Writing for an Audience Linda Flower

Linda Flower (1944- ) received her PhD from Rutgers University and is a professor of rhetoric at
Carnegie Mellon University. She also co-founded Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center in 1991.
She is greatly interested in cross-cultural discourse: the conflicting voices and perspectives that
consequently arise and the importance of embracing them under the strategic guidance of the
teacher. This excerpt was originally published in Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing (1998).

01 The goal of the writer is to create a momentary common ground between the reader and the
writer. You want the reader to share your knowledge and your attitude toward that knowledge.
Even if the reader eventually disagrees, you want him or her to be able for the moment to see things
as you see them. A good piece of writing closes the gap between you and the reader.

Analyze Your Audience

02 The first step in closing that gap is to gauge the distance between the two of you. Imagine, for
example, that you are a student writing your parents, who have always lived in New York City,
about a wilderness survival expedition you want to go on over spring break. Sometimes obvious
differences such as age or background will be important, but the critical differences for writers
usually fall into three areas: the reader's knowledge about the topic; his or her attitude toward it,
and his or her personal or professional needs. Because these differences often exist, good writers do
more than simply express their meaning; they pinpoint the critical differences between themselves
and their reader and design their writing to reduce these differences. Let us look at these areas in
more detail.

Knowledge

03 This is usually the easiest difference to handle. What does your reader need to know? What are
the main ideas you hope to teach? Does your reader have enough background knowledge to really
understand you? If not, what would he or she have to learn?

Attitudes

04 When we say a person has knowledge, we usually refer to his conscious awareness of explicit
facts and clearly defined concepts. This kind of knowledge can be easily written down or told to
someone else. However, much of what we "know" is not held in this formal, explicit way. Instead it
is held as an attitude or image as a loose cluster of associations. For instance, my image of lakes
includes associations many people would have, including fishing, water skiing, stalled outboards,
and lots of kids catching night crawlers with flashlights. However, the most salient or powerful
parts of my image, which strongly color my whole attitude toward lakes, are thoughts of cloudy
skies, long rainy days, and feeling generally cold and damp. By contrast, one of my best friends has a
very different cluster of associations: to him a lake means sun, swimming, sailing, and happily
sitting on the end of a dock. Needless to say, our differing images cause us to react quite differently
to a proposal that we visit a lake. Likewise, one reason people often find it difficult to discuss
religion and politics is that terms such as "capitalism" conjure up radically different images.

05 As you can see, a reader's image of a subject is often the source of attitudes and feelings that are
unexpected and, at times, impervious to mere facts. A simple statement that seems quite persuasive
to you, such as "Lake Wampago would be a great place to locate the new music camp," could have
little impact on your reader if he or she simply doesn't visualize a lake as a "great place." In fact,
many people accept uncritically any statement that fits in with their own attitudes and reject,
just as uncritically, anything that does not.

06 Whether your purpose is to persuade or simply to present your perspective, it helps to know the
image and attitudes that your reader already holds. The more these differ from your own, the more
you will have to do to make him or her see what you mean.

Needs

07 When writers discover a larger gap between their own knowledge and attitudes and those of the
reader, they usually try to change the reader in some way. Needs, however, are different. When you
analyze a reader's needs, it is so that you, the writer, can adapt to him. If you ask a friend majoring
in biology how to keep your fish tank from clouding, you don't want to hear a textbook recitation on
the life processes of algae. You expect a friend to adapt his or her knowledge and tell you exactly
how to solve your problem.

08 The ability to adapt your knowledge to the needs of the reader is often crucial to your success as
a writer. This is especially true in writing done on a job. For example, as producer of a public affairs
program for a television station, 80 percent of your time may be taken up planning the details of
new shows, contacting guests, and scheduling the taping sessions. But when you write a program
proposal to the station director, your job is to show how the program will fit into the cost
guidelines, the FCC requirements for relevance, and the overall programming plan for the station.
When you write that report your role in the organization changes from producer to proposal writer.
Why? Because your reader needs that information in order to make a decision. He may be interested
in your scheduling problems and the specific content of the shows, but he reads your report
because of his own needs as station director of the organization. He has to act.

09 In college, where the reader is also a teacher, the reader's needs are a little less concrete but just
as important. Most papers are assigned as a way to teach something. So the real purpose of a paper
may be for you to make connections between historical periods, to discover for yourself the
principle behind a laboratory experiment, or to develop and support your own interpretation of a
novel. A good college paper doesn't just rehash the facts; it demonstrates what your reader, as a
teacher, needs to know that you are learning the thinking skills his or her course is trying to
teach.

