does anyone speak arabic? · 10/06/2011 · multitude of speech forms, contemptuously re-ferred to...

/ 47Salameh: Arabic Language

by Franck Salameh

In August 2010, Associated Press staffer Zeina Karam wrote an article, pickedup by The Washington Post and other news outlets, that tackled a cultural, and arguably political, issue that had been making headlines for quite some time in the

Middle East: the question of multilingualism and the decline of the Arabic language inpolyglot, multiethnic Middle Eastern societies.1 Lebanon was Karam’s case study: anEastern Mediterranean nation that had for the past century been the testing grounds foriconoclastic ideas and libertine tendencies muzzled and curbed elsewhere in the Arabworld.2 However, by inquiring into what is ailing the Arabic language—the nimbus andsupreme symbol of “Arabness”—the author aimed straight at the heart of Arab nation-alism and the strict, linguistic orthodoxy that it mandated, putting in question its mostbasic tenet: Who is an Arab?

Franck Salameh is assistant professor of NearEastern studies at Boston College and author ofLanguage, Memory, and Identity in the MiddleEast: The Case for Lebanon (Lexington Books,2010). He thanks research assistant IuliaPadeanu for her valuable contributions to thisessay.

ARABIC AND ARABISM

For most of the twentieth century, Arabs,Arab nationalists, and their Western devo-tees tended to substitute Arab for MiddleEastern history, as if the narratives, storylines,and paradigms of other groups mattered littleor were the byproduct of alien sources far re-moved from the authentic, well-ordered, har-monious universe of the “Arab world.”3 Assuch, they held most Middle Easterners to beArab even if only remotely associated withthe Arabs and even if alien to the experiences,language, or cultural proclivities of Arabs. Inthe words of Sati al-Husri (1880-1967), a Syr-

ian writer and the spiritual father of linguisticArab nationalism:

Every person who speaks Arabic is an Arab.Every individual associated with an Arabic-speaker or with an Arabic-speaking people isan Arab. If he does not recognize [hisArabness] … we must look for the reasonsthat have made him take this stand … Butunder no circumstances should we say: “Aslong as he does not wish to be an Arab, and aslong as he is disdainful of his Arabness, thenhe is not an Arab.” He is an Arab regardless of

1 Zeina Karam, “Lebanon Tries to Retain Arabic in PolyglotCulture,” The Washington Post, Aug. 16, 2010. For more onArabic language decline, see Mahmoud al-Batal, “Identity andLanguage Tension in Lebanon: The Arabic of Local News atLBCI,” in Aleya Rouchdy, ed., Language Contact and Lan-guage Conflict in Arabic: Variations on a Sociolinguistic Theme(London: Curzon Arabic Linguistics Series, 2002); Al-Ittijahal-Mu’akis, Al-Jazeera TV (Doha), Aug. 1, 2000, Aug. 28,2001; Zeina Hashem Beck, “Is the Arabic Language ‘Perfect’ or‘Backwards’?” The Daily Star (Beirut), Jan. 7, 2005; HashemSaleh, “Tajrubat al-Ittihad al-‘Urubby… hal Tanjah ‘Arabiyan?”Asharq al-Awsat (London), June 21, 2005.2 Fouad Ajami, “The Autumn of the Autocrats,” ForeignAffairs, May-June, 2005.3 Elie Kedourie, “Not So Grand Illusions,” The New YorkReview of Books, Nov. 23, 1967.

Does Anyone Speak Arabic?

48 / MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY FALL 2011

his own wishes, whether ignorant, indiffer-ent, recalcitrant, or disloyal; he is an Arab,but an Arab without consciousness or feel-ings, and perhaps even without conscience.4

This ominous admonition to embrace adomineering Arabism is one constructed on anassumed linguistic unity of the Arab peoples; aunity that a priori presumes the Arabic languageitself to be a unified, coherent verbal medium,used by all members of Husri’s proposed na-tion. Yet Arabic is not a single, uniform language.It is, on the one hand, a codified, written stan-dard that is never spoken natively and that isaccessible only to those who have had rigorous

training in it. On the other hand, Arabic is also amultitude of speech forms, contemptuously re-ferred to as “dialects,” differing from each otherand from the standard language itself to the sameextent that French is different from other Ro-mance languages and from Latin. Still, Husri’sdictum, “You’re an Arab if I say so!” became anarticle of faith for Arab nationalists. It also con-densed the chilling finality with which its authorand his acolytes foisted their blanket Arab labelon the mosaic of peoples, ethnicities, and lan-guages that had defined the Middle East for mil-lennia prior to the advent of twentieth-centuryArab nationalism.5

But if Husri had been intimidating in hisadvocacy for a forced Arabization, his discipleMichel Aflaq (1910-89), founder of the BaathParty, promoted outright violence and crueltyagainst those users of the Arabic languagewho refused to conform to his prescribed,overarching, Arab identity. Arab nationalistsmust be ruthless with those members of the na-tion who have gone astray from Arabism, wroteAflaq,

they must be imbued with a hatred unto death,toward any individuals who embody an ideacontrary to Arab nationalism. Arab national-ists must never dismiss opponents ofArabism as mere individuals … An idea thatis opposed to ours does not emerge out ofnothing! It is the incarnation of individualswho must be exterminated, so that their ideamight in turn be also exterminated. Indeed,the presence in our midst of a living oppo-nent of the Arab national idea vivifies it andstirs the blood within us. And any action wemight take [against those who have rejectedArabism] that does not arouse in us livingemotions, that does not make us feel the orgas-mic shudders of love, that does not spark in usquivers of hate, and that does not send theblood coursing in our veins and make our pulsebeat faster is, ultimately, a sterile action.6

A rigid and unforgiving under-standing of the role of Arabic as ameans of developing Arab nation-alism appeared frequently in thewritings of Baath Party founderMichel Aflaq. He promoted violenceagainst those users of the Arabiclanguage who refused to conform tohis prescribed, overarching, Arabidentity: “hatred unto death, towardany individuals who embody an ideacontrary to Arab nationalism.”

