This brought back Angry Arab memories. This is an interview with Lebanese poet, Qaysar `Afif. `Afif was my philosophy teacher in high school (yes, we have to take Arab/Islamic philosophy in high school) at IC in Beirut. Once during a class, he said something unflattering about Karl Marx. And I was a dogmatic Marxist-Leninist back then. So I was furious, and told him that he can't talk about Marxism when it is very clear that he did not know what he was talking about. I told him that he can't talk to students about Marxism when he was biased and ignorant of the subject matter. What happened was then odd--or so thought Angry Arab brat. He started yelling and screaming--non stop--for something like 20 minutes. Just yelling and screaming at me: "and who do you think you are" he kept saying. "A student", I kept telling him back. Students from other classes came down because they heard the noise. I don't know what it is about me but that happened to me a few times in my school years although I think of myself as easy going. It happened to me once before when I was in what you call junior high here in the US: it was with my Arabic teacher, Hamdi Huwalla. He gave us a sentence as an example of a grammatical form of Arabic speech, and I said that the substance of the statement (about early Islamic history" was quite inaccurate." And he really got mad too, and also started yelling and screaming at me, saying: "You have not even hatched out of the egg" yet, you arrogant kid. I was an arrogant 13 year-old then. I ran into Hamdi Huwalla this summer, and he was most nice and kind to me. It finally happened to me at AUB in a class on Islamic thought with Nadim Nu`aymah. Nu`aymah had (has?) a very annoying habit of having us read a passage (from the Albert Hourani book, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age--I still remember) and then asks us about the intentions each of the authors cited. And if you read the wise teacher's mind, and guess what he understood from it, you were right. Otherwise, you were wrong. It was my last semester as an undergraduate, and I just wanted to finish the ordeal of this course. So one day, he had us read a passage, and he asked that same question: What did the author intend to say. People raised their hands, and offered their interpretations. He thought that they were all wrong. I obviously did not raise my hand. So he said: AbuKhalil. What do you think? And I said: What do I think? I am not going to answer. I refuse to play this game. You want not students, but mind readers, and I am no a mind reader. I watched you play this game all semester long, and want no role in it. So I thought that I gave a polite but firm answer. The man lost it, literally. He started yelling and screaming, and then yelled: I can't see you in the class anymore. Leave the room immediately. I don't want you in the room ever again. So I left. I had to go and talk to him later because I had to graduate. He let me back in, but he stopped playing that game I, noticed. I always tell my students the first day of class that story to remind them that we are not dealing with exact science here. Maybe I should start a new section: Angry Arab memories.