10 Effective writers are not simply expressing what they know, like a student madly filling up an
examination bluebook. Instead they are using their knowledge: reorganizing, maybe even
rethinking their ideas to meet the demands of an assignment or the needs of their reader.
Not the Man My Father Was Ahmad Beydoun
Translated from the Arabic by Osman Nusairi
Ahmad Beydoun (1943- ) is a native of South Lebanon who received a PhD from Sorbonne University in 1982. He was
an instructor of cultural sociology at the Lebanese University until 2007 and is the author of many books written in French
and Arabic. His works address the political and historiographical systems in Lebanon. Included among his publications in
French is, Le Liban: Itineraire dans une Guerre Incivile (1993) and in Arabic, Al-Jumhuriyah Al-Mutaqattiah (1999). His
latest book, Riyad al-Sulh Fi Zamanihi, is a biography of Riad El-Solh, the Prime Minister of Lebanon in 1943. "Not the
Man My Father Was" appeared in Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East,
published in 2000.

01 In the place where I grew up, the name of the first son is generally a repetition of his
grandfather's. Thus repetition takes the form of a switching between two names: typically, Hussein
ibn Ali ibn Hussein ibn Ali, Hussein son of Ali son of Hussein son of Ali, and so on. We do not have
the Anglo Saxon practice of repeating the same name from one generation to the next without
separation, as in George I, George II, and so on. This distinction does not indicate that we have a less
acute patriarchy. Rather the contrary, for when a father gives the name of his father to the newly
born, this profound act performs a rite of deep structural subjection: he is declaring that it is his
father, not himself, who deserves immortality and who is the role model proposed for the newly
born. The latter, who is part and parcel of him and issued out of his loins, is being presented as an
offering to keep granddad's firebrand kindled.

I was the eldest male, after three females born to my dad. But he did not call me after my
grandfather, whose name was Muhammad. My father was the youngest of his brothers, and nor did
he carry the name of his grandfather. So while I did not represent a name repetition case on joining
the dynasty, I was, however, invited through naming into another type of repetition and
continuation of tradition also familiar to us. I was given the name of a then senior zaim (leader) in
Jebel Amil in south Lebanon where I was born. That zaim was called Ahmad Bek al-Asad. Indeed it
was the Bek himself, it seems, who suggested the name to my dad. As it was, two factors favoured
the idea: the first was that Ahmad Bek al-Asad's dad, who had been zaim in his day as well, was
called Abdullatif, which was my dad's name also. And so my name status became like that of the
Bek; we both were Ahmad, sons of Abdullatif. The second factor was that before having a male
issue, my dad had been nicknamed Abu Ali. Among us, that nickname is largely given to brave men.
Chance had it that my paternal uncle also had the same nickname of "father of Ali" since his elder
son, who was born years before me, was called Ali. As we were then living in the same house as my
uncle, there were times when both he and my father would answer in response to the name, or one
of them rather than the other. So for my dad the Bek's suggestion was a way out from that fraternal
muddle. He lost one nickname indicating courage but gained another indicating leadership,
which he desired. His courage, for which he was renowned in those days, was one of his means to
that goal.

03 Thus, the name Ahmed Abdullatif was a way of sending a loud message to the poor boy who was
me. I was meant to be a leader like the one who had lent me his name. This is not because everyone
who carries a leader's name necessarily becomes a leader if that were the case the country
would overfill with leaders and chiefs. But it was because dad himself was to become a leader as
well as a dignitary and was a subordinate, a kind of satellite, of the big chief who had blessed me
with his name. As I was the eldest male in my dad's household, I was meant to succeed him in his
dignified status, years later, that is to say I was meant to grow into a repetition of him. My father
was meant to prepare me for this destiny and I was meant to prepare myself for it too. When he
stood for parliamentary elections he was in his forties while I was only eight years old. My
mates in the quarter were aware of the destiny awaiting me. They used to carry me on their
shoulders and roam around the quarter, chanting:
When souls are snatched
With a thin sharp sword
The leader of Syria and the Jebel [Lebanon] will be
Ahmad ibn Abdullatif

04 Naturally that profound rhyme was not made for me. But borrowing it from the private arsenal
of my namesake the Bek was extremely easy. There was an element of sarcasm there too: for my
clad was an adversary of his in that election.

