essay

10SALAMEH-LangMemoryIdentityInTheMiddleEastArabismItsRivals.pdf

Arabism and Its Rivals

If I choose to write in French, which is the language of my country, rather than in Latin, which is the language of my teachers, it is because I hope that those who rely purely on their natural and sheer sense of reason will be the better judges of my opinions than those who still swear by ancient books. And those who meld reason with learning, the only ones I incline to have as judges of my own work, will not, I should hope, be partial to Latin to the point of refusing to hear me out simply because I happen to express my opinions in the vulgar [French] language. 1

René Descartes

Like Descartes’s seventeenth-century Latin, today’s Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the imperial tool of a partisan political enterprise, not an instrument of a spoken everyday language possessing vitality and malleability, let alone functional and authentic “national” purpose. Arabs do not use MSA as their natural, native, spoken vernacular. Indeed, one could argue that MSA is the vector of an elitist view of language, memory, and identity in the Middle East—more specifically an Arab nationalist and Muslim traditionalist view—and one not reflecting the Middle East’s inherent cultural and ethnic diversity. Few educated Arabs today can claim to have functional, spontaneous fluency in MSA. And if one accounts for the 50 percent illiteracy2 in the Arab Middle East—that is 50 percent of presumptive Arabs who have no formal schooling in, and consequently no understanding of what is often touted as their national language—one can easily discern the frailty of the Arab nationalist allegations about a cohesive, uniform, homogenous “Arab world.” Yet it is precisely this faulty Arab nationalist paradigm that dominates Western scholarship and Western interpretations of the Middle East.

Indeed, for nearly a century of Western academic interest in the modern Middle East, the region has been viewed and dealt with almost exclusively through political and geographic semantics and by way of mental clichés beholden to the biases of Arabs, Arab nationalists, Muslims, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. A leading Middle East scholar once marveled at how scholarship in his field, that is, Middle East Studies as a Western academic endeavor, had in the last one hundred years become a tedious and soporific preoccupation besotted by Arab disaffections, Arab fears, Arab hopes, and Arab concerns, to the neglect of other renditions and interpretations of the Middle East.3 One could even argue that there exists a strong “antiminority” thrust in Middle Eastern studies today; a tendency that ignores a very important dimension in the politics of the region’s history, memory, and identity. In fact, a Middle East history believed to challenge the assumed paramountcy of the prevalent Arab-Muslim narrative is a scholarly pursuit that is not academically fashionable; its study generally perceived to be

Salameh, Franck, and Franck Salemeh. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East : The Case for Lebanon, Lexington Books, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csupomona/detail.action?docID=616205. Created from csupomona on 2018-12-20 15:06:12.

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anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. Yet Middle Eastern minorities, peoples and cultures that come in shades other than the dominant Arab and Muslim ones, are a glaring reality—although not necessarily a politically “relevant” or “desirable” one—and can often boast narratives and histories predating the emergence of Arabs and Muslims from the seventh-century Arabian Peninsula.

Neat and comforting as it might seem to exponents of Arabism, this restricted vision that presumes the Middle East to be a one-dimensional monolithic Arab-Muslim cultural universe, offers only a partial—and ultimately false—reading of a region perhaps as intensely complex and diverse as it might seem exclusively Arab or Muslim. But this tendency is of course not without historical merit and practical value. The Middle East is indeed home to Arabs and Muslims, and the summary label “Arab” in reference to this richly textured composite of peoples and histories offers an anodyne patina of harmony and coherence to what would otherwise be a confusing Babel of identities. But at the same time, this bad habit of slotting inherently diverse peoples in overarching monistic labels reflects a lack of imagination and intellectual laziness that often mislead rather than enlighten.

Pluralism and multiplicity of identities have been hallmarks of Middle Eastern history for millennia, even as this diversity—always falling outside the purview of prevalent modern Arabist paradigms—continues to be bereft of adequate scholarly consideration commensurate with its importance to a just and objective understanding of the region.4 It bears repeating that the Middle East is far too complex, far too nuanced, and far too culturally variegated to be reduced to politically soothing monochro- Arabism and Its Rivals matic categories or a single collective identity. To say that the Middle East is coterminous with the “Arab World” would be tantamount to saying that Europe and its peoples—or Africa and its peoples for that matter —are homogeneous entities, the result of the same historical circumstances, the outcome of the same cultural experience, and the consequence of the same standard language and the same ethnic core. Yet, such is the power of arbitrary Arab nationalist orthodoxy, tying its unitary impulses to its anticolonialist and anti-imperialist liberation beginnings, bolstering its claims by way of the Western left’s patronizing refusal to validate any Middle Eastern narratives unaffiliated with Arabism and Islam.

