As the title
indicates, as I said, the book is titled “Language Memory and
Identity in the Middle East; the Case for Lebanon”, and
essentially, it deals with the construction of national identity in
the modern Middle East, and the use of language and historical
memory, and perhaps even the construction of language and historical
memory for the purpose of constructing national identities.
00:50 to 3:01
The reason why I
began thinking about writing something like this started when I was
doing my graduate work at Brandeis University. The theme that I was
interested in at that time was “minority peoples in the Levant
area, minorities in the Middle East, in the Eastern Mediterranean…”
More importantly, I was interested in minority narratives and
minority history. But that coincided with 9/11, the beginning of the
rush towards “Arabic”, towards wanting to acquire Arabic, and as
part of my graduate work I was asked if I was able or willing to
teach Arabic, and that is how I fell into teaching Arabic at the
time, even though I was being formed to be a historian, a cultural
historian; I initially dealt essentially with intellectual history
and the history of ideas in the modern Middle East. And eventually I
got into teaching Arabic at Brandeis University, teaching what we
call “Modern Standard Arabic”, which is not a spoken language; I
like to say it is a “vocalized language”; it is a language that
people speak out of prepared texts; it is not a language that is
spoken spontaneously; it is a “learned language”; it is a
language that people acquire at school; and it is nobody’s
“natively spoken language” but rather always a “second
language.” And so, for that reason, Arabic is a language that is
reserved to a minority of people in the Middle East, namely the
elites and the educated and literati and writers and so forth… But
that is the language that we teach in the academy. .. and that’s
the language that we teach when people come to us and say “we want
to study Arabic”, that’s the language that is talked about.
03:04 to 04:33
In the course of
teaching Arabic I began encountering students, a group of students
that we refer to in the profession as “heritage students”; that
is, students who supposedly spoke Arabic, but wanted to learn how to
read and write their native language. And it was during those
encounters that I came to the realization (during my discussions with
students from Syrian descent, Egyptian descent, Iraqi descent,
American-born) who, in our discussions, when we were trying to
formulate classes for them would tell us something to the effect that
“I grew up speaking Arabic, but I don’t understand what goes on
on “Al-Jazeera”.” Al-Jazeera was at that time the most watched
Arabic-language television network; satellite TV network… And this
is when I began asking questions. And this is a very interesting
question, isn’t it? “I grew up speaking Arabic, and yet I do not
understand what goes on on al-Jazeera although al-Jazeera is in
Arabic; not because I cannot read Arabic, but because I truly can’t
understand the “Arabic” that is being broadcast on al-Jazeera….
And this sort of caused a redirection in my doctoral research, and I
began working on the idea of Linguistic Nationalism. And from that
doctoral work came later on the book you have before you: Language
Memory and Identity in the Middle East; The Case for Lebanon…
04:40 to 7:28
That book also
caused me to begin asking questions about myself and my own Lebanese
roots. I am originally Lebanese; I came to the United States at the
age of 17; I grew up in a polyglot household; we spoke multiple
languages; my paternal grand-father was Cuban-born; (as a child, I
remember my grandfather playing the piano and singing to us in
Spanish)… But I remember stories he used to tell us about living
in Cuba; he had lived there until the age of 20, when he decided to
move to Lebanon and ended up staying there. He used to tell us that
the Lebanese of Cuba were referred to locally as “Turcos”; that
is to say, Turks; not Arabs, but “Turcos.” And that was on
account of the fact that the early waves of Lebanese immigrants who
came to the New World, to the Americas, to North America, but also to
South America and the Caribbean, were speakers of Turkish. They
spoke Turkish; they were subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and their
spoken language was Turkish. And that is part of the reason why they
earned that sobriquet “Turcos.” In North America… today, the
dominant label in reference to the Lebanese in North America has
become “Arabs” (or Arab Americans), but the early Lebanese
immigrants of the 1860s were being referred to as “Syrians”, and
that is because they themselves referred to themselves as “Syrians”;
not because they were natives of what is today the Arab Republic of
Syria (that Republic didn’t exist back then)… but because the
Christians of what is today Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and
Israel referred to themselves as “Syrians”, and that was mainly a
reflection of the names of the main Churches to which they belonged;
Syrians in the sense that the liturgy of their Churches was Syriac, a
dialect of Aramaic. And that label stuck until the instigation of
the Arab national movement in the 1930s and 1940s, and that cause a
switch in the labels that these people used to refer to themselves…
and that is how the “Arab” label became more in vogue in our
days.