05 What drove my life afterwards on a different course depriving me, when older, of mounting the
shoulders I rode so young? What removed me from the mutual tradition to which I had been
pledged, thus barring me from assuming responsibility for the affairs of the community in which I
was born and from surrendering my rein to it and judging all I would do and say through its values
and interests? What prompted me to be fond of a state which the pre-Islamic poet Tarfah Ibn al-Abd
bemoaned bitterly when he wrote:
. . . the whole clan shunned me
And I was cast out like a scabby camel.

06 Probably no answer to such questions is devoid of a serious risk. One constructs a whole picture
of the motives, means and conditions of one's life from left-over bits in the memory, and it may have
no shape except that improvised today. Despite this I intend to answer. To begin with, I did not
follow the path prescribed for me by virtue of my birth, probably because, and I say this without
boasting, I was not fit to follow that course.

07 What appears to me now as the obstacle to "repeating" my dad was the fact that I was in
possession of neither his physical strength nor his daring. As a child I tended to be rather
emaciated. Most of my mates were better built and more energetic. My poor appetite had prompted
my referral in my childhood to the doctor at a time when children were not referred to
doctors except for a very good reason. I used to do a bit of sports in and out of school, but I never
distinguished myself. In fact, my dad's physical strength, which was widely known and which my
imagination used to dress up in mythical fashion, was an important component of his prestige. The
chief in those days was before everything else the head of a familial alliance. Such an alliance or clan
had to look out and lie in wait for its adversaries. This included sometimes being ready for brawls
in alleyways and village squares using stones, sticks and knives. It was not unknown though
unlikely for matters to reach the use of guns. The strength of the leader, though he rarely took
part in the brawls directly, was a deterrent to the other side and a desired guarantee of his prestige
among his men. Members of our family particularly mothers when the husband was away
would on the other hand complain about a boy who had done something which required
punishment. My dad used to summon the boy and straighten him up. The culprit would not dare,
even as an adult, not to appear before such justice. In its most extreme form, such punishment
would take the form of a good dose of repeated cuffs which are still talked about by those who
received them.

08 It was a pleasure to have to go on occasion to summon candidates for such cuffs, the impact of
which I had personally experienced when the occasion arose, though that became a rare
occurrence. At any rate I was ill-equipped for inheriting this trade. Naturally my father's leadership
was not based solely on his physical strength. Besides fortitude, the man possessed most attributes
that are in theory required of elders: generosity, earnest concern for relatives, an endless readiness
to serve whenever possible, and to console. That was in addition to honesty nurtured by firmly
established faith and piety, and beyond that, crowning everything, a deep sense of the right to be at
the forefront and to follow that end within the dictates of hierarchy as traditionally received. If, for
my part, I have managed to possess any of those attributes, my share of such certainty and
persistence has always remained negligible.

09 That shortcoming manifested itself early in the fact that I remained throughout my childhood a
shy boy. My father himself may be responsible in part for such lack of daring, a condition which he
never ceased to treat with annoyance and a determination to cure. He would insist on my entering
the madafa (reception hall) and, when I did so, standing upright with my chin held high to greet
those present, before sitting down to take part in whatever was being talked about. All these
matters remained of little interest to me until I was approaching the age of twenty, though
throughout that period I became a loud noisy tease when in a company other than that of the
reception hall and where my father was not present.

10 The man who wanted me to count for something among people used by his mere presence at
home to induce in me and my brothers silence, or at least a tendency to lower our voices and utter
the minimum. His authority was overpowering, driving me to the margins of his circles of family,
allies and supporters, rather than to their forefront. Later, when father was older he became
nicer and extremely tender. Once he was over fifty his physical strength wasted after diabetes
began to hit at his health. He became less inclined to be strict in handling what he considered to be
wrong. He came to be saddened by my disinclination to socialize with influential people and to
attend to what he called social obligations in a circle which he, for his part, had widened
extensively. I did not find in myself enough determination or desire to keep pace with the
endless roving within that circle.