The Ancient Greek convention assuming a speaker of a given language to be a member of a specific ethnos doesn’t quite apply to the composite polyglot nature of Middle Eastern identities. Languages in the Middle East are not—and never were—markers of ethnic membership or symbols of a single cultural identity. In both the ancient and modern Middle East, assortments of cultural and ethnic groups have always wielded the languages of their times’ dominant civilizations, without necessarily merging into those civilizations and integrating the latter’s ethnic and cultural parameters. Six millennia ago, Sumerian was one such dominant culture foisting its own speech-form as the Middle East’s standard lingua franca. Hence, not unlike the MSA of today, Sumerian was used by Middle Easterners who were bona fide Sumerians and non-Sumerians alike. After a long run, Sumerian itself was eclipsed, and yielded to prolonged historical phases where, in turn, Akkadian, Aramaic,

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Greek, Latin, Turkish—and a number of other speech-forms—became the dominant administrative languages of the Middle East, again, without necessarily diluting the entire region into some uniform, exclusively Akkadian, Aramaean, Hellenistic, Roman, or Turkish culture. And even as Arabic was gradually adopted as the language of government in the seventh and eighth centuries of the current era, on the heels of the Arabs’ conquest of the region, lexical and scriptal elements of the Middle East’s earlier Canaanite, Aramaic, Latin, and Greek vernaculars impregnated Arabic even as they were eventually replaced by it.5

A lingua franca, or a dominant administrative language, does not necessarily entail monolingualism, cultural uniformity, or national cohesion. Even in the West where ethnicity is often defined by language, many exceptions remain and validate the time-honored Middle Eastern model. In the Anglophone world, Americans, Irishmen, Scotsmen, and Nigerians are all native English speakers, but not Englishmen.6 Likewise, Belgians, Quebeckers, and Swiss can be native francophones without necessarily being considered Frenchmen. In the modern Middle East, a form of Arabic happens to have gradually grown into the region’s dominant language. But like Sumerian, Aramaic, and Greek before it, this Arabic 4 dominance—akin to that of English, French and Spanish—was more the by-product of conquest and colonization than it was a sign of some sui generis endogenous cultural uniformity. Yet the Arabic language remains the overarching benchmark of identity in the Middle East and the assumed cement and nimbus of Arabism and Arab nationalism.

It would not be unfair to point out that the seventh-century Arab conquest of the Middle East was as banal and stereotypical as any other military imperial enterprise in the history of mankind. The Arab conquest did not take place in a cultural and ethnic vacuum, and its cultural and linguistic encroachments on its colonial chattel were no different from those of any other, earlier or later, colonial intrusion. The bulk of the peoples and cultures that the seventh-century Arab imperial enterprise brought under its sway were certainly not Arabs and not speakers of Arabic. But over time those conquered Middle Easterners—Persians, Aramaeans, Syrians, Byzantines, Jews, and others—were in turn, both coerced and seduced into adopting the Arabic language and its rituals, integrating them into their daily lives. It is true that literary brilliance, intellectual effervescence, and scientific advancements have all taken place in Arabic, and that “Arabized” Persians and Byzantines and Spaniards and Syrians had all taken part in the dynamic intellectual crucible that became the Arabic language between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. But it is equally true that cultural orthodoxy and linguistic imperialism have also had their high mark in, and by way of the Arabic language. Not unlike the way in which the European conquest of the Americas, the African slave trade, and the massacres of the Aborigines played a role in making English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French into “world languages,” so did the Arab-Muslim conquests of the seventh century make Arabic into a “world language”; a vector of intellectual grandeur to be sure, but an instrument of cultural domination nonetheless, and a tool through which indigenous non-Arab populations were willy-nilly incorporated into a new Arab order and a new “Arab world.”

As mentioned earlier, Arabic is a dead language.7 Yet the Arabiclanguage-based criterion of Salameh, Franck, and Franck Salemeh. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East : The Case for Lebanon, Lexington Books, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csupomona/detail.action?docID=616205. Created from csupomona on 2018-12-20 15:06:12.

