My response to Kingkrane:
Kingcrane, thank you so much for a well-reasoned, coherent, and clean comment. Finally, someone capable of debating an opponent without attacking them
ad hominem. We need more of the same on this --
Angry Arab's-- hateful vitriolic weblog.
Having said that, Kingcrane, and agreeing strongly with you on many points, I also want to say that I strongly disagree on many more.
First of all, in spite of my tender ;) age (i am not nearly close to the maturity, dignity, and clearheadedness that comes with your age) I have personally lost all faith in the practicality or logic of "secular" Arab nationalism. So, I am not sure I'm able to accept your premise that "these ideas will gain popularity."
For all intents and purposes, secular Arabism is a spent force and an obsolete ideology.
I am not saying it is dead; it is perhaps not in
rigor mortis yet, and it might not die for a while (look at communism, it is still loud and shrill rhetorically, though it has lost its effectiveness, usefulness and vigor! And I suspect Arabism is very much akin to Communism; it will still remain alive for a while in faculty lounges, classrooms, and the imagination of disillusioned and defeated Arabists... and I want to venture and say that secular Arabism is perhaps still most meaningful among those groups who invented it; Arabic-speaking Christians fearful of a polity within Islam.)
But for all intents and purposes, Arabism is dead and buried politically, even though it still pulsates rhetorically. (That is why, hysterical Arabists, like the ones swarming around Angy Arab, get all flustered and verbally abusive whenever faced with the bitter reality of their creed's faltering. And I meant it when I mentionned in my initial comments that, had Arabism been a resolute, snugly argued and universally accepted creed (as its exponents make it out to be), nobody would be discussing it, on Angry Arab, or elswhere...
Nobody discusses what it means to be French, or Italian, or American; these are societies, or identities if you will, that have reached a level of social sophistication and sociological maturity so as to shun futile rhetoric and Byzantine dialectic.) Unfortunately, not us in the Middle East! Arabism is one narrative, and you advocate for it eloquently and (perhaps in the view of some) convincingly. But it is not the only narrative, nor is it the most compelling or the most dominant one either. There are a number of equally valid, legitimate, and meaningful national and identity narratives in the Middle East... and I don't think that just because Western scholars are for one reason or the other infatuated with Arabism (or that because Arabist intellectuals possess a shrill propaganda machine) that
other narratives should be neglected, denigrated, or negated.
On to the issue of language. I am what you might call in your trade, a "heritage" learner of Arabic. Both my parents are Lebanese, both speak Lebanese (call it Arabic if you must, I don't believe this is an accurate label), and both my sister and I, although born and raised in the United States, have learned what we were told was Arabic. Then came September 11th, America's sudden discovery of the Arabic language, and my own (I was 15 back then) curiosity about the language.
The TV and radios in our den (for an entire year after 9/11) were blaring al-Jazeera, LBC and what have you almost 24/7. Yet, a speaker of Arabic as I was told I were, I could not understand the first thing about what was going on on "Arabic" TV. I was literally asking my parents to translate for me Arabic,
from Arabic! How strange was that?
Now I am studying Arabic in college (what you called in your comment EMSA), and I must admit that I do have an advantage over classmates who do not come from a Middle Eastern background or who haven't had any kind of prior exposure to the sounds of the language. But I cannot honestly say that I'm learning how to read and write what I previously learned to speak at home. To me, EMSA (my teachers call it MSA) and Lebanese are two entirely different languages; genetically related in many ways, to be sure, but still two independent mediums of verbal communication --being a native speaker of one, in my case, did not contribute to understanding the other.
This difficulty (or confusion) was compounded by the fact that nobody among the so-called "Arabs" around me spoke EMSA! Even my parents who have been instrumental in my learning Modern Standard Arabic still refuse to speak it with me; "it's not natural [...] I can't love you and feel you in it" they keep telling me!!
This peculiarity was explained to me by many of my professors. Some called it
diglossia, others used (what I thought was an unconvincing, not to say faulty, analogy) and called MSA "proper" Arabic, and the dialect I (and they) spoke "the ebonics of Arabic.") I still found it strange that my father, a physician, and mother, an elementary school-teacher, (and my "Arab" instructors of Arabic in college, when speaking among each other) spoke a "lowly" "vulgar" tongue. It didn't make sense. Uneducated illiterate Americans can still go to the movies, watch ABC news, listen to NPR, and understand every single word of English, regardless of whether they spoke Ebonics, Southern-hick (like the folks down by Lake Okeechobee in my neck of the woods), Bronx-ish, Manhattanite, or blue-blooded Brahmin Bostonian.