11 In fact, considering the expectations placed upon him and his inability to meet them, the boy
who was me was quite likely to have fallen foul of such a predicament and reached the crisis stage
which children enter when they are incapable of being what they are desired to be. It is then that
they shut others off and somehow get out of earshot to declare that they will become absolutely
nothing and no one. I could have become extremely disturbed or plainly ill had I not found an
alternative world to that of the reception hall and its associated locations, a world apart from that
of my father with its vast human network, parts of which he used to preside over, perpetuating its
fabric and repeating the acts which held that fabric together and allowed it to expand. My father,
who pinned his hopes on me and who desired but good for me, himself aided and abetted me in
entering that alternative world, the horizons of which began to reveal themselves to me gradually:
an alternative world which became the focus of my aims and the means for me to move, and which
gave me a context within which to live my life. My father helped me because he used to leave me to
my own devices in any matters that fell outside his circle, in other words, matters that were not
about my behaviour in the world of adults. I used to shrink before his stern appearance and
dignified presence in his own surroundings, but he trusted me and never had an eye on my doings,
disregarding problematic things I embarked upon except when they involved undermining others.

12 I started smoking before I was fifteen. He was aware of this, though I never lit a cigarette in his
presence until two or three years afterwards. He never objected. Before turning fifteen I also used
to stay until after midnight at friends' houses and out in the streets. He did not object. News of me
falling in love, which I started early as well, used to reach him no doubt. He would keep quiet about
it, most probably considering the matter mere child's play. My mother was the one who widened
those avenues of growth for me by asking me, on seeing me staying inside to study over the holiday,
why I did not go out to play.
13 However, the most significant matter to record here is that my father was among those who felt
the world was different from what it was when their generation had entered it: education was the
big gate to that new world and their children would not be able to find their way except by other
means than they had known. School, among other things, led potentially to a set of values that were
inconsistent with what our fathers were familiar with. They were aware of that. They had
witnessed the local people's resistance, in the days of the mandate, to the state's determination to
close Quranic pre-schools after curriculums and certificates were introduced and their imposition
required making education exclusive to formal schools.