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identity continues to inform the prevalent perceptions and depictions of the Middle East, even as it continues to inaccurately conflate language—and a dead language no less—with ethnos, nationality, and geography. Besides being an Ancient Greek legacy, this parameter of identity predominates the common portrayals of the Middle East because it reflects an ostensibly successful and familiar European model. Indeed, the political map of modern Europe, with very few exceptions, points to countries bearing cognate names that apply to territories, nationalities, ethnicities, and languages all at once.8 Accordingly, the French Republic would be inhabited by Frenchmen who spoke French, Italy would be home to Italian-speaking Italians, and Sweden would be the homeland of the Swedes whose national language was Swedish. With the rise of modern nationalism and its introduction into the Middle East during the early part of the twentieth century, these quintessentially European patterns of identity became the norm championed by Arab nationalists—and their foreign friends—suppressing in the process millenarian peoples and narratives that, up until then, were never defined in linguistic terms, let alone by way of a single language and in terms suggesting a uniform Arab ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identity.

In the Middle East, there are no historical or conceptual equivalents to the European trinity of land-ethnicity-and-language as defined by the same set of cognate appellations. That is, being French, living in a territorial-state named France, and speaking the French language are European concepts par excellence reflecting European circumstances with no antecedent historical analogues in the Near East. The idea that there exists a well-delineated geographic area called “Arabia,” inhabited by “Arabs” who spoke “Arabic,” is a fairly recent notion for the Middle East, one that has its intellectual roots in Europe, not Arabia, and one, at best, referring to a vague geographic notion identified by the Arabsthemselves as “the Peninsula of the Arabs” (Jazeerat al-’Arab), not “Arabia” per se.9 Add to that the fact that the language touted as vehicle and cement of that Arab nation is as useful a medium of verbal communication to members of that nation as Dante’s Latin would have been useful to today’s Italians or Frenchmen, and the plot thickens.10

CONFLATING LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

History, memory, and identity are not the function of language in the Middle East, and defining a user of the Arabic language as an Arab—although a distinguishing motif of Arab nationalism —is a criterion that, until the early twentieth century, remained incomprehensible to most Middle Easterners. We saw earlier that the nationalist doctrine—Arab or otherwise—which argues that speakers of the same language somehow constitute, or must constitute, a single nation is patently defective. There is also something blatantly false in the claim that the Arabic language itself is a cohesive, coherent, unitary language. MSA is a literary, highly regulated language that is acquired only through formal education. It is never spoken natively, and if indeed spoken—or rather “vocalized”—then only in constructed situations, out of prepared texts, and then only by a rare select few educated Arabs. Raymond Gordon’s Ethnologue defined MSA as the second language of 246,000,000 nonnative speakers, and as a competency that is:

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not a first language. Used for education, official purposes, written materials, and formal speeches. Classical Arabic is used for religion and ceremonial purposes, having archaic vocabulary. MSA is a modernized variety of Classical Arabic. In most Arab countries only the well educated have adequate proficiency in Standard Arabic, while over 100,500,000 do not.11

Versions of this definition of the Arabic language will be revisited repeatedly throughout this work, not so much in an attempt to discredit Arabic, nor to add to its mystique and bear out the rigors often associated with learning it, but merely to stress the fact that there are indigenous Middle Eastern identity parameters and legitimate Middle Eastern national claims that lie outside the confines of the traditional paradigms associated with the Arabic language and Arab nationalism. Harvard linguist Wheeler Thackston, for instance, told a Christian Science Monitor reporter in 2002 that many teachers of Arabic in the West purposely obfuscate “the vast difference [that exists] between the written standard [Arabic that they teach] and the spoken dialects.”12 This is perhaps understandable in view of the scholarly contempt with which Arabists—both Westerners and Middle Easterners alike—usually treat dialects.13 Attention to colloquial languages is viewed by many language purists and Arab nationalists as an imperialist scheme to splinter the Arab world and undermine its unity, for only MSA deserves, according to that view, the dignity of being called a language, and “dialects” are nothing more than defective lower speech-forms. Of course, this ignores the fact that, not only are those very (lowly, defective) dialects a glaring reality of life—and certainly not an “imperialist” fabrication—but they are also the region’s onlyspoken speech-forms that are natural spontaneous endogenous Middle Eastern emanations. Indeed, as noted by Gordon, MSA is the artificial language form in the Middle East, limited to academic, religious, and formal institutional frameworks, and certainly qualifying as a “scheme”—this time pilfered, not by Westerners, but by Arabists intent on duping varied and diverse Middle Eastern cultures into a uniform Arab identity. In fact, Kees Versteegh, a leading Arabic language historian, noted that until the seventeenth century, most Western Arabists “did not even know about the existence of [. . .] colloquial language[s],”14 let alone did they express interest in learning them, teaching them, or using them to splinter an Arab nation—which, in any case, was never in history a coherent unified political or geographical reality warranting this alleged insidious splintering.15