07:30 to 08:02
My book attempts to
look at the history of the term “Arab”, what we mean the word
“Arab” when we refer to someone as an “Arab”, and it deals
with the issue of language and how there is a certain symbiosis
between the Arab “ethnicity”, or the Arab “cultural identity”
if you will, and the Arabic language that is used as this nimbus or
this focal point of this Arab identity.
08:03 to 11:40
About the history of
opposition to the Arab national movement, or the idea that one’s
identity is an Arab identity. This issue has a long history in the
Middle East. And, actually, prior to the instigation of the Arab
national movement in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a movement in the
1860s which was vibrant until the late 19th century, at a time when
different subjects of the Ottoman Empire—let us keep in mind that
the countries that we refer to today as “the Arab world” were, up
until 1918 mere provinces in the Ottoman Empire. And the Ottoman
Empire, by its very definition, was generally speaking a polyglot,
multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and generally very
tolerant of this diversity. And so, although everybody within the
Empire was a subject of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Empire itself
recognized the diversity of the different people that lived in the
Ottoman dominions. Towards the end of the 19th century, there began
an impulse within the Ottoman government and among the Ottoman elites
towards “Turkification” of the different subjects of the Ottoman
Empire. That is, the idea of advancing Turkish as a nationality or
an ethnicity, and certainly advancing the Turkish language as a
national language. Now, Turkish had been for 400 years prior the
administrative language of the Ottoman Empire, and that’s why I
began saying that my own grandparents were speakers of Turkish, among
other languages… and that is because of the fact that the Ottoman
Empire was a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual empire.
As a reaction by
some people, some groups, some intellectuals within the Ottoman
Empire—a reaction against the Turkification of the various
communities that had lived in the Empire—there began a movement of
Arabization. It was a group of elites, mainly in Beirut, but also in
Alexandria—in Egypt—and in Cairo; groups referred to in the
literature on the topic as “Syro-Lebanese immigrant groups” in
Egypt. So, there began a movement of Arabic linguistic revival.
It’s referred to in Arabic as “the Nahda”, which means “the
renaissance…” ; the “Arab renaissance movement.” The
spearheads of this movement were people who did not want to be looked
upon as Turks, they wanted to latch onto a different kind of identity
that were separated them. They were content with the idea of being
Ottoman subjects. But now that the “Ottomanism” was turning into
a “Turkish” identity, they wanted nothing to do with this Turkish
identity. And so, they began elaborating different kinds of
identities.
11:41 to 14:09
Among those
identities that were being toyed with was the Pharaonic identity in
Egypt; that is, the idea that says that the Egyptians proceed from a
long ancient line of peoples, beginning with the ancient Pharaohs. A
similar movement began being played around with in the area of what
is today Syria and Lebanon, and that is “Syrianism”; the idea
that the people of the region being an ancient “Syrian people”;
not Turks, and no longer Ottomans. And in Lebanon, people started
toying around with the idea of Phoenicianism; that is the peoples of
Lebanon were descendants of the ancient Canaanite Phoenicians. Now,
most of these intellectuals, who were versifying on those ideas, were
writing about those ideas not in Turkish, but, for the first time in
their history as members or subjects of the Ottoman Empire they began
writing in Arabic. And this caused a revival of the Arabic language;
modernization of the Arabic language. A language that had lain
dormant for 400 years was all of a sudden being used to publish
newspapers, books, journals of opinions… It was still very
primitive, because it was a language that had not been used for 400
years… But it was being injected with new blood, new
terminologies, new concepts, new words, new lexicons etc… And this
is how the language that we refer to today as Modern Standard Arabic
took flight, was born. I refer to it throughout my book as MSA (and
that a shorthand for Modern Standard Arabic.) So, these people who
were writing in Arabic were speaking about ideas of Phoenician
descent and Canaanite descent and Syrian descent and Pharaonic
descent happened to be—not by chance—mainly Christian subjects of
the Ottoman Empire. There were some Jews among them, but they were
mainly Christians.