4 Abu Khaldun Sati Al-Husri, Abhath Mukhtara fi-l-Qawmiyyaal-‘Arabiya (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wihda al-‘Arabiya, 1985),p. 80.

5 Franck Salameh, Language Memory and Identity in theMiddle East: The Case for Lebanon (Lanham, Md.: LexingtonBooks, 2010), pp. 9-10.6 Michel Aflaq, Fi Sabil al-Ba’ath (Beirut: Dar at-Tali’a,1959), pp. 40-1.

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Therein lay the foundational tenets of Arabnationalism and the Arabist narrative of MiddleEastern history as preached by Husri, Aflaq, andtheir cohorts: hostility, rejection, negation, andbrazen calls for the annihilation of the non-Arab“other.” Yet despite the dominance of such dis-turbing Arabist and Arab nationalist readings,the Middle East in both its modern and ancientincarnations remains a patchwork of varied cul-tures, ethnicities, and languages that cannot betailored into a pure and neat Arab essence with-out distorting and misinforming. Other modelsof Middle Eastern identities exist, and a spir-ited Middle Eastern, intellectual tradition thatchallenges the monistic orthodoxies of Arab na-tionalism endures and deserves recognition andvalidation.

THE ARABIC LANGUAGE DEBATE

Take for instance one of the AP article’sinterviewees who lamented the waning of theArabic language in Lebanese society and the risein the numbers of Francophone and AnglophoneLebanese, suggesting “the absence of a com-mon language between individuals of the samecountry mean[s] losing [one’s] common iden-tity”—as if places like Switzerland and India, eachwith respectively four and twenty-three official,national—often mutually incomprehensible—speech forms, were lesser countries or sufferedmore acute identity crises than ostensibly cohe-sive, monolingual societies. In fact, the oppositeis often true: Monolingualism is no more a pre-condition or motivation for cultural and ethniccohesiveness than multilingualism constitutesgrounds for national incoherence and loss of acommon identity. Irishmen, Scotsmen, Welsh,and Jamaicans are all native English-speakersbut not Englishmen. The AP could have ac-knowledged that glaring reality, which has beena hallmark of the polyglot multiethnic MiddleEast for millennia. This, of course, is beside thefact that for many Lebanese—albeit mainlyChristians—multilingualism and the appeal ofWestern languages is simply a way of heedinghistory and adhering to the country’s hybrid

ethnic and linguistic heritage.Cultural anthropologist Selim Abou argued

that notwithstanding Lebanon’s millenarian his-tory and the various and often contradictoryinterpretations of that history, the country’s en-dogenous and congenital multilingualism—andby extension that of theentire Levantine littoral—remains indisputable.He wrote:

From the very earlydawn of history up tothe conquests of Alex-ander the Great, andfrom the times of Alex-ander until the dawningof the first Arab Empire, and finally, from thecoming of the Arabs up until modern times,the territory we now call Lebanon—and thisis based on the current state of archaeologi-cal and historical discoveries—has alwayspracticed some form of bilingualism andpolyglossia; one of the finest incarnations ofintercultural dialogue and coexistence.7

So much, then, for linguistic chauvinismand language protectionism. The Arabic lan-guage will survive the onslaught of multilingual-ism but only if its users will it to survive byspeaking it rather than by hallowing it and byrefraining from creating conservation societiesthat build hedges around it to shield it from des-uetude. Even avid practitioners of multilingual-ism in Lebanon, who were never necessarily tal-ented or devoted Arabophones, have tradition-ally been supportive of the idea of preservingArabic in the roster of Lebanese languages—albeit not guarding and fixing it by way of mum-mification, cultural dirigisme, or rigid linguisticplanning. Though opposed in principle to Arabnationalism’s calls for the insulation of linguis-tically libertine Lebanon “in the solitude of atroubled and spiteful nationalism … [and] lin-guistic totalitarianism,” Lebanese thinker MichelChiha (1891-1954) still maintained that:

Salameh: Arabic Language

Modern StandardArabic is codifiedand writtenbut neverspoken natively.

7 Selim Abou, Le bilinguisme Arabe-Français au Liban (Paris:Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), pp. 157-8.


Arabic is a wonderful language … the lan-guage of millions of men. We wouldn’t bewho we are today if we, the Lebanese of thetwentieth century, were to forgo the pros-pect of becoming [Arabic’s] most accom-plished masters to the same extent that we

had been its masterssome one hundredyears ago … But howcan one not heed thereality that a countrysuch as ours would beliterally decapitated ifprevented from beingbilingual (or even trilin-gual if possible)? … [Wemust] retain this lessonif we are intent on pro-

tecting ourselves from self-inflicted deafness,which would in turn lead us into mutism.8

Another fallacy reiterated in the AP articlewas the claim that “Arabic is believed to be spo-ken as a first language by more than 280 millionpeople.”9 Even if relying solely on the field ofArabic linguistics—which seldom bothers withthe trivialities of precise cognomens denotingvarieties of language, preferring instead theoverarching and reductive lahja (dialect/accent)and fusha (Modern Standard Arabic, MSA) di-chotomy to, say, the French classifications oflangue, langage, parler, dialecte, languevérnaculaire, créole, argot, patois, etc.—ZeinaKaram’s arithmetic still remains in the sphere offolklore and fairy tale, not concrete, objectivefact. Indeed, no serious linguist can claim theexistence of a real community of “280 millionpeople” who speak Arabic at any level of nativeproficiency, let alone a community that can speakArabic “as a first language.”

Harvard linguist Wheeler Thackston—andbefore him Taha Hussein, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyed, Abdelaziz Fehmi Pasha, and many oth-ers—have shown that the Middle East’sdemotic languages are not Arabic at all, andconsequently, that one can hardly speak of 280

million native Arabophones—or even of a pal-try one million such Arabic speakers—withoutoversimplifying and perverting an infinitely com-plex linguistic situation. The languages or dia-lects often perfunctorily labeled Arabic mightindeed not be Arabic at all.