So, for the past two years, (thanks to the guidance of one of my Lebanese professors, who understood my frustrations) I have dedicated myself to the study of MSA and linguistics, and to reading the works of Sati' al-Husri, Wheeler Thackston, Kees Versteegh, Anis Freyha, Abdallah al-3alaayli, Taha Hussein, Haugen, Mario Pei, Barthélémy, and many others. I am still at the beginning of my journey with Arabic and Arab Nationalism, but I can tell you, Kingcrane, with all due respect and admiration (to you and your noble trade as a teacher), that the difference between EMSA and "dialects" is not a difference in degrees of language (as in the picture you have painted in your commentary on Angry Arab.) We are not dealing with "proper" languages and "accents" here. Sure, there are internal variances, regionalisms, and accents within the same "dialect" (say Lebanese, or Syrian); there are also kinships within the same family of dialects (as in Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian, or Lebanese Levantines.) But that is not to say that Levantine, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Iraqi, are mere accents of EMSA (as your comment falsely claimed.) As a Lebanese from Tripoli, my father might speak a specific accent of Levantine (some might even call it a "dialectal variant" of Levantine.) But that doesn't translate into Levantine or Lebanese being "accents" of MSA. They might be "dialects" of MSA (there are some who dispute this description), but they are certainly not accents. And assuming they are dialects, then what is a dialect? As you know, an adage common among linguists says "a language is simply a dialect with an army and a navy behind it!" What does that tell us? To me at least, this says that I speak a language that stands on its own, but one that is being subverted by an unnatural and stilted codified MSA (that is a tool of an overbearing ideology.)
Again, with my sincerest apologies, your are conflating "degrees" of language (which exist in all languages), and "kinds" or "nature" of language.
As my professor's professor (Wheeler Thackston, a Harvard specialist of Levantine) had told him, a difference between Beiruty and Sidonian Lebanese, (or between "standard" syrian and "standard" Lebanese --as expressed in the poetry of Fayrouz for instance) is a difference in the degree of language. The difference between Lebanese and MSA is a difference in nature or kind.
Kingcrane, you said "Accents do not define a country..." I beg to differ! Why would they not? Especially when the "accents" you speak of aren't accents but "dialects." Why did the "Latin accent" of Florence, for instance, define Italy? Why did the "accent" of Castille define Spain? Why did the "accent" of the Vallée de la Loire define France? Why, why, why??? Some answers can be found in this succinct Christian Science Monitor article
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0117/p14s02-legn.htmlBut perhaps Kees Versteegh and Joshua Blau put it best when they argued that the linguistic situation in the modern Middle East today is very much akin to that of Mediaeval Europe, when out of Latin and its "dialects" (call them "accents" if you must) came French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and to a large extent English (Joshua Blau, The Renaissance of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic. California, 1981., p. 7)
Blau maintains that Arab nationalists today attempt to blur that reality (the fact that their linguistic situation is analogous to that of Medieval Latin and its various "dialects") in order to affirm a putative unity, tenuous as it might be, between the vernacular languages and literary Arabic (Blau, pp. 12-13).
According to Versteegh, Arab nationalism over the past century has in effect actuated a well-orchestrated “decreolization” that sought to artificially introduce a “standard” literary language as a spoken language of the “Arab” peoples. In the process, the development of “vernaculars” into “national” languages got suppressed, and the elaboration of a new “Arabic” standard attempted to replace the spoken demotic languages.
In the “Arab” universe of the Arab nationalist, this anomaly is usually sanitized with such nomenclatures as
Fus-ha (eloquent) and '
Aamiyya (vulgar). Thus, the marked distinction between the two, or more, varieties of “Arabic” would be smoothed over and oversimplified as a mere variance in speech-codes: one formal, the other informal. This, of course, is a faulty classification that obfuscates the wide divide that separates spoken “Arabic” from written “Arabic”, and facilitates the acceptance of a certain “Arabness” as the dominant and standard culture of the Middle East. And so, the question becomes: if European speakers of Latin dialects (e.g. Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, etc..) can no longer be claimed for a supra-national “Latin” ethnicity, why should the speakers of various “Arabic” dialects (and linguists argue that those so-called Arabic dialects can hardly be classified as Arabic any longer) continue to be pigeonholed as Arabs?” (see
http://eccelibano.blogspot.com/2005/02/why-am-i-not-arab.html for complete quote.)
My answer is that these so-called dialects (which you, Kingcrane, denigrate as accents) still don't "have an army and a navy behind them!" But that is not to say that they won't one day! The "Arab" empire can by no means measure up to the power of the Roman empire. Yet the Roman empire faltered, and its Colonial Language, "Latin", bowed out to its "lowly dialects." I can't see how Arabic can manage to go against the course of history for much longer (out with the old, in with the new.)
Again, you seem so conclusive when you say "in the area of Asia defined North by the Turks, North-East by the Kurds, and East by the Persians, the people have a lot of similarities, and they all speak Arabic. Christian exceptionalism (I am born a Greek Catholic) will not result in a separate identity or entity..." My question to you, Kingcrane, is why not? What makes so sure of that? Why does Arabism have merit (and in your view can stand on its own), but not other narratives and not other identity markers???
Your sweeping claim here is both, sweeping, and contradictory. First you accept the premise of a selective identity, then you proceed to lump all those whom you claim have "Arabic" in common into one "Arabic" identity. Do all speakers of English (and I mean
real speakers of English as in the Irish and Scotsmen who
truly speak English as a native tongue, albeit with an accent) do all of those speakers of English
have to adopt an English sort of overbearing nationalism??? (some Irishmen even object to the seemingly innocuous geographic designation "the British Isles"... what gives, Kingcrane???)