14:10 to 16:40
There were many
reasons for that, but one of the main reasons had been that the
Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire did not need to elaborate on a
new history or excavate an old history, because they were full
members of the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman Empire being a
Sunni-Muslim Empire, they didn’t need to elaborate a separate
identity separate from that of the Empire. The Christians felt
threatened by the idea of Turkification, so they began elaborating an
idea of a kind of identity that was based on a “unity of language”
that was no longer the Turkish language but was, rather, this new
“Modern Standard Arabic.” So the Nahda, that is the Arabic
Literary Renaissance movement, which had been in the 1880s and 1890s
a strictly literary movement, was co-opted in the 1920s and 1930s, by
the votaries of Political “Arab nationalism”, turned into the
early stirrings of Arabism/Arab nationalism, and re-baptized the
“Arabic Nahda”. So, the Nada, the Arabic Literary (and
linguistic) Renaissance movement was re-baptized (misleadingly) in
the 1920s and 1930s as the “votaries Arabic National Renaissance
Movement. So, it was politicized in the 1920s and 30s, whereas it
had been in the 1880s and 1890s a purely literary movement. So, the
question about the history of these rival movements that were
supposedly “rivals” of Arab nationalism, I’m not sure I can
term those movements as “rivals” of Arab nationalism, because
they preceded Arab nationalism; they were movements that used the
Arabic language as an intellectual or a literary medium to speak of
ideals and identities that were neither Arabic nor Turkish, but
rather ancient identities that preceded Arabs and Turks in the
region. So, there is a long history to this rivalry between Arabism
and other nationalisms, but I’m not sure I can refer to it as a
“rivalry” per se; I would say that the idea of a Syrian people,
or the Phoenician people, or the Canaanite people, or the Pharaonic
people was perhaps a predecessor of Arab nationalism
16:41 to 19:42
What I am proposing
in this book is a new reading of the history and the identities of
the people of the Middle East; not to challenge the prevalent
paradigm, which tends to view the region as this monolith of Arab and
“Arabic speakers”, but to add or rediscover or re-excavate
another layer of identities that are still extent in the Middle East,
that are not dead.. and that is, the idea of the imbrications or
layerings of cultures and identities and languages in the Middle
East, throughout its millenarian history. The prevalent tendency
today, inside and outside of the academy, is look at the Middle East
as this uniform preserve of Arabs and Arabic speakers; and this
fallacy is based on the idea that these peoples (the Middle
Easterners) use the Arabic language; that is, that the language of
their daily parlance is Arabic. That assumption is false for two
reasons: 1) that there are many other languages, besides Arabic,
which are used in the daily parlance of the Middle East; and 2) what
we refer to as the “Arabic language,” as this uniform nimbus of
Arabness, this symbol of “being an Arab”, is not a spoken
language. Modern Standard Arabic is a learned language; it’s a
language that nobody acquires natively—people born in Lebanon,
Syria, the Palestinian territories, Iraq, etc.., grow up speaking a
language that is as different (in the words of Harvard linguist
Wheeler Thackston) these people whom we refer to as Arabs or speakers
of Arabic actually grow up speaking (natively) a language that is as
different from Arabic as English is different from Latin. That is to
say, if we look at English as the natively acquired language and what
we learn to read and write when we go to school as Latin, the various
people of the Middle East, whom we refer to as Arabs, actually grow
up speaking a variety of (native) languages that we term dialects,
but languages that are as different from Arabic as English is
different from Latin.
19:44 to 23:14
So, the first
assumption was that all of these peoples of the Middle East are users
and speakers of the Arabic language, and that is a false assumption
because there are actually 33 different language varieties that we
falsely and misleadingly refer to as “Arabic”, and one Modern
Standard Arabic. Some of these 33 different varieties are sometimes
mutually comprehensible; others are completely mutually
incomprehensible. A good analogy would be perhaps living in the
Pyrenees border region of France and Spain; villagers living on
either sides of the border would be able to understand each other,
even with each of them speaking their specific dialects of French and
Spanish respectively… And the farther away one gets from this
border area, the French dialect of the Pyrenees becomes more closely
associated with Standard French and the Spanish dialect of the
Pyrenees more closely associated with Standard Castilian Spanish, and
mutual comprehensibility ceases. That is precisely the case with
many places in the Middle East. So, naturally, Syrians, Lebanese,
Palestinians, and some Iraqis can arguably understand each other’s
dialects, and the farther away a Lebanese gets from Lebanon towards
North Africa or the deep Gulf region, one is faced with complete
linguistic breakdown and mutual comprehensibility ceases entirely.