This is hardly a modern aberration devisedby modern reformists fancying dissociation fromthe exclusivity of modern Arabism and its mono-lithic paradigm. Even Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406),the fourteenth-century Muslim jurist andpolymath and arguably the father of modern so-ciology, wrote in his famous 1377 Prolegomenathat only the language of Quraish—the ProphetMuhammad’s tribe—should be deemed true Ara-bic; that native Arabs learn this speech form natu-rally and spontaneously; and that this languagebecame corrupt and ceased being Arabic when itcame into contact with non-Arabs and assimi-lated their linguistic habits. Therefore, he argued,

the language of Quraish is the soundest andpurest Arabic precisely due to its remotenessfrom the lands of non-Arabs—Persians,Byzantines, and Abyssinians … whose lan-guages are used as examples by Arab philolo-gists to demonstrate the dialects’ distancefrom, and perversion of, Arabic.10

Thackston has identified five dialectal clus-ters that he classified as follows: “(1) GreaterSyria, including Lebanon and Palestine; (2)Mesopotamia, including the Euphrates regionof Syria, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf; (3) the Ara-bian Peninsula, including most of what is SaudiArabia and much of Jordan; (4) the Nile Valley,including Egypt and the Sudan; and (5) NorthAfrica and [parts of] the … regions of sub-Sa-haran Africa.”11 He acknowledged that althoughthese five major dialectal regions were speckledwith linguistic varieties and differences in ac-cent and sub-dialects, “there is almost completemutual comprehension [within each of them]—

8 Michel Chiha, Visage et Présence du Liban (Beirut: Editionsdu Trident, 1984), p. 49-52, 164.9 Karam, “Lebanon Tries to Retain Arabic.”

10 Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddimah (Beirut: Dar al-Qalam, 1977),p. 461.11 Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr., The Vernacular Arabic of theLebanon (Cambridge, Mass.: Dept. of Near Eastern Languagesand Civilizations, Harvard University, 2003), p. vii.

Languages ordialects oftenperfunctorilylabeled Arabicmight not beArabic at all.

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that is, a Jerusalemite,a Beiruti, and anAleppan may notspeak in exactly thesame manner, but eachunderstands practi-cally everything theothers say.” However,he wrote,

When one crossesone or more majorboundaries, as isthe case with aBaghdadi and aDamascene for in-stance, one beginsto encounter diffi-culty in compre-hension; and thefarther one goes, theless one under-stands until mutualcomprehension dis-appears entirely. Totake an extreme ex-ample, a Moroccanand an Iraqi can nomore understand each other’s dialects thancan a Portuguese and Rumanian.12

In 1929, Tawfiq Awan had already begunmaking similar arguments, maintaining that thedemotics of the Middle East—albeit arguablyrelated to Arabic—were languages in their ownright, not mere dialects of Arabic:

Egypt has an Egyptian language; Lebanon hasa Lebanese language; the Hijaz has a Hijazilanguage; and so forth—and all of these lan-guages are by no means Arabic languages. Eachof our countries has a language, which is itsown possession: So why do we not write[our language] as we converse in it? For, thelanguage in which the people speak is thelanguage in which they also write.13

Even Taha Hussein (1889-1973), the doyenof modern Arabic belles lettres, had come to thisvery same conclusion by 1938. In his The Fu-ture of Culture in Egypt,14 he made a sharp dis-tinction between what he viewed to be Arabictout court—that is, the classical and modernstandard form of the language—and the sun-dry, spoken vernaculars in use in his contempo-rary native Egypt and elsewhere in the Near East.For Egyptians, Arabic is virtually a foreign lan-guage, wrote Hussein:

Nobody speaks it at home, [in] school, [on]the streets, or in clubs; it is not even used in[the] Al-Azhar [Islamic University] itself.People everywhere speak a language that isdefinitely not Arabic, despite the partial re-semblance to it.15


For some Arabs, like these Beirutis enjoying a night out on the town,multilingualism and the appeal of Western languages is a naturalcorollary to their country’s hybrid ethnic and linguistic heritage. Theterritory now known as Lebanon has historically practiced some formof polyglossia and was once a shining representative of interculturalcoexistence in the Middle East.

12 Ibid.13 Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and theArabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationalism, 1900-1930 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 220.

14 Taha Hussein, The Future of Culture in Egypt (Washing-ton, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1954).15 Ibid., pp. 86-7.


To this, Thackston has recently added that whenArabs speak of a bona fide Arabic language,they always mean

Classical [or Modern Standard] Arabic: thelanguage used for all written and official com-munication; a language that was codified, stan-dardized, and normalized well over a thou-sand years ago and that has almost a millen-nium and a half of uninterrupted literary legacybehind it. There is only one problem with[this] Arabic: No one speaks it. What Arabsspeak is called Arabi Darij (“vernacular Ara-bic”), lugha ammiyye (“the vulgar language”),or lahje (“dialect”); only what they write dothey refer to as “true [Arabic] language.”16

And so, even ifModern Standard Ara-bic were taken to be theArabic that the AP wasspeaking of, it is still pa-tently false to say, asdoes Karam, that MSA isanybody’s “first,” native“spoken language”—letalone the “spoken … firstlanguage [of] more than

280 million people.” Even Edward Said, a notori-ously supple and sympathetic critic when it comesto things Arab, deemed Arabic, that is MSA, the“equivalent of Latin, a dead and forbidding lan-guage” that, to his knowledge, nobody spokebesides “a Palestinian political scientist and poli-tician whom [Said’s] children used to describe as‘the man who spoke like a book.’”17

FOREIGN IMPOSITION OR SELF AFFLICTION?