Among the Arabs, Arab nationalists, and their sympathizers, colloquial languages are dismissed as lowly, deformed speech patterns unworthy of being spoken, let alone recognized, studied, codified, and taught. Even those untrained in the rigors of MSA are emotionally and ideologically conditioned to malign their own native speech forms and to revere MSA as the hallowed and definitive vector of Arabness and Islam. The sobering truth, however, is not only that there is not a cohesive, coherent geographic entity corresponding grosso modo to the “Arab World” meriting the designation “Arabia.” Even a unified Standard Arabic language that is assumed to be a first-mother-language, acquired natively, touted as a national language, and ostensibly spoken by the totality of the proposed members of “Arabia,” the “Arab world,” or the Arab nation, this also is more hyperbole than it is fact. Indeed, the speech forms

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traditionally referred to as Arabic, account for over thirty language varieties, are spoken in more than a dozen Middle Eastern countries, and are often mutually incomprehensible to the point of constituting bona fide languages in their own right.16 Yet accuracy is sacrificed for the sake of simplicity—if not ideological bias—and these multiple languages are willy-nilly labeled as one Arabic language, and their users summarily anointed Arabs.17 Of course, there had been Middle Easterners, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— perhaps even earlier—who did view components of their identities in linguistic terms, a fact that might give merit and historical depth to language-based Arabism. There were those who maintained they were speakers of, say, Armenian, Turkish, French, Syriac, and perhaps even Arabic—to name but a few—but these references to language were more often than not expressions of “social snobbery” than they were relevant and valid parameters of coherent ethnic identities, exceptions rather than general rule.18

That is not to say that there were no Arabs and no Arab identity in the Middle East prior to the advent of twentieth-century nationalism. There were! However, Arab nationalism and the idea that users of the Arabic language constituted a single unified, cohesive nation with a collective memory and a common national language, and that this Arabic nation deserved—and had the right—to fulfill its destiny with the establishment of a single Arab state; that idea itself was nonextant prior to the early decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, up until the advent of Arab nationalism, corporate identity, and self-perception in much of the Middle East were religiously—not linguistically—defined. Of course, people identified themselves—and were identified by others—by way of a slew of other criteria: familial, tribal, geographic, and others. But the only standard self-image that mattered, the one that trumped all others, was religious. And although it made sense at certain levels of group affiliation to use local, geographic attributes—for example, Beiruti, Cairene, Jerusalemite, Baghdadi, and other geographic eponyms, some of which have survived into the modern era in the form of family names—in practice it made more sense for Middle Easterners to use ethnoreligious identifiers —for example, Druze, Alawite, Copt, Assyrian, Sunni, and so on.

Still, there were Arabs, and, historically, defining who was an Arab was rather simple. Up until the early twentieth century, scholars from both the Middle East and the West considered an Arab to be a person whose ancestry was in the Arabian Peninsula and parts of the Fertile Crescent. Someone from Jeddah was an Arab, a Cairene was not. Indeed, historian Bernard Lewis has shown that the Middle East was a mix of cultures, particularisms, nationalities, and self-perceptions that never enjoyed a single uniform collective identity, let alone an exclusively Arab one.19 This began to change in the early twentieth century when Arab nationalist elites imbued in national creeds pilfered from the West, began superimposing a new overarching national identity on preexisting group affiliations. In the 1930s, the idea that one is an Arab if one spoke Arabic came into vogue.20 This new linguistic pattern of identity—again, initially a European concept reflecting specifically European circumstances—came on the heels of World War I, the result of the postwar concept of “self-determination” of European communities which already had languages with long literary traditions, which could be billed as emblems of specific national identities.21

