What follows is an illuminating anecdote involving a professor, a young female student, and myself. The professor was an excitable and amiable middle-aged man, fairly chubby by North American standards. His swarthy complexion, gleaming bald head and bushy mustache betrayed his foreign ancestry — an Egyptian Coptic Christian from Cairo, long since emigrated to the New World, and long since employed at his hallowed American university, though he had never quite managed to master that standard, saccharine accent of the American Midwest. His Arab speech was deep and gravelly, yet still uniquely colorful. He could not utter a sentence so much as perform it, effortlessly […]