Playing into the hands of keepers ofthe Arab nationalist canon—as well as Arabistsand lobbyists working on behalf of the Arabiclanguage today—the AP article adopted the

cliché that the decline of Arabic—like the failureof Arab nationalism—was the outcome of West-ern linguistic intrusions and the insidious,colonialist impulses of globalization. “ManyLebanese pride themselves on being fluent inFrench—a legacy of French colonial rule,” Karamwrote, rendering a mere quarter-century ofFrench mandatory presence in Lebanon (1920-46) into a period of classical-style “French colo-nial rule” that had allegedly destroyed the foun-dations of the Arabic language in the countryand turned the Lebanese subalterns into imita-tive Francophones denuded of their putativeArab personality.18

Alas, this fashionable fad fails to take intoaccount that French colonialism in its Lebanesecontext differed markedly from France’s colonialexperience elsewhere. For one, the founding fa-thers of modern Lebanon lobbied vigorously forturning their post-Ottoman mountain Sanjak intoa French protectorate after World War I.19 Andwith regard to the Lebanese allegedly privileg-ing the French language, that too, according toSelim Abou, seems to have hardly been acolonialist throwback and an outcome of earlytwentieth-century French imperialism. In his 1962Le binlinguisme Arabe-Français au Liban,Abou wrote that the French language (or earlyLatin variants of what later became French) en-tered Mount-Lebanon and the Eastern Mediter-ranean littoral at the time of the first Crusades(ca. 1099).20 Centuries later, the establishmentof the Maronite College in Rome (1584) and theliberal (pro-Christian) policies of then Mount-Lebanon’s Druze ruler, Fakhreddine II (1572-1635), allowed the Maronites to furtherstrengthen their religious and their religion’s an-cillary cultural and linguistic ties to Rome, Eu-rope, and especially France—then, still the “el-der daughter” of the Catholic Church. This un-leashed a wave of missionary work to Lebanon—and wherever Eastern Christianity dared flauntits specificity—and eventually led to the found-

Middle Easternersare steering clearof Arabic inalarming numbersbut not due toWestern influence.

16 Thackston, The Vernacular Arabic of the Lebanon, p. vii.17 Edward Said, “Living in Arabic,” al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo),Feb. 12 - 18, 2004.

18 Karam, “Lebanon Tries to Retain Arabic.”19 See, for instance, Meir Zamir, The Formation of ModernLebanon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).20 Abou, Le bilinguisme Arabe-Français au Liban, pp. 177-9.

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ing of schools tending to the educational needsof the Christian—namely Maronite—communi-ties of the region. Although foundational coursesin Arabic and Syriac were generally taught at thosemissionary schools, European languages includ-ing French, Italian, and German were also part ofthe regular curriculum. French, therefore, can beargued to have had an older pedigree in Lebanonthan suggested by Karam. And contrary to theclassical norms in the expansion and transmis-sion of imperial languages—the spread of Arabicincluded—which often entailed conquests, mas-sacres, and cultural suppression campaigns, theFrench language can be said to have been adoptedwillingly by the Lebanese through “seduction”not “subjection.”21

It is true that many Lebanese, and MiddleEasterners more generally, are today steeringclear of Arabic in alarming numbers, but con-trary to AP’s claim, this routing of Arabic is notmainly due to Western influence and culturalencroachments—though the West could sharesome of the blame; rather, it can be attributed,even if only partially, to MSA’s retrogression,difficulty, and most importantly perhaps, to thefact that this form of Arabic is largely a learned,cultic, ceremonial, and literary language, whichis never acquired natively, never spoken na-tively, and which seems locked in an uphillstruggle for relevance against sundry sponta-neous, dynamic, natively-spoken, vernacularlanguages. Taha Hussein ascribed the decayand abnegation of the Arabic language prima-rily to its “inability of expressing the depths ofone’s feelings in this new age.” He wrote in1956 that MSA is

difficult and grim, and the pupil who goes toschool in order to study Arabic acquires onlyrevulsion for his teacher and for the language,and employs his time in pursuit of any otheroccupations that would divert and soothe histhoughts away from this arduous effort …Pupils hate nothing more than they hatestudying Arabic.22

Yet, irreverent as they had been in shun-ning Arabic linguistic autocracy and foster-ing a lively debate on MSA and multilingual-ism, Lebanon and Egypt and their Arabic tra-vails are hardly uncom-mon in today’s MiddleEast. From Israel to Qatarand from Abu Dhabi toKuwait, modern MiddleEastern nations thatmake use of some formof Arabic have had tocome face to face withthe challenges hurled attheir hermetic MSA andare impelled to respondto the onslaught of im-pending polyglotism and linguistic humanismborne by the lures of globalization.

In a recent article published in Israel’s lib-eral daily Ha’aretz, acclaimed Druze poet andacademic Salman Masalha called on Israel’s Edu-cation Ministry to do away with the country’spublic school system’s Arabic curricula and de-manded its replacement with Hebrew and En-glish course modules. Arabophone Israelistaught Arabic at school, like Arabophonesthroughout the Middle East, were actually taughta foreign tongue misleadingly termed Arabic,wrote Masalha:

The mother tongue [that people] speak athome is totally different from the … Arabic[they learn] at school; [a situation] that per-petuates linguistic superficiality [and] leadsto intellectual superficiality … It’s not bychance that not one Arab university is [ranked]among the world’s best 500 universities. Thisfinding has nothing to do with Zionism.23

Masalha’s is not a lone voice. The abstruse-ness of Arabic and the stunted achievements ofthose monolingual Arabophones constrained toacquire modern knowledge by way of ModernStandard Arabic have been indicted in the UnitedNations’ Arab Human Development reports—a


A Druze poet andacademic calledon Israel to doaway with thepublic schoolsystem’sArabic curricula.