You say that you are "one of those who say that we need to join those who fight for a just cause, that of Arab secularism." I might agree with you on this, provided "Arab Secularism" (so far, an oxymoron, as it were) eschews its totalitarian negationist instincts. But say, for argument's sake, I do join you in the cause of "Secular Arabism", and I do fight next to you (as most Lebanese have done) for justice and humanism (Lebanon was one of the most persuasive and elegant defenders of the Palestinian cause etc...) Does that mean I must dissolve myself and my cultural identity and my history into yours??? My mother loves my father! She's been married to him for 23 years! There isn't anything she wouldn't do for the man! But she's not him, and she will never become him! She has her own personality, her own consciousness, her own nature, and her own perception of herself etc... What gives, professor?? How do you reconcile these conflicting ideas? Why do I have to give myself up and relinquish my cultural references, and adopt those of my Arab neighbors? I don't see Canadians reveling in an American identity and nationality (yet they are tied to the United States by more than mere bonds of languages!)
Again, professor Kingcrane, you're still unable to answer my initial question, the one that instigated your comments and this (sorry, lengthy) reply; if identity is selective and cognitive for you, an Arab, why do you reject that choice for me, a non-Arab??? It doesn't make sense! Arabs
cannot have their cake and eat it too! They cannot shower insults on people and label them Zionists and Maronites if they dissented from
their (Arabist) worldview. I have been accused of being a Maronite on Angry Arab many times. I am not insulted, but why the label? Why can't I be a Muslim and a Lebanese? Nagib Jamalleddin is a Shi'ite from Baalbeck, and one of the leading intellectuals in Sa'id Akl's linguistic reform movement! Kamal al-Sharabi is a Sunni from Damascus, yet he believe strongly in the sanctity of the Lebanese and Syrian identities, in their mutual separateness, and their distinction from Arabic culture. Is he a Zionist too? Is Dr. Nabil Fayyad a Zionist as well? Arabists preach "secularism", yet they're unable to accept diversity and particularlism in their neighborhood. This, to my sense, makes them no different than the Zionists, or the Nazis (whom they seem to despise, but emulate all the same.)
You also said "to my many friends who have embraced Lebano-Phenicianism with a touch of Maronito-romantism, I have two objections: the first is based on the fact that, if Phenicians are the ancestors of the Lebanese, then their progeniture is the city Sunni Moslims of Saida/Sidon, Beirut, Tripoli, and Lattakia..."
I agree, and that's why I taunt my Lebanese friends and professors (some of whom are Maronites) that
I am the true Phoenician, not they. But what difference does it make, professor, if they possess that kind of consciousness (falsified as it might be in your eyes.) Afterall, aren't all myths of origin built on
myth (as Anderson argued)??? Doesn't Arabism after all engage in the same fabrications and myth-makings?? The main point here is that the traces and fingerprints of the Phoenicians are visible and overwhelming in Lebanon! Where can you hide Baalbeck, Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, and the Cedars! Can you collapse Lebanon's mountains to make its topography conform to its Arab neighborhood's norm? Should we pray the god of "Secular Arabism" to withhold snow from Lebanon's peaks, to please
Araby?? People see and touch these symbols daily, professor! And these symbols, in turn, speak to the Lebanese of past glories and fond memories in many mysterious mystical ways. Why should it matter that the Maronites aren't Phoenicians? The main thing is that they are persuaded they are (just as you are persuaded you're an Arab.) What is most important is that it was
they (the Maronites) that brought the Phoenician myth to life in Lebanon, nurtured it, and infused it back into the memories of amnesiac Sunnis and other fellow Lebanese. Should the Maronites be scorned or thanked for recalling our past and exalting the glories of our land??
Dear professor, did you mean to taunt me when you said "In addition, the alphabet that some of these Sa'id-'Aklians and May-Murrians talk about all the time was excavated in a Syrian city north of Lattakia ... (Ugarit)"?? Again, why is this small tidbit of information relevant? How does it refute the Phoenician myth of origin? The entire LEBANESE coastline, including present-day Israel and Syria, were a Phoenician playground and part of the Phoenician universe. Modern geography doesn't always correspond to timeless memory! So what? Syria of today is not the same Syria of the Phoenicians (although a lot of Syrians are now beginning to jump on the Phoenician bandwagon... again, another manifestation of the bankruptcy of Arabism.) Syria of the Phoenicians was
Phoenician,
not Arab! So, as a humanist Lebanese, I wouldn’t mind the Syrian sharing in the bounty of my sublime ancestors.
(btw, from my modest knowledge of area archaeology, the site at Ugarit included a library that revealed
not a Phoenician alphabet as you wrongly claim --the alphabet was unearthed earlier by Ernest Renan at Byblos in the 1860s, and later deciphered by Maurice Dunand in Byblia Grammata at the same Byblos site. Rather, the site at Ugarit revealed, in addition to schools, libraries, and places of worship, Phoenician literary, religious, and administrative archives, written in the Phoenician language,
yes, but in Cuneiform
not alphabet.)
warmest regards,
Leila