This is one problem with the assumption of the “Arab world” as
this single monolithic language zone. The other problem is that,
contrary to what we used to here in the West; here in the West we
usually use the same set of cognate words to refer to nationality,
ethnicity, language, identity, and territory. In other words, a
Frenchman lives in a country called France, he is French, he speaks
French. So, we use the same root-word (French) to refer to
ethnicity, nationality, territory, culture, and language. This sort
of categorization does not apply to the Middle East. The Middle East
has for millennia spoken different languages. As I mentioned
earlier, there had been layers of cultures and civilizations that
have come to the Middle East and controlled the area, with each
civilization coming along and imposing its language as a lingua
franca. To give an example, 5000 years ago Sumerians were the people
that controlled the entire Middle East. They emerged from the area
of today’s Iraq, and spread out throughout the region. Sumerians
spoke a language that we refer to as Sumerian (Sumerian is by the way
not a Semitic language; in other words, it is not genetically related
to any of the languages in use in the modern Middle East today.)
23:15 to 26:00
Sumerian became a
language of empire for about two millennia, which meant that people
who were bona fide Sumerians spoke Sumerian, and people who were not
Sumerians also spoke Sumerian. People who did not recognize
themselves, who did not refer to themselves as Sumerians still spoke
Sumerians. This culture, its language and its civilization had a
long run; after that it was replaced over time by the Babylonians;
the Babylonians also spread their language and made it into a lingua
franca spoken throughout the Middle East, spoken by Babylonians and
non-Babylonians. Aramaeans came on to the scene and also spread the
Aramaic language. Thus, Aramaic became a language spoken by many
people, including the Canaanites, but mainly the Israelites, the
Jews, the Hebrews, whose spoken language had initially been Hebrew, a
Canaanite language; that language was replaced by Aramaic. The
Hebrews did not lose their Hebrew identity, their Canaanite identity,
although they did use natively a language other than Hebrew. I give
an example in my classes taken from that famous movie by Mel Gibson,
The Passion of the Christ. One of the exquisitely accurate
historical moments in that movie relates to the use of language. So
there you have the figure of Christ speaking in Aramaic; it was one
of the impulses of the film-maker, I think, to give this film
authenticity. So, Jesus spoke Aramaic; he spoke with his mother in
Aramaic, spoke to some of his disciples in Aramaic; but that
character was also a very typical Jew of his times, a very typical
Eastern Mediterranean, Middle Easterner of the times in that he was a
polyglot; so, he was speaking to his jailers in Greek, because Greek
was the language of the masses at the time (Greek succeeded Aramaic
and became the common language of Middle Easterners). Jesus also
spoke to the Roman administrator, to the Governor, to the
representative of Caesar in Palestine in Latin, because that was the
language of the Administration. The fact that Jesus was
multi-lingual did not denude him of his Jewish Hebrew Israelite
identity.
26:01 to 27:09
So, what I’m
trying to say is that because of its geographic location at the
crossroads of three continents, the Eastern Mediterranean, or the
Middle East, which we refer to as the Levant region, this area saw a
procession of conquerors and civilizations. Some of them stayed for
a long time, others were mere passersby who left a few imprints
behind them and move on. But traces of these civilizations have
remained in the fact that many people in the modern Middle East have
maintained memories of these bygone times, still speak modern
languages that are connected to (or are outcomes and syntheses) of
these ancient languages, and as I began saying, from Sumerian we
moved into Babylonian, into Aramaic, into Persian, then Greek, then
Latin, then Turkish, Arabic, and then French and English towards the
end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. So,
that’s the story of my book.
27:10 to 31:20
The impact of MSA on
intellectual and cultural life in the modern Middle East:
unfortunately MSA remains the preserve of a very small group of
people. According to the 2002 UNRHD in the Middle East, the level of
literacy in the Middle East hovers around 50 to 55%, which tells me
that about 50 or 55% of the people of the Middle East, whom we
traditionally refer to as Arabs, are unable to speak, unable to read,
unable to write—and not only unable to read and write, but who are
also unable to speak their national language, Modern Standard Arabic.