21 Ibid., pp. 191-5.22 Taha Hussein, “Yasiru an-Nahw wa-l-Kitaba,” al-Adab(Beirut), 1956, no. 11, pp. 2, 3, 6.

23 Salman Masalha, “Arabs, Speak Hebrew!” Ha’aretz (TelAviv), Sept. 27, 2010.


series of reports written by Arabs and for thebenefit of Arabs—since the year 2002. To wit,the 2003 report noted that the Arabic languageis struggling to meet the challenges of moderntimes

[and] is facing [a] severe … and real crisis intheorization, grammar, vocabulary, usage,documentation, creativity, and criticism …The most apparent aspect of this crisis is thegrowing neglect of the functional aspects of[Arabic] language use. Arabic language skillsin everyday life have deteriorated, and Arabic… has in effect ceased to be a spoken lan-guage. It is only the language of reading andwriting; the formal language of intellectualsand academics, often used to display knowl-edge in lectures … [It] is not the language ofcordial, spontaneous expression, emotions,daily encounters, and ordinary communica-tion. It is not a vehicle for discovering one’sinner self or outer surroundings.24

And so, concluded the report, the onlyArabophone countries that were able to circum-vent this crisis of knowledge were those likeLebanon and Egypt, which had actively pro-moted a polyglot tradition, deliberately protected

the teaching of foreignlanguages, and instatedmath and science cur-ricula in languages otherthan Arabic.

Translation is an-other crucial means oftransmitting and acquir-ing knowledge claimedthe U.N. report, andgiven that “English rep-resents around 85 per-cent of the total worldknowledge balance,”

one might guess that “knowledge-hungry coun-tries,” the Arab states included, would take heedof the sway of English, or at the very least, wouldseek out the English language as a major source

of translation. Yet, from all source-languagescombined, the Arab world’s 330 million peopletranslated a meager 330 books per year; that is,“one fifth of the number [of books] translated inGreece [home to 12 million Greeks].” Indeed, fromthe times of the Caliph al-Ma’mun (ca. 800 CE) tothe beginnings of the twenty-first century, the“Arab world” had translated a paltry 10,000books: the equivalent of what Spain translatesin a single year.25

But clearer heads are prevailing in Arabcountries today. Indeed, some Arabs are takingownership of their linguistic dilemmas; fecklessArab nationalist vainglory is giving way to prac-tical responsible pursuits, and the benefits ofvalorizing local speech forms and integrating for-eign languages into national, intellectual, andpedagogic debates are being contemplated. Ar-abs “are learning less Islam and more English inthe tiny desert sheikhdom of Qatar” read a 2003Washington Post article, and this overhaul ofQatar’s educational system, with its integrationof English as a language of instruction—“a to-tal earthquake” as one observer termed it—wasbeing billed as the Persian Gulf’s gateway to-ward greater participation in an ever more com-petitive global marketplace. But many Qatarisand Persian Gulf Arabs hint to more pressingand more substantive impulses behind curricu-lar bilingualism: “necessity-driven” catalystsaimed at replacing linguistic and religious jingo-ism with equality, tolerance, and coexistence;changing mentalities as well as switching lan-guages and textbooks.26

This revolution is no less subversive innearby Abu Dhabi where in 2009 the Ministryof Education launched a series of pedagogicalreform programs aimed at integrating bilingualeducation into the national curriculum. Today,“some 38,000 students in 171 schools in AbuDhabi [are] taught … simultaneously in Arabicand English.”27

And so, rather than rushing to prop up andprotect the fossilized remains of MSA, the de-

The Arabs’ failureto modernize maybe a corollaryof their language’sinability toconform to theexigencies ofmodern life.

24 Arab Human Development Report 2003 (New York: UnitedNations Development Programme, 2003), p. 54.

25 Ibid., pp. 66-7.26 The Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2003.27 The National (Abu Dhabi), Sept. 15, 2010.

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bate that should be engaged in today’s MiddleEast needs to focus more candidly on the utility,functionality, and practicality of a hallowed andponderous language such as MSA in an age ofnimble, clipped, and profane speech forms. Thepoint of reflection should not be whether to pro-tect MSA but whether the language inheritedfrom the Jahiliya Bedouins—to paraphraseEgypt’s Salama Musa (1887-1958)—is still an ad-equate tool of communication in the age of in-formation highways and space shuttles.28 Ob-viously, this is a debate that requires a healthydose of courage, honesty, moderation, and prag-matism, away from the usual religious emotionsand cultural chauvinism that have alwaysstunted and muzzled such discussions.

LINGUISTIC SCHIZOPHRENIA AND DECEIT

Sherif Shubashy’s book Down withSibawayh If Arabic Is to Live on!29 seems tohave brought these qualities into the debate.An eighth-century Persian grammarian and fa-ther of Arabic philology, Sibawayh is at the rootof the modern Arabs’ failures according toShubashy. Down with Sibawayh, which pro-voked a whirlwind of controversy in Egypt andother Arab countries following its release in 2004,sought to shake the traditional Arabic linguisticestablishment and the Arabic language itself outof their millenarian slumbers and proposed tounshackle MSA from stiff and superannuatednorms that had, over the centuries, transformed itinto a shrunken and fossilized mummy: a ceremo-nial, religious, and literary language that wasnever used as a speech form, and whose hallowedstatus “has rendered it a heavy chain curbing theArabs’ intellect, blocking their creative energies

… and relegating them to cultural bondage.”30

In a metaphor reminiscent of Musa’s de-scription of the Arabic language, Shubashycompared MSA users to “ambling cameleers fromthe past, contesting highways with racecar driv-ers hurtling towards modernity and progress.”31

In his view, the Arabs’ failure to modernize was acorollary of their very language’s inability (orunwillingness) to regenerate and innovate andconform to the exigencies of modern life.32 Butperhaps the most devastating blow thatShubashy dealt the Arabic language was his de-scription of the lahja and fusha (or dialect vs.MSA) dichotomy as “linguistic schizophrenia.”33


Taha Hussein, considered the “dean ofmodern Arabic literature,” recognizedthe futility of thinking of classical Arabicas one unified and unifying language.“Nobody speaks it at home,” he wrote,“[in] school, [on] the streets, or in clubs… People everywhere speak alanguage that is definitely not Arabic,despite the partial resemblance to it.”

28 Salama Musa, Maa Hiya an-Nahda, wa Mukhtarat Ukhra(Algiers: Mofam, 1990), p. 233.29 Sherif al-Shubashy, Li-Tahya al-Lugha al-‘Arabiya, YasqutSibawayh (Cairo: Al-Hay’a al-Misriya li’l-Kitab, 2004); CherifChoubachy, Le Sabre et la Virgule: La Langue du Coran est-elle à l’origine du mal arabe? (Paris: L’Archipel, 2007).

