How The Exorcist Possessed My Arabic Lesson

The original film The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin, is widely regarded as one of the scariest movies of all time, especially by the first generation to watch it in cinemas. Some still have trouble sleeping…

So, what does this film have to do with Arabic?

As one student commented in evaluations, “We thought our Arabic instructor had gone crazy when he told us we would watch The Exorcist in Arabic class!”

In this article, I’d like to describe how and why I used this iconic film, based on William Peter Blatty’s eponymous best-selling novel, in my beginning Arabic classes.

Opening Scene of “The Exorcist”: Arabic and the Islamic Call to Prayer

The movie “The Exorcist” is known in Arabic as Tārid al-Arwāḥ al-Sharrīrah (طَارِدُ الْأَرْوَاحِ الشِّرِّيرَةِ), which literally means The Expeller of Evil Spirits.

For those who might never have seen the film or those who may have forgotten the opening sequence, here’s a refresher.

Of course, few forget the middle, the end, or the haunting melody of “Tubular Bells.” That theme plays as the elderly Catholic exorcist arrives on a misty street in Georgetown.

But the film actually opens somewhere else entirely:

• with a wide shot of a blistering red desert sun in the Middle East.
• We’re at an archaeological site in Hatra (northern Iraq), surrounded by the sights and sounds of the desert, including two jackals howling in the background.
• We next see the sun rise at dawn and hear the muezzin in minarets reciting the call to prayer.

A young boy runs to fetch a grizzled, old, sun-burnt Jesuit priest who is also a leading Middle East archaeologist, in order for him to look closely at a recently found artefact at this dig.

The film subsequently cuts to the priest stumbling through an ancient souk. He is visibly shaken from what he had just seen. With his heart palpitating and his arthritic hands shaking, he orders tea at an outdoor café to take his digitalis (pills used to treat heart conditions).

Suddenly, the film cuts quickly to him in an office with a grandfather clock on the face of which are not Roman numerals, but true Arabic numerals (اَلْأَرْقَام ٱلْعَرَبِيَّة ٱلْمَشْرِقِيَّة) with the clock ticking loudly as he logs artefacts into his notebooks.

The office manager and he exchange some words about his urgent need to leave. Then, the film cuts to Georgetown in the United States and a movie set on the campus of Georgetown University.

➤ Until this point, everything was in Arabic, including writing in the logbook.

Setting for Using The Exorcist in an Arabic Lesson

This film is not, strictly speaking, the “ideal authentic text” that language teachers often look for. An authentic text is typically defined as “a spoken or written text produced by native speakers for native speakers in a native environment.”

This concept is part of the “communicative competence” methodology that became popular in the 1980s, influenced by scholars like Dell Hymes and Stephen Krashen.

However, I felt the film was perfect “comprehensible input” for my specific situation.

In the fall of 2016, I was teaching a beginning Arabic elective at a small private college in York, Pennsylvania. The class only met twice a week. For these students, the film’s Arabic was at just the right level – about one step above their current ability.

By this point in the semester, we were also learning words for foods and beverages and how to order in a restaurant or maqwa (مَقْهًى – café).

Reginald Hefner’s “No Writing Rule”

Until this point, I had taken an all-oral approach to teaching Arabic, as I wanted to delay introducing the script.

My goal was to wait until students had built up enough repertoire to hold a 3-5 minute conversation in Arabic with their peers, all without notes.

Once they reached that level, I could then teach them the script using the words and phrases they had already mastered. This seemed far more effective than the traditional method: starting with Aleph (أَلِف) and Ba’ (بَاء) and proceeding alphabetically with strange, out-of-context words.

I would also only introduce five letters on any given class, as they had to learn the independent form, the initial form, the medial form, and the final forms of these letters, which really amounted to about 20 items, though some were the same or similar. I wanted to ease the cognitive load by using words and phrasing, the meaning of which they already knew.

By this time in the semester, they had learned orally/aurally greetings, general salutations and their formulaic responses generally expected in the Arabic-speaking world, autobiographical information, the spoken numerals zero to 100.

I only made one exception to my “no writing rule” (really delayed writing): on the first day of class I gave them all a photocopy of the “real Arabic numerals,” not the “fake” Arabic numerals described in their math textbooks and I also gave each student a different copy of an Arabic hard-copy newspaper used “IRL” (in real life) from various countries in the Middle East or North Africa (MENA).

• As a first assignment, I told them to simply look for examples of these numerals in the newspapers that I had given them because it was a TASK that I felt that a beginning student could accomplish with an authentic Arabic text.
• At this point, I had NOT taught them to say the numerals or to read any script on the first day of class. Instead, we focused on giving and receiving autobiographical information and greeting each other appropriately in Arabic.
• When the students arrived for their second Arabic class, they all had not only found examples of the numerals but also could tell me they found what they thought were prices of cars, prices of foodstuffs, what seemed to be the date of the newspaper or references to years, etc. They also told me that their classmates in other classes were surprised that they could “read Arabic after only one class” using real newspapers.

I had assigned a TASK that beginners could complete so that by the time I showed them a segment of the beginning of “The Exorcist” they were quite pleased that they could read the clock face in the movie, after which we began to learn to tell time for everyday use in spoken Arabic; again, I delayed the more formal variety of telling time using ordinal numerals used in more formal situations in Arabic.

Discussing The Fatiha

By this time, I had also taught the class about various cultural features like the pillars of Islam, how the Fatiha (ٱلْفَاتِحَة) from the Quran (ٱلْقُرْآن) and other short supplications are sometimes used in various social contexts (though this can vary locally).

I also reminded them that not all Arabs are Muslims and that there are Christian Arabs as well.

The Exorcist in an Arabic Lesson

In the end, I felt the 10-15 minutes (different times depending on whether it was the Director’s cut or the theatrical release) invested in seeing the beginning clip of The Exorcist (but not the whole movie) repaid handsome dividends in the form of the continued enthusiasm by my students for the study of Arabic, however unusual their professor seemed to be.

I was also able to use the film The Exorcist as a springboard for discussion of some cultural issues and as a small nearly authentic example of Arabic and Arab culture that could be digested by total beginners like, for example, a key scene featuring Robert DeNiro speaking Arabic in Director David O. Russell’s American Hustle (2013) with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper.

The students in my class were so happy that they could carry on conversations with each other entirely in Arabic after only one 75-minute class that the Chair of the Department asked me whether I would be willing to teach both Arabic 101 and Arabic 102 every semester, starting with my second semester at the college.

By the end of the second semester, the Department Chair asked whether I would consider teaching Mandarin Chinese in addition to both Arabic 101 and Arabic 102 every semester thereafter, starting in the FALL semester.

By this time, I had also taken my Arabic 101 and 102 students to an Arabic Calligraphy Exhibit at The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

On our way home, my Arabic students begged me to take them past the stairs and the house where “The Exorcist” was filmed in Georgetown.

Note: The feature image was created by AI and is used for illustration purposes only.