As I said before, due to the fact that this language is one that is
acquired through coaching, through schooling, and since not everybody
gets the chance to go to school, not everybody acquires this
language. And even those who acquire it, those who are able to
function in Modern Standard Arabic, do so only in constructed
situations; they cannot do so spontaneously, extemporaneously. The
analogy that I like to give is, when we teach MSA, Modern Standard
Arabic, it’s as if we were teaching our students here at BC, giving
them four years of Latin, and dropping them on a street-corner in
Milan—Italy, and telling them “okay, now go speak, communicate
with the native Napolitans!!” That is exactly the same situation
we face in the Modern Middle East when we teach Modern Standard
Arabic. And the reason why we teach Modern Standard Arabic is
because it is the only language variety in the Middle East that has
been standardized, that has been codified, a language for which we
have books, and for which we have a written literature. Now,
there is a sizeable
corpus of written literature in dialects as well, that is in the
languages that we commonly refer to as “dialects”, but those
dialects have not yet been codified. So people who write in their
local dialects sometimes use the Arabic script; those who, for
instance, write Judaeo-Arabic use the Hebrew script; in Lebanon the
Christians who write in their dialects use the Syriac script, Syriac
being the language of their Churches, to which they know the script
(the written form) and use this script to render their non-Syriac
spoken dialects in written form. The Arabic script itself is not
capable of capturing the panoply of sounds produced in dialectal
languages, so the Syriac script is used to fill this lacuna of
Arabic’s. But these attempts at codifying spoken vernacular
languages have not gained recognition (or legitimacy) yet. This is
due mainly to the “prestige” of Modern Standard Arabic; this is
due mainly to the symbiotic relationship that Modern Standard Arabic
maintains with a major world religion, Islam, and there is this
tendency to think that were we to write down a dialect, we would
diminish the prestige of Modern Standard Arabic. So, many modern
Middle Eastern intellectuals today, who are leading writers in their
spoken dialects avoid writing, or at least avoid publishing in their
dialectal languages, because they fear that this might affect the
prestige of Modern Standard Arabic.
31:22 to 34:25
But that was an
issue that Medieval Europeans had to also deal with. When Church
Latin was the prestige language, was the only language deemed worthy
of being written down, speakers of the “French dialect of Latin,”
or the “Italian dialect of Latin,” or the “Spanish dialect of
Latin” etc.. (of course I am oversimplifying here, that is not what
those languages were called), but people who spoke various dialects
of Latin in Medieval times were afraid to write down their spoken
dialects because Latin was the only language that was deemed worthy
of being written. But eventually the Latin monopoly was broken, and
the people who instigated this (I would say) “revolution” were
people/writers whom we know today, and whom world “literary
history” and the academy remember fondly: Dante for instance in
the case of Italy, Cervantes in the case of Spain, Ronsard and
Joachim du Bellay in the case of France, etc… Those were people
who were fought viciously by their own cohorts, by their friends and
colleagues in the academy, keepers of the Latin orthodoxy and the
Latin linguistic canon. This is to show you what a powerful Latin
orthodoxy was and how psychologically chained people and
intellectuals were by this idea that one shouldn’t sully a sacred
language (Latin) by writing in a profane language (the so-called
“dialects” of Latin.) When Dante wrote “La Comedia” (which
we call today “The Divine Comedy”), he hadn’t then named it
“The Divine Comedy” yet; it was deemed and named “Divine”
posthumously, due to its subject matter, certainly, but some argue
that it was rebaptized “La Divina Comedia” because of its divine
language, because of the exquisite language (a dialect mind you) that
Dante used to write “The Comedy.” And we have to remember that
Dante is “the child”, “the student” of Virgil; he was the
“Prince” of Latin, he wrote exquisite Latin long before writing
“The Divine Comedy.” And so, Dante was fought vehemently by his
colleagues at the Florence Academy. I don’t know exactly what they
told him, but they must have excoriated him with something to the
effect that “how dare you, how could you have written in this lowly
dialect, in the language of the plebians, the language of servants
and commoners??” And Dante’s answer was, I imagine, “look,
this language that you’re attacking, that you’re describing as a