30 Choubachy, Le Sabre et la Virgule, pp. 10, 16-8.31 Shubashy, Li-Tayhya al-Lugha al-‘Arabiya, p. 18.32 Choubachy, Le Sabre et la Virgule, pp. 17-8; Shubashy, Li-Tahya al-Lugha al-‘Arabiya, p. 14.33 Shubashy, Li-Tahya al-Lugha al-‘Arabiya, pp. 125-42.


For although Arabs spoke their individualcountries’ specific, vernacular languages whileat home, at work, on the streets, or in the mar-ketplace, the educated among them were con-

strained to don a radi-cally different linguisticpersonality and makeuse of an utterly differ-ent speech form whenreading books and news-papers, watching televi-sion, listening to the ra-dio, or drafting formal,official reports.34

That speech form,which was never spontaneously spoken,Shubashy insisted, was Modern Standard Ara-bic: a language which, not unlike Latin in rela-tion to Europe’s Romance languages, was dis-tinct from the native, spoken vernaculars of theMiddle East and was used exclusively by thosewho had adequate formal schooling in it. Heeven went so far as to note that “upward of 50percent of so-called Arabophones can’t evenbe considered Arabs if only MSA is taken forthe legitimate Arabic language, the sole truecriterion of Arabness.”35 Conversely, it was agrave error to presume the vernacular speechforms of the Middle East to be Arabic, even ifmost Middle Easterners and foreigners wereconditioned, and often intimidated, into view-ing them as such. The so-called dialects of Ara-bic were not Arabic at all, he wrote, despite thefact that

like many other Arabs, I have bathed in thislinguistic schizophrenia since my very earlychildhood. I have for very long thought thatthe difference between MSA and the dia-lects was infinitely minimal; and that who-ever knew one language—especiallyMSA—would intuitively know, or at thevery least, understand the other. However,my own experience, and especially the evi-dence of foreigners studying MSA, con-vinced me of the deep chasm that separated

MSA from dialects. Foreigners who areversed in MSA, having spent many yearsstudying that language, are taken abackwhen I speak to them in the Egyptian dia-lect; they don’t understand a single word Isay in that language.36

This “pathology” noted Shubashy, wentalmost unnoticed in past centuries when illit-eracy was the norm, and literacy was still thepreserve of small, restricted guilds—mainly theulema and religious grammarians devoted to thestudy of Arabic and Islam, who considered theirown linguistic schizophrenia a model of pietyand a sacred privilege to be vaunted, not con-cealed. Today, however, with the spread of lit-eracy in the Arab world, and with the numbersof users of MSA swelling and hovering in thevicinity of 50 percent, linguistic schizophreniais becoming more widespread and acute, crip-pling the Arab mind and stunting its capacities.Why was it that Spaniards, Frenchmen, Ameri-cans, and many more of the world’s transparentand linguistically nimble societies, needed touse only a single, native language for both theiracquisition of knowledge and grocery shoppingwhereas Arabs were prevented from reading andwriting in the same language that they use fortheir daily mundane needs?37

As a consequence of the firestorm un-leashed by his book, Shubashy, an Egyptianjournalist and news anchor and, at one time,the Paris bureau-chief of the Egyptian al-Ahramnews group, was forced to resign his post asEgypt’s deputy minister of culture in 2006. Thebook caused so much controversy to a pointthat the author and his work were subjected toa grueling cross-examination in the Egyptianparliament where, reportedly, scuffles eruptedbetween supporters and opponents ofShubashy’s thesis. In the end, the book wasdenounced as an affront to Arabs and was ul-timately banned. Shubashy himself was ac-cused of defaming the Arabic language inrhetoric mimicking a “colonialist discourse.”38

Standard Arabicis a symbioticbedmate of Islamand the tool ofits cultural andliterary tradition.

34 Ibid., p. 125.35 Choubachy, Le Sabre et la Virgule, p. 119.

36 Shubashy, Li-Tahya al-Lugha al-‘Arabiya, pp. 125-6.37 Ibid., pp. 126-8, 130; Choubachy, Le Sabre et la Virgule,p. 121.

/ 57

A deputy in the Egyptian parliament—repre-senting Alexandria, Shubashy’s native city—accused the author of “employing the discourseand argumentation of a colonialist occupier,seeking to replace the Arab identity with [theoccupier’s] own identity and culture.”39 AhmadFuad Pasha, advisor to the president of CairoUniversity, argued that the book “was addedproof that, indeed, the Zionist-imperialist con-spiracy is a glaring reality,”40 aimed at disman-tling Arab unity. Muhammad Ahmad Achourwrote in Egypt’s Islamic Standard that

Shubashy has taken his turn aiming anotherarrow at the heart of the Arabic language.Yet, the powers that seek to destroy ourlanguage have in fact another goal in mind:The ultimate aim of their conspiracy is noneother than the Holy Qur’an itself, and tocause Muslims to eventually lose their iden-tity and become submerged into the ocean ofglobalization.41

Even former Egyptian president HusniMubarak felt compelled to take a potshot atShubashy in a speech delivered on Laylat al-Qadr, November 9, 2004, the anniversary of thenight that Sunni Muslims believe the ProphetMuhammad received his first Qur’anic revela-tion. Mubarak warned,

I must caution the Islamic religious scholarsagainst the calls that some are sounding forthe modernization of the Islamic religion, soas to ostensibly make it evolve, under thepretext of attuning it to the dominant worldorder of “modernization” and “reform.” Thistrend has led recently to certain initiativescalling for the modification of Arabic vocabu-lary and grammar; the modification of God’schosen language no less; the holy language inwhich he revealed his message to theProphet.42

THE LATIN PRECEDENT

However understandable, this onslaughtwas largely unnecessary. For all his audacity,spirit, and probity, not to mention his provoca-tive dissection of the linguistic and cultural co-nundrum bedeviling the Arabs, Shubashy failedto follow his argument to its natural conclu-sion, and his proposed solutions illustrated thehang-ups and inhibitions that had shackled anddissuaded previous generations of reformers.

