I can’t imagine believing all your life that your father had never learned to read or write and only finding out ten years after his death that he most certainly did. In a system going back to the 10th century.
I remember reading a profile of Richard Nixon years ago where he justified his intense racism by saying, All those people in Africa and across all of history they never even came up with a written language? They never kept records?
But they did.
Ajami, a modified Arabic, was never taught in school by the colonialists nor acknowledged.
With help from my friend Lise, I stumbled across this very cool story from my late father’s alma mater.