There are some books that are so essential to learning something new that they become like an extension of your body. Over 20 years ago, when I was a college student attempting to learn Arabic, that book was the Hans Wehr Modern Arabic-English Dictionary.
This was right before 9/11, before many Americans were interested in studying Arabic, and there were only a handful of students in my class. Every day we would all lug the Hans Wehr Dictionary, aka “The Wehr,” around with us and plop it on the classroom table. The book was bright green, with white font and a thin red band across the bottom, and it was the only dictionary that our professor recommended that we buy.
Our Arabic professor was a brilliant Palestinian man who was not satisfied with the current Arabic language-learning paradigm and decided to write his own textbooks instead. Believing that learning one dialect is better than learning none, our teacher taught us his own mother tongue, a sweet-strong Levantine Arabic that sounded like water being poured from a jug. I’m not sure if he was aware of the history of the Hans Wehr dictionary, but at that time there was an unspoken agreement to avoid talking politics in class.