Like Taha Hussein, Salama Moussa, andTawfiq Awan, among others, Shubashy seemedat times to be advocating the valorization andadoption of dialectal speech forms—and thediscarding of MSA. But then, no sooner hadhe made a strong case for dialects than hepromptly backed down,as if sensing a swordof Damocles hangingover his head, and re-nounced what he wouldnow deem a heresy andan affront to Arab his-tory and Muslim tradi-tion—in a sense, resub-mitting to the orthodox-ies of Arab nationalistsand Islamists that hehad initially seemedkeen on deposing.

His initial virulent critiques of the Arabiclanguage’s religious and nationalist canon not-withstanding, his best solution ended up rec-ommending discarding dialects to the benefitof “reawakening” and “rejuvenating” the oldlanguage. There were fundamental differencesbetween Latin and MSA, Shubashy argued:

Arabic is the language of the Qur’an andthe receptacle of the aggregate of the Ar-abs’ scientific, literary, and artistic patri-mony, past and present. No wise manwould agree to relinquish that patrimonyunder any circumstances.43


Big languageunificationmovements havebeen met withfailure, wars,genocides, andmass populationmovements.

38 See, for example, Muhammad al-Qasem, “Li-Tahya al-Lugha al-‘Arabiya … wa Yasqut Sibawayh… Limatha?” IslamOnline, July 10, 2004.39 Choubachy, Le Sabre et la Virgule, p. 181.40 Ibid., p. 190.41 Ibid., pp. 189-90.42 Ibid., p. 190. 43 Shubashy, Li-Tahya al-Lugha al-‘Arabiya, pp. 133-4.


In fact, contrary to Shubashy’s assertions,this was a dilemma that Europe’s erstwhile us-ers (and votaries) of Latin had to confront be-tween the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.For, just as MSA is deemed a symbiotic bedmateof Islam and the tool of its cultural and literarytradition, so was Latin the language of thechurch, the courts of Europe, and Western lit-erary, scientific, and cultural traditions. Leav-ing Latin was not by any means less painfuland alienating for Christian Europeans than the

abandonment of MSAmight turn out to be forMuslims and Arabs. Yeta number of audaciousfifteenth-century Euro-pean iconoclasts, un-daunted by the linguis-tic, literary, and theologi-cal gravitas of Latin or-thodoxy, did resolve toelevate their heretoforelowly, vernacular lan-

guages to the level of legitimate and recognizednational idioms.

One of the militant pro-French lobbies atthe forefront of the calls for discarding Latin tothe benefit of an emerging French language wasa group of dialectal poets called La Brigade—originally troubadours who would soon adoptthe sobriquet La Pléiade. The basic documentelaborating their role as a literary and linguisticavant-garde was a manifesto titled Déffence etillustration de la langue Françoyse, believedto have been penned in 1549 by Joachim DuBellay (1522-60). The Déffence was essentiallya denunciation of Latin orthodoxy and advo-cacy on behalf of the French vernacular. LikeDante’s own fourteenth-century defense andpromotion of his Tuscan dialect in De vulgarieloquentia—which became the blueprint of anemerging Italian language and a forerunner ofDante’s Italian La Divina Commedia—DuBellay’s French Déffence extolled the virtues ofvernacular French languages and urged six-teenth-century poets, writers, and administra-tors to make use of their native vernacular—asopposed to official Latin—in their creative, lit-erary, and official functions, just as they had

been doing in their daily lives.Latin, nevertheless, persisted and endured,

especially as the language of theology and phi-losophy, in spite of the valiant intellectuals whofought on behalf of their spoken idioms. Evenduring the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-ries, students at the Sorbonne who were caughtspeaking French on university grounds—or inthe surrounding Latin Quarter—were castigatedand risked expulsion from the university. In-deed, the Sorbonne’s famed Latin Quarter isbelieved to have earned its sobriquet preciselybecause it remained a sanctuary for the lan-guage long after the waning of Latin—and anivory tower of sorts—where only Latin was tol-erated as a spoken language. Even RenéDescartes (1596-1659), the father of Cartesianlogic and French rationalism was driven toapologize for having dared use vernacularFrench—as opposed to his times’ hallowed andlearned Latin—when writing his famous trea-tise, Discours de la Méthode, close to a cen-tury after Du Bellay’s Déffence.

Descartes’ contemporaries, especially lan-guage purists in many official and intellectualcircles (very much akin to those indictingShubashy and his cohorts today), censuredDescartes, arguing French to be too divisiveand too vulgar to be worthy of scientific, philo-sophic, literary, and theological writing. Yet, anundaunted Descartes wrote in his introduction:

If I choose to write in French, which is thelanguage of my country, rather than in Latin,which is the language of my teachers, it isbecause I hope that those who rely purely ontheir natural and sheer sense of reason will bethe better judges of my opinions than thosewho still swear by ancient books. And thosewho meld reason with learning, the only onesI incline to have as judges of my own work,will not, I should hope, be partial to Latin tothe point of refusing to hear my argumentsout simply because I happen to express themin the vulgar [French] language.44

Successfullanguageunificationmovementsnormalize speechforms alreadyspoken natively.

44 René Descartes, Discours de la méthode (Paris: EditionG.F., 1966), p. 95.

/ 59Salameh: Arabic Language

Yet, the psychological and emotive domi-nance of Latin (and the pro-Latin lobby) of sev-enteenth-century Europe remained a powerfuldeterrent against change. So much so thatDescartes’ written work would continue vacil-lating between Latin and French. Still, he re-mained a dauntless pioneer in that he had daredput into writing the first seminal, philosophicaltreatise of his time (and arguably the most influ-ential scientific essay of all times) in a lowly popu-lar lahja (to use an Arabic modifier.) He did sonot because he was loath to the prestige andphilosophical language of his times but becausethe French vernacular was simply his natural lan-guage, the one with which he, his readers, andhis illiterate countrymen felt most comfortableand intimate. It was the French lahja and itslexical ambiguities and grammatical peculiari-ties that best transmitted the realities and thechallenges of Descartes’ surroundings andworldviews. To write in the vernacular French—as opposed to the traditional Latin—was tofunction in a language that reflected Descartes’own, and his countrymen’s, cultural universe,intellectual references, popular domains, andhistorical accretions.

