “exposing” me as a heretic, hypocrite, government agent, or whatever else. People have told me there is no future for me as a “career Muslim” if I touch certain topics. But what does it say about our communities if we can’t take criticism? Or that we can’t tolerate being told that we’re wasting mental energy on issues that have no material benefit to us? There’s no point being part of a ridiculous discourse, and I’m not going to entertain people’s delusions. I don’t need to be part of any community. I have my own family and friends. I’m fine with being Muslim with them. Despite all my critique, I prefer mosques in this part of the world: you go in, you pray, you leave. No questions asked. I don’t need the politics of mosques in Western countries.

You identify yourself as a Sufi, or someone who practices Sufism. In general I notice there is an incomprehension about what this means in the West, including among many Muslims who think that Sufism is not a real part of Islam, or that it somehow represents a fringe, marginal position.

The issue relates to the general ignorance we suffer from, where Western Muslims don’t really understand Islam all that well. The perception of Sufism in the West is formed by one of two sources. The first are white Westerners who think of Sufism as an Islamic-inspired version of New Age spirituality, or a kind of Islam-lite for those who like Islam but don’t want to follow its somewhat restrictive laws. The other side is the Salafi movement, who hate Sufism for theological reasons. Therefore, Western Muslims are often under the impression that Sufism is Islam-lite for Whites, or a deviant sect.

Western Muslims are generally alienated from how Islam is practiced in the Muslim world. Most Muslims in America come from South Asia, Turkey, Yemen, Africa, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and other places where the popular understanding of Islam is heavily influenced by Sufism. They aren’t really in touch with the culture of their home countries, where Sufi Islam permeates everything in the social environment, their only point of contact is often the local mosque and YouTube shaykhs, both sources being Salafi.

When I tell people in the West that I’m a Sufi, they are under the impression that it means I’m not very religious. Then they see me in a thawb, and see that my wife covers, or they notice prayer rugs in our living room, and they discover that I am “conventionally” religious. This is ironic, in the past being a Sufi generally meant you had more religious commitments: taking direct guidance from a shaykh, attending a Sufi lodge, engaging with more prayers, rather than the opposite.

You’ve lived abroad for many years now, can you reflect a bit about your decision to reverse the course your parents took and migrate away from the United States?

Growing up in Metro Detroit and watching the inner city fall apart in real time was a very painful and eye-opening experience for me. As a suburban kid, I always thought of Detroit as an exciting, interesting place. My father’s early years in America were spent there, and I felt that our American story began in Detroit. But after decades of decline the city suffered a death blow with the 2008 financial crisis. I was a teenager, and my family was severely impacted. That experience made me skeptical about the American dream and capitalism. Furthermore, when I learned the ways that the automobile was responsible for both Detroit’s boom and bust, as well as the lack of transit and walkable cities in most of America, it only further disillusioned me. I used to live in a small town just outside of Detroit, which was a pre-car, walkable, inner-ring suburb. But when my family moved to a post-1964 White-flight car-oriented suburb my social life suffered. It dawned on me how bad urbanism just makes life miserable, with awful public spaces, traffic, pollution, and an endless waste of money and resources. That’s why I’m focused on making sure that the place that I permanently settle down is a walkable city, such as New York City or Istanbul. It's just not worth living in a place that is designed for cars rather than people, which unfortunately describes most of the United States.

Despite your critiques I’ve noticed that you’re really quite positive about America, especially after living abroad for so long. I’ve come to a similar perspective after reaching adulthood despite my continued opposition to much of American foreign policy. 

When I first moved to Iran as a 15 year old, my dad told me that the experience of living there would make me love America, like all immigrants do. Although that was not immediately true, now that I am experiencing the responsibilities of adulthood, I have come to appreciate what America offers to the average person. In places that I’ve lived, people are thrown in dungeons and tortured, or have their citizenship revoked, rendering them stateless, just for criticizing the government. Just imagine that: You are born and raised in a country, but if you say something the rulers dislike, they send you a letter saying that your citizenship has been revoked. That means that you now can’t access any services, and you also can’t leave the country because you no longer have a passport. Maybe if you’re rich enough you can bribe someone or buy a new citizenship, but if not, you’re just stuck forever. If you have kids, they also will be stateless and you can forget about them going to college, or having a better life than you did. 

Many people are suffering in these situations. Seeing this made me realize that as an American, I have dignity and I have freedom. No one can deport me or dispossess me simply because of my speech. Ironically, I feel more free and dignified as a member of the most disliked religious group in America, than as a person living in a country where that religion is the law of the land.

The beauty of America—as well as other Anglophone countries like Canada and the United Kingdom—is that you also don’t necessarily have to conform to a specific cultural norm, you can forge your own identity. After having an identity crisis as a young man, I eventually realized that I don’t have to be Iranian or American, I can just be this weird guy dressed up in odd clothes who teaches poetry. When I’m in New York no one asks me what passport I travel with, what I’m doing here, or why I married my wife, which are common questions you get living in the Middle East. You are really free to be yourself, and the only requirement is that you not bother others. I’m happy to take that deal.

It goes without saying that America has done a lot of evil, both to people at home and abroad. Just look at what is happening in the news today, with our full support. All of that being said, for the average person, if you imagine the kind of life that you want to lead, there are few countries that are as open and full of opportunity as America. That’s why despite all the criticism and complaints, people ultimately vote with their feet and move there in droves, whether by plane or on foot. People want to be American, because they prefer a life with a hope of advancement and personal reinvention rather than the misery and stagnation of their home countries.