14 They were also aware that among those of their generation who had been to modern schools,
there were cases of blatant derailment from the straight path of religion and morals, which
consequently presented a challenge to the grasp of the community and its structure. There were
numerous elements known for drinking alcohol, abstaining from performing their prayers and
undermining the authority of the zaim and the religious elite. In other words, there were those who
came close to possessing what I once called the individuality of the exception at a time when it was
not possible for individuality to be a general rule. Despite the presence of such alarming types, our
parents sent us to modern schools and we became the first generation who went to those schools
and followed a principle which had gained general endorsement after having been an exception for
those no more than ten years our senior. My elder sister, who is only seven years older than I,
attended the Quranic pre-school in its dying days before transferring to a formal school.
15 As for my dad himself, he had obtained no more than a limited education in one
of those modest Quranic schools which were just disappearing when I reached
school age. Despite the fact that modern education had not yet become an
indispensable tool in securing the kind of leadership my father was preparing
me for, he was aware that leadership itself was in the process of changing
and that lack of education would soon be a shortcoming which would slow
down the progress of those who aspired to it. Schools had quickly asserted
themselves as a vehicle for the ambitious and, moreover, as a supplier of a
corps of respectable elements; their widening range early on began to present
a competing force to the system of heritage and privileges that defined the old
order. For all these reasons my father did his best to see that I attained as much
education as possible. Despite his leadership status, and sometimes thanks to
it, the man was nearer to poverty than to wealth. Being government-run, the
school did not require fees. But he used to send me separately to paid private
lessons. Those who know the times and the circumstances then will no doubt
be astonished to hear that such private lessons were aimed at boosting my
French. I was not slower than my peers in learning that language, but my father
was aware that its teaching in the whole school was poor. He even brought for
me once a Palestinian teacher who assumed I would be familiar with some
English, a language which was never mentioned in the governmental schools
of Bint Jubail and had no wide appeal in our part of the world.
16 When I reached the highest grade available in the village school (I was thirteen
then) my father sent me as a boarder to Deir Mashmoushah monastery school,
then on to the Makaasid school of Sidon. That was a momentous decision which
my dad was uncertain he would be able to follow through. Hence, before making
it, he took me to the shrine of Saidah Zainab on the outskirts of Damascus,
to ask God for proper guidance. The Deir Mashmoushah school, where teaching
in a foreign language was central, became the first support environment
to help me to extract myself from the captivity of tradition and to find a way
of following the rhythms of the steps to pursue a different path without being
scrutinized according to the logic of the traditional or by its watchful wardens.
17 This was because education in that school was significantly different from what
had long been taught by the teachers at Quranic schools. The difference is too
obvious to require a long-winded explanation. In those schools religion had
been the core of all education and the source of the status of the teacher. In no
way would the religious-educated depart from the culture of the community,
nor would he challenge the content of any of its classes. What he was taught
384 lifestyle and self-determination not the man my father was 385
would not go beyond preparing him or preparing to initiate him to settle in
one of the familiar slots in the system of the local community. The religiouseducated
would occupy a predetermined status and rank, and to fulfill this
role he would rely on being subjected to a training and set of considerations
basically outside the confines of the school. Such schools would not introduce
to the community new skills which were likely to upset other established ranks
within the hierarchy. No unfamiliar beliefs or opinions and behaviour unknown
to the community would be posed there. The potential for this was introduced
by the modern school: it brought the teacher to challenge the knowledge of
the religious scholar, the fakir, the physician to challenge the parliamentary
seat of the dignitary. It opened the route for public and private employment,
with all the power to do good or harm that entails, and, thanks to certificates, it
enabled the mobility of those from the lower depths of obscure families. So the
hierarchical system, too, was unsettled.
18 In short, the modern school pursued the element of merit above that of inheritance
as a ladder to social status and as a grounds for earning it. As such
it indicated through that door a way to individualism, even though it could not
secure it. An aspect of this role was the fact that the school took the traditional
community outside itself by offering roles and spheres of movement which had
not been part of the system of the community and would not have been accommodated
within it. Another aspect of that role was that the modern school
improvised for its traditional community recruits a flow of unfettered and
endless new ideas and behaviour. This aspect was defined and deepened by
learning the foreign language. It is of no small significance to see new names,
imported from faraway worlds and from different times, entering one's cultural
life to stand suddenly, or gradually, on at least the same footing as the names
that have stood as the flags and watch-towers of one's community for years
or centuries. The imported names were so attractive as to seem as though
they were parading themselves for you to choose from. This placed them in a
different position from the names taken as authority by one's own community.
The old names would then seem as if they had been prepared for one before
one was born, and as if their huge impact left one no choice except in some
minor details. [. . .]
19 French was the foreign language on which I embarked on my first day at school.
I should make two points about this. I grew up in surroundings which were
generally hostile to France. But that hostility was saturated to its roots by a deep
admiration felt and spread by the graduates of modern schools in particular. It
was an admiration of various French names, objects, places and values: Paris,
Voltaire, Anatole France and Gustave Lebon. The second point to mention is the
fact that, among many of my generation, I commanded a view on France when
its cultural arena was forefronted by a group of rebels and outsiders.
20 The most prominent of those were the existentialist thinkers, as they were
presented in the wake of the Second World War, along with all the other men
of letters and artists who were sympathetic to them or affiliated to their world.
In short, those we were influenced by were among the most individualistic
individuals. Being inspired by them did nothing except aggravate the rupture
in our relationship with the traditional community at home. The references of