CONCLUSION

This then, the recognition and normaliza-tion of dialects, could have been a fitting con-clusion and a worthy solution to the dilemmathat Shubashy set out to resolve. Unfortunately,he chose to pledge fealty to MSA and classicalArabic—ultimately calling for their normalizationand simplification rather than their outright re-placement.45 In that sense, Shubashy showedhimself to be in tune with the orthodoxiespreached by Husri who, as early as 1955, hadalready been calling for the creation of a “middleArabic language” and a crossbreed fusing MSAand vernacular speech forms—as a way of bridg-ing the Arabs’ linguistic incoherence and bring-ing unity to their fledgling nationhood:

There are fewArabs doingcritical work onStandard Arabicwho do not endup being cowedinto silence.

MSA is the preserve of a small, select num-ber of educated people, few of whom botherusing it as a speech form. Conversely, whatwe refer to as “dialectal Arabic” is in truth abevy of languages differing markedly fromone country to theother, with vast differ-ences often within thesame country, if notwithin the same city andneighborhood … Need-less to say, this pathol-ogy contradicts the exi-gencies of a sound,wholesome nationallife! [And given] thattrue nations deservingof the appellation re-quire a single common and unifying nationallanguage … [the best solution I can foresee toour national linguistic quandary] would be toinoculate the dialectal languages with elementsof MSA … so as to forge a new “middleMSA” and diffuse it to the totality of Arabs… This is our best hope, and for the timebeing, the best palliative until such a day whenmore lasting and comprehensive advances canbe made towards instating the final, perfected,integral MSA.46

This is at best a disappointing and desul-tory solution, not only due to its chimerical am-bitions but also because, rather than simplify-ing an already cluttered and complicated linguis-tic situation, it suggested the engineering of anadditional language for the “Arab nation” toadopt as a provisional national idiom. To expandon Shubashy’s initial diagnosis, this is tanta-mount to remedying schizophrenia by inducinga multi-personality disorder—as if Arabs werein want of yet another artificial language tocomplement their already aphasiac MSA.

Granted, national unification movementsand the interference in, or creation of, a nationallanguage are part of the process of nation build-ing and often do bear fruit. However, success inthe building of a national language is largely

45 Shubashy, Li-Tahya al-Lugha al-‘Arabiya, pp. 142, 184-5.46 For the full text of Husri’s address, see Anis Freyha, al-Lahajat wa Uslubu Dirasatiha (Beirut: Dar al-Jil, 1989), pp.5-8.


dependent upon the size of the community andthe proposed physical space of the nation in ques-tion.47 In other words, size does matter. Smalllanguage unification movements—as in thecases of, say, Norway, Israel, and France—canand often do succeed. But big language unifica-

tion movements on theother hand—as in thecases of pan-Turkism,pan-Slavism, pan-Ger-manism, and yes, pan-Arabism—have thus farbeen met with not onlyfailure but also devastat-ing wars, genocides, andmass population move-

ments. Moreover, traditionally, the small lan-guage unification movements that did succeedin producing national languages benefitted fromoverwhelming, popular support among membersof the proposed nation. More importantly, theysought to normalize not prestige, hermetic, (writ-ten) literary languages, but rather lower, de-graded speech forms that were often alreadyspoken natively by the national community inquestion (e.g., Creole in Haiti, Old Norse in Nor-way, and modern, as opposed to biblical He-brew in Israel).48

Shubashy’s call of “down with Sibawayh!”meant purely and simply “down with the classi-cal language” and its MSA progeny. Overthrow-

47 Ronald Waurdhaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), pp. 353-74.48 John Myhill, Language, Religion, and National Identity inEurope and the Middle East (Amsterdam and Philadelphia:John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2006), pp. 9-12.

ing Sibawayh meant also deposing the greatestArabic grammarian, the one credited with thecodification, standardization, normalization, andspread of the classical Arabic language—andlater its MSA descendent. Yet, calling for thedethroning of one who was arguably the found-ing father of modern Arabic grammar, and in thesame breath demanding the preservation, inocu-lation, and invigoration of his creation, is con-tradictory and confusing. It is like “doing thesame thing over and over again and expectingdifferent results,” to use Albert Einstein’s famousdefinition of insanity. Or could it be that per-haps an initially bold Shubashy was renderedtimid by a ruthless and intimidating MSA estab-lishment? After all, there are few Arabs doingdispassionate, critical work on MSA today, whodo not ultimately end up being cowed into si-lence, or worse yet, slandered, discredited, andaccused of Zionist perfidy and “Arabophobia.”Salama Musa,49 Taha Hussein,50 and Adonis51

are the most obvious and recent examples ofsuch character assassinations.

Ultimately, however, it is society and com-munities of users—not advocacy groups, lin-guistic guilds, and preservation societies—thatdecide the fate of languages. As far as the sta-tus and fate of the Arabic language are con-cerned, the jury still seems to be out.

49 Ibrahim A. Ibrahim, “Salama Musa: An Essay on CulturalAlienation,” Middle Eastern Studies, Oct. 1979.50 “Taha Hussein (1889-1973),” Egypt State Information Ser-vice, Cairo, accessed June 10, 2011.51 See Adonis, al-Kitab, al-Khitab, al-Hijab (Lebanon: Daral-Adab, 2009), pp. 9, 14, 16-9.

It is society andcommunities ofusers thatdecide the fateof languages.

does anyone speak arabic? · 10/06/2011 · multitude of speech forms, contemptuously re-ferred to...

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