lowly dialect and the language of commoners and servants, is the very
language you are using to attack me; you’re not attacking me in the
sublime Latin; you’re attacking me in Tuscan, in the language of
the servants, but in the spoken language of my mother and your
mothers, and the language of our Prince… so it is a princely
language, it is not a lowly language…”
34:26 to 37:32
And the same thing
happened with French, the same thing happened with Castilian, with
Spanish. So, it took these courageous individuals who were willing
to go against the orthodoxies of the time and produce works of
universal quality in a lowly language, in a lowly dialect in order to
give those dialects the élan and move them to the plane of a
language rather than a dialect. And, I think this is what the Middle
East is awaiting today. There have been attempts at this throughout
the 1920s and 1940s, very influential intellectuals in Egypt, but
also in Lebanon and in Syria, began playing around with the idea of
writing down and codifying their individual dialects. But those
individuals were fought, accused of subversion, and driven into
obscurity and self-imposed mutism. Many of them have been completely
erased from the literary canon of the modern Middle East: an Egyptian
by the name of Salama Moussa for instance, who in the early 1920s was
advocating for the writing of the Egyptian language (dialect), was
completely erased from the literary history of the region. One of
Moussa’s mentors, Taha Husayn, made a switch in the 1950s back to
Arabic, even though he had initially been one of the most passionate
advocates on behalf of an “Egyptian language”—as mentioned
earlier he was fought on account of that, he was accused of being a
traitor to Islam, to Arabness—and he made a switch back to Modern
Standard Arabic, and as a result, he is today considered in many
circles the “doyen of modern Arabic belles lettres.” So, he
regained his “dignified” status if you will, because he
reconverted back to unequivocal advocacy on behalf of Arabic. But
there are intellectuals today, especially in Lebanon, who are still
toying around with the idea. And Lebanon has traditionally been a
laboratory in the Middle East, where new ideas are taken on a
test-drive, as is Lebanon in a sense a barometer and a bellwether of
looming changes in the region. So, there are people today in
Lebanon, who are not only considering the codification of their
spoken vernacular language, but who are actually publishing
respectable works of literature in spoken Lebanese as opposed to the
traditional Arabic.
37:33 to 40:56
Can the case of
Lebanon be indicative of positive changes sweeping through the Middle
East? I did mention earlier that Lebanon had been a place where new
ideas have been tested; it is hoped that the ideas that are being
considered in Lebanon will catch on. What I can tell from reading
the literature, from visiting different websites, from reading the
media, and from observing what the young do today with their spoken
languages, there are salient changes sweeping through the region. I
don’t know that this can be attributed directly to Lebanon—it can
probably be attributed at least in part to Globalization and to the
democratization of the computer and internet, and the limitations of
the Arabic script when it comes to putting down in writing the spoken
dialects. In other words, young people who communicate on the
Internet usually don’t use an Arabic keyboard; when they
communicate in writing, in IMS or Text Messaging, they do so in their
spontaneous native languages, not in the constructed stilted Modern
Standard Arabic. So, they are using the Roman script to text and
communicate on the Internet. Because the Roman script is more
capable of capturing the whole spectrum of sounds in the spoken
languages, it is privileged over the cumbersome and inaccurate Arabic
script. To give you an example, the Arabic language has only 3
vowels; that’s it; “Aa,” “Uu,” “Eee,” those are the
vowels of Arabic. And therefore, there are only 3 symbols to
represents those three sounds. The different spoken dialects, spoken
by Palestinians, by Lebanese, by Syrians, by Jordanians, by Iraqis
etc…, contain at least six vowels. Now, how can you accurately
represent six vowels when the Arabic script provides with only three
symbols to connote vowels? That is why the Roman script is becoming
more in vogue, because it is capable of accurately representing these
sounds. The Lebanese dialect has eight vowels. So, people are
becoming acquainted with the functionality of the Roman script. So,
it’s not only an issue pertaining to Lebanon; it’s not only
because Lebanon is doing this and we want to be cool and imitate
Lebanon, because Lebanon has a liberal society that is open to the
Mediterranean etc.., so, it’s cool to do as the Lebanese do. No!