traditional culture, religious and otherwise, were in no position really to mitigate
the effects those writers and artists left on us. The issue of freedom, for
instance, was the nearest to seizing our souls and to being established as the
axis for our thoughts and feelings as anything which we were likely to chance
upon in Arabic heritage texts (or what was abridged for us thereof), or those of
contemporary Arab writers.
21 Religion, which had been at the core of the knowledge offered by Quranic
schools, became very marginal in modern schools, or at least in governmentrun
ones. We used to pay no attention to Quran classes. The Quran teacher was
considered by most of us the least prestigious of teachers. And nor were families
qualified to fill the shortfall caused by the sizing down and indeed the collapse
of religious education. In Shia villages there were no reliably strong structures
supporting families in the face of secular education. Private Shia schools were
weak and could not match Christian ones. The educational role of village fakirs
or scholars was generally insignificant compared with that of the priest and
church. Conditions then were no match for what Shia later started to embark
upon with Imam Musa Sadr by way of religious and sectarian instruction, an
effort which during and after the last civil war has been continued. Our families
then were generally religious, but rarely had someone to help them enlighten
their children in religious matters. So in my village support was restricted to
the apologetic religious classes in school and the Ashura season. I may well
have learnt by heart a lot more of the Quran while at the Deir Mashmoushah
monastery school than I had ever done elsewhere. I had to adhere closely to
some identity with which to enter the environment of the school, which was
not my environment, though the people treated me cordially. Of my own free
will I took to reciting the Quran so that I could have "a book" like others, and
also because it is a beautiful book. Other than maintaining a fascination with
the Arabic language, my soul was almost entirely surrendered to French devils.
22 I must say this for the benefit of mentioning an important matter: namely that
adopting a French point of reference to formulate my case against the world
did not preclude me from standing firmly on a deep-rooted pan-Arab pedigree.
So my intense discontent with the French (those were the days of the Algerian
war and Suez) remained as a matter of course. I was a pan-Arabist (which I
remained, with some modification in format, even after I became a Marxist). I
was indifferent to the fact that Sartre, Camus and Merleau-Ponty were French,
despite the fact that to me France was almost summed up in being a space for their lives and works.
They had to be made to transcend this type of definition.
They used to suggest a loftiness, somehow, although some of their actions
would undermine it in another way.
23 Many of my colleagues and I used to continue with persistence what had been
indicated hesitantly by the graduates of the modern schools of our fathers'
generation: hating political France while taking intellectual France as a point of
reference in ideas and behavioural values. This duality together with remaining
part of the pan-Arab orbit precluded us from changing the language world in
which we had been reared. This was also the course followed by many of our
Christian colleagues, with collusion from family and school. As such my tongue
was not Europeanized. Rather I used to do my best in conversations to translate
into Arabic all that I acquired from French and Western sources in general. So
I can afford to say that the main expression of my pan-Arab commitment or
affiliation became the sphere of language. And as such, I have not ceased to
this day to be increasingly infatuated with Arabic and determined to improve
my knowledge of its aspects and to perfect its morphology. It has been the
anchor which prevented my ventures into other languages from being a mere
aimless disoriented journey into the wilderness.
24 When I travelled to Paris for my studies at the age of twenty I was determined
to do my best to perfect French. Nevertheless, I carried in my already overstuffed
suitcase the four volumes of Nahj al-balaaghah (The Road to Eloquence).
Later I wrote to my father requesting a copy of the Quran. I should add here
that my father, who used to get angry if any of us went beyond the limits of
what was "appropriate" and "respectable", never pressured us in matters of
worship. For my part, I used neither to fast nor to pray. My father would always
emphasize this formula as a guiding principle: "Sports, looking after one's
health and serenity, in addition to pleasing God." On realizing that the formula
was destined to prove yet another candidate for failure, he would be content
to utter the prophetic saying: "You guide not whomsoever you desire. It is God
who guides whomsoever He wishes."
25 In fact my progress in education was a means of further distance from the
bounds of parental authority and from the traditional community to which
that authority was sponsoring my affiliation. As for my father, he could only be
extremely pleased with such progress, although he started to feel, as I believe,
that the consequences of such progress were neither calculated nor desired.
What came to my rescue in my exit act was the limited education my father
had attained in Quran schools. I remember that I used to be extremely embarrassed
whenever I listened to my father making infrequent public addresses.
What caused my embarrassment was his poor style and his many grammatical
mistakes. This was because I grew up in a town where morphology and grammar,
let alone prosody, still had great value. Moreover, my dad himself began
to feel that what I had learnt would lend me an authority over myself, rivaling
his authority over me. As he did not comprehend the logic of such authority
enough to rebut it with the appropriate argument, he would retreat when he
had failed to convince of something to a long-standing phrase, which was not
devoid of bitterness: life had taught him a lot, although he had not stayed in
school for as long as I had. I only appreciated the truth of those words after I
had lived long enough to realize that life does indeed teach what is not taught
in schools and that it often uses severe means towards that end.
questions
1. How does Beydoun argue that the repetition of male names in one family is
an aspect of patriarchy? Does this only exist in the Arab culture? Are there
any differences in these practices throughout the world?
2. What is the significance of the author's name and how was it decided upon?
What impact did his name have on him growing up?
3. What were the qualities that made Beydoun's father a leader in his community
and why were they so important? What effect did his father have on
him in his early youth?
4. How did Beydoun eventually overcome expectations placed upon him?
5. Compare and contrast the experiences of Beydoun in different school
systems, both "religious" and "modern." Explain the importance of
education in Beydoun's development as well as the general battle over
educational content waged in his generation. Is the situation the same
today? Why or why not?
activity
Write a reflective essay on the expectations your parents have/had of
you and your feelings about living up to them. Make sure to include relevant
experiences that shaped your development.
Before