Your Arabic institute in Rabat

I didn't plan to open a language institute. I planned to travel.

For years I moved through the world the cheap way, a backpack, a hostel bed, and whatever conversation the evening produced. Thirty-five countries, four continents, and the topic that surfaced more nights than any other was language. I'd be asked what a word in Arabic meant, and within minutes I wasn't translating a word anymore; I was sketching the architecture of my mother tongue for people who had never seen it from the inside. Roots and patterns, the logic under the script. And alongside it, something else I found myself doing again and again, showing people what Morocco actually is, beyond the Sahara, Casablanca and Marrakech.

Somewhere in those hostel kitchens, this institute started.

I'm an engineer by training, and engineers can't leave a beautiful system unexplained. So I began building the structure I wished existed, Arabic laid out for people who didn't grow up inside it. I speak Arabic, French, English and Spanish, and I've spent time studying Tamazight, Russian and German, so I know both sides of the table, what it is to teach your own language, and what it is to sit in front of someone else's.

The other half of the story is my family. For more than fifteen years before Al Minbar existed, our home hosted students coming to Morocco, so I grew up watching what happens when someone lives a language instead of visiting it.

The dinner-table version of immersion isn't a marketing idea to me. It's how I was raised.

I'm a pure product of this country, I've lived in Morocco all my life, and I've stood in enough of the world to know how rare it is when cultures actually meet instead of passing each other. That meeting is what we build here, in 2021 and every Monday since.