The Roman script is used prevalently today because it has functional
value. And that is catching on. Sometimes, I might have a text
before me written in a Latin-based script; a legible text that I can
sound out, but I can’t understand. That is so because it is
written in a dialect that I’m not familiar with (it’s sort of
like an Anglophone trying to read a French text; the alphabet is the
same, but the languages are different.)
40:56 to 44:05
This is causing a
slew of different new discoveries (about selfhood, memory, and
identity) throughout the Middle East; discoveries of pre-Arab
identities or pre-Arab civilizations that have come on to the region
prior to the period in which Arabs and Arabic have become dominant.
By getting acquainted with writing one’s spoken language in a
script different from the dominant, canonized Arabic script, the
young of the Middle East are getting acquainted with the idea that
the sounds of their spoken language (and their representation
accurately in another script) can lead to those sounds being read to
mean something different from their subsumed “Arabic” meanings.
[…] I’ll give some examples from the Palestinian Territories in
a little bit, about place-names; I began talking earlier about the
layering of civilizations that came on to the region of the Middle
East; about 95% of place-names in Syria and Lebanon for instance
reflect that checkered history; about 95% of those place-names are
Aramaic, not Arabic. They sound Arabic because we have acquired the
bad habit of writing them in the Arabic script; but once they are
rendered in the Aramaic script, the Syriac script, or even in the
Hebrew script, one begins to pronounce them the way they were
intended to be pronounced, and one realizes that the kinship that
those toponyms have is an Aramaic and Canaanite, not an Arabic
kinship. Now, all Semitic languages have a wealth of common words
with common roots and some common meanings, but once one begins to
parse the grammars of those languages, one realizes that the
linguistic kinship is one that is apparent, not real. To give you an
example, the capital of Lebanon is “Bayroot”; it is rendered
“Bayroot” in written Arabic; it has no meaning whatsoever in
Arabic. (Try to imagine the name of a supposedly major “Arab”
metropolis that has no known meaning in the national language!!!)
But like I said, 95% of the names of towns and villages in Lebanon
are Aramaic. So, Beirut is one example; it has no meaning in Arabic.
But if you were to render “Beirut” in writing, and do so in the
Syriac script (or the Aramaic script, or even in the Roman script)
rather than relying on the (limitative and inaccurate) Arabic script,
“Bayroot” would be rendered “Beerot”. Due to the fact that
the “O” sound does not exist in Arabic (and naturally has no
representation in the Arabic script), it is represented by the “U”
symbol. So, when “Beirut” is rendered “Beerot”, you’re
taking the name back to its Canaanite roots, and you will realize
that the meaning of the town is “the wells.” The word “Beer”
in Canaanite (and in spoken Lebanon) refers to “a well”, “Beerot”
is the plural form of the singular “well.”
44:06
to 46:54
My hope with this
book is to try to steer the conversation on the Middle East and
Middle Eastern identities away from the cozy neat little paradigms
that we have formed for ourselves about this area being a monolith
and a preserve of a single people, speaking the same unified coherent
uniform language, the outcome of a single tradition, a single culture
and a single historical experience. In this book, I try to look at
the wider picture and try to instigate a wider conversation and a
wider contextualization of the Middle East, and begin to recognize
the area for its diversity really rather than by way of the narrow
prisms through which we have grown accustomed seeing it: that is, as
this single monolithic uniform preserve of one single people, which
in reality it’s not. I am hoping that by consenting to view the
area in its diversity will help us perhaps begin dealing with it in a
better manner, with more clarity about the roots of its problems. So
far, I think I’ve been lucky that reactions to my book have been
overall positive ones; and that’s very encouraging. But I know
that sometimes going against established orthodoxies is not a pretty
thing, and the “honey-moon” that I’ve been having will perhaps
prove to be a short-lived one. I am certain—and I welcome that,
because my aim is to instigate a lively debate—but I’m certain
that the keepers of the Arab nationalist canon, and in certain
circles in Middle East Studies, this book’s thesis is bound to be
attacked, and for good reason, because it challenges the jealously
held orthodoxies that we have constructed around the Middle East, its
assumed unity and the unity of the Arab ethos and its Arabic
language.
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