Daily Inspiration Quote by Juan Cole

There is a quiet flex in the word “too.” Juan Cole isn’t just listing languages; he’s repositioning himself inside the story he studies. For an American educator known for work on the modern Middle East, “I speak Urdu quite a lot” signals lived contact rather than armchair expertise. Urdu isn’t the default prestige language in U.S. academia the way French or German once were. Saying he uses it “quite a lot” pushes back against the idea that language learning is decorative scholarship, something you dust off for a footnote. It implies conversations, media consumption, fieldwork, friendships - the messy, ongoing kind of engagement that makes translation less about words and more about worldviews.

The second clause, “and I read a lot of Persian,” sharpens the point. Reading Persian evokes a different register: archival depth, poetry, intellectual history, the long memory of empires and religious traditions that still shape politics. He’s marking range: Urdu for contemporary South Asian public life, Persian for a civilizational library that stretches from Iran to India. Together they counter a common Western shortcut that treats “the Middle East” or “the Muslim world” as a monolith and relies on English-language intermediaries.

The subtext is credibility, but also a critique: serious analysis requires linguistic humility. If you can’t hear people in their own idioms, you’ll end up mistaking your categories for their reality. Cole’s sentence works because it’s modest on the surface and quietly polemical underneath.