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The Middle East had no such “tribal” languages possessing the requisite literary and cultural tradition upon which to base a specific identity. Rather, the Middle East was, and remains to this day, a paradox of multiple identities based on religion, sect, town, village, family, and other group associations and interests, the majority of which, until the emergence of Arab nationalism, did not involve the Arabic language. Indeed, when the modern Egyptian poet Lewis ‘Awad wrote about his homeland, he did so in colloquial Egyptian, not MSA. When the Lebanese-American thinker Gibran Khalil Gibran yearned for his native Mount Lebanon, he did so more comfortably in English than in the nascent, stilted MSA of his times.22 When the fifteenth-century Maronite bishop of Cyprus, Gabriel Alkalai, wrote his history of Lebanon, he did so inKarshuni, his local Lebanese speech-form written in Syriac characters.23 Even the modern Arabic works of illustrious Egyptian novelist, Nagib Mahfouz, feature internal monologues in Egyptian vernacular, not the traditional MSA for which he was famous.24 Some Bedouin poetry is, likewise, recited in a number of colloquial variants.25

Nevertheless, the twentieth-century European-inspired Arab nationalism attempted to assign an Arab ethnic identity to an arbitrary language, MSA. It bears repeating that like Medieval Latin and Latin’s equivalents in the ancient Middle East—from Sumerian to Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, Turkish, and Latin itself—MSA might have been the ceremonial and official language of government and religion, but was never used colloquially; it was the language of literature not “the language of life.”26 Even today, as an archaic artificial language, MSA remains the domain of newspapers, not conversations. Arabs themselves speak a multiplicity of languages “which are downgraded to dialects” but which, in the words of Wheeler Thackston, “resemble [Modern Standard] Arabic as much as Latin resembles English.”27 Yet the charade continues; all of those varied speech-forms continue to be lumped under one “Arabic” rubric; and all of their speakers—even with very low levels of mutual comprehensibility—continue to be referred to as “Arabs.”

THE WARDENS OF ARAB NATIONALISM

Not unlike other absurd, totalitarian, racialist, linguistically based “panmovements”—from pan-Germanism to pan-Slavism—Arab nationalism was essentially an “enlarged tribal consciousness” with an overbearing and coercive impulse aiming at forcibly uniting peoples of a presumably similar ethnic and linguistic origin, in total disregard of their independent histories, social experiences, and cultural accretions.28 In this sense, Arabism and Arab nationalism held that anyone remotely connected to the Arabs, even if not born within the Arabs’ “geographic realms” (i.e., the “Arab world”), and even if alien to the experiences, language, or cultural predilections of Arabs, those persons are perforce Arabs. Indeed, Arab nationalists used linguistic definitions of Arabism to deny the cultural claims of ethnic or sectarian minorities in the Middle East. Sati’ al-Husri (1880–1967), a Syrian writer who played an important role in the crystallization of this sort of compulsory Arabness, maintained that:

Every person who speaks Arabic is an Arab. Every individual associated with an Arabic- Salameh, Franck, and Franck Salemeh. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East : The Case for Lebanon, Lexington Books, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csupomona/detail.action?docID=616205. Created from csupomona on 2018-12-20 15:06:12.

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speaker or with an Arabic-speaking people is an Arab. If he does not recognize [his Arabness], and if he is not proud of his Arabness, then we must look for the reasons that have made him take this stand. It may be an expression of ignorance; in that case we must teach him the truth. It may emanate from an indifference of sorts, or a faulty consciousness; in that case we must enlighten him and lead him to his true self. It may be the result of extreme egoism; in that case we must limit his egoism. But under no circumstances should we say: “as long as he does not wish to be an Arab, and as long as he is disdainful of his Arabness, then he is not an Arab.” He is an Arab regardless of his own wishes. Whether ignorant, indifferent, recalcitrant or disloyal, he is an Arab, but an Arab without consciousness or feelings, and perhaps even without conscience.29

Al-Husri’s invitation—a disquieting, almost violent exhortation to embrace his domineering Arabness—is one based on a purported linguistic unity of the Arab peoples; a unity which a priori presumes the Arabic language itself to be a unified, coherent verbal medium, used by all members of al-Husri’s proposed nation. But the use of Arabic as a criterion for identity to the same extent that, say, French can be used as a criterion for national identity, is somewhat problematic. As mentioned earlier, Arabic is not a single, uniform, common language. Instead, it is on the one hand a codified written standard, a literary and administrative language that is never natively spoken by anyone—and accessible to only those members of the Arab nation who have had rigorous training in it. On the other hand, “Arabic” is also a multitude of speech forms, contemptuously referred to as “dialects,” different from each other and from the standard language itself to the same extent as French is different from other Romance languages and from Latin. Yet, all of these languages—both the multiple spontaneous (natively spoken) vernaculars and the standard (never spoken) written form—are all referred to as “Arabic” by al-Husri and his Arab nationalist cohorts. This is analogous to using the same appellation “Latin” in reference to the language of ancient Rome, the language of the Medieval Catholic Church and the royal courts of Europe, the language of Renaissance humanists, and the modern languages of France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal;30 shoddy, misleading, and risibly inaccurate taxonomy by any other standard, but, remarkably, totally acceptable in the Middle Eastern context.

Yet, this is the lapidary brevity and the chilling finality with which Sati’ al-Husri and his cohorts foisted their blanket “Arab” label on the mosaic of peoples, ethnicities, and languages that is the Middle East. And this is the prevalent narrative of modern Middle East history that still informs most of our views and perceptions of the region. “If you’re from the Middle East you’re an Arab, and you’re an Arab if I say so,” Sati’ al-Husri seemed to suggest. For unlike the intellectuals and peoples of Europe, from whom Arabists had borrowed their own national models, al-Husri and other Arab nationalists were still besotted by their “Latin”—their MSA —and still unwilling to allow the recognition and admission of their own native vernacular languages as bona fide languages in the manner of their European prototypes. This is so even as some Arab nationalist intellectuals, al-Husri chief among them, made less than adequate use of MSA, thus betraying their status as both outsiders and neophytes to their much vaunted MSA.

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If al-Husri advocated a forced Arabness for anyone prattling an idiom resembling Arabic, Michel Aflaq, an apostle of his and cofounder of the Baath Party, promoted outright violence and cruelty against those users of the Arabic language who refused to conform to an overarching Arab identity as postulated by al-Husri. Arab nationalists, Aflaq preached, would be foolish to condone the national and cultural claims of others who renounce the Arabness offered to them. He was brutally honest in his justification of violence and physical punishment against those users of Arabic who rejected their imputed Arabness. Aflaq wrote that:

It is both comical and shameful that Arabs should be thinking of humanism and of supporting those other nations [presumably users of Arabic who are not attracted by Arabism and claim a separate identity.] . . . When we [Arabs] are cruel to them, we know that our cruelty is in order to bring them back to [Arabness], to their true selves of which they are ignorant. Their potential will, which has not been clarified yet, is with us, even as their swords are drawn against us.31

In fact, the cruelty which Aflaq unabashedly called for, and the repression, and outright annihilation of the non-Arab “other,” his cultural references and his national narratives—which were presumably detrimental to Arabism—would in time become some of the favored operational tenets of Baathism.32 But with skillful seductive use of Arabic semantics, Aflaq transformed the crass language of violence and brutality inherent to his ideas, into a sublime gospel of love—self-love and love of the nation. Indeed, it is with Aflaq and with his preached brutality that the story of Fawaz Turki’s Jasmine, recounted in the Introduction, is validated and normalized. Arab nationalists, Aflaq professed, must practice a form of “loving brutality” against those who go astray from the nation, because Arab nationalism is “before anything else, love,” and as a popular Arabic adage goes—reminiscent of the English “tough love”—“he who smites you does so because he so loves you.” Therefore, according to Aflaq, Arab nationalists must be pitiless and cruel because they love their disoriented and errant “Arab brothers.” Arab nationalists must, therefore, be unforgiving with those members of their nation who have gone astray,

[and] they must be merciless to themselves as well. [. . .] They must be imbued with a powerful hatred, a hatred unto death, towards any individuals who embody an idea contrary to the idea of Arab nationalism. [. . .] An idea that is opposed to ours does not emerge ex nihilo: it is the outcome of individuals who must themselves be annihilated, so that their very idea might in turn be also annihilated. The existence of an enemy of our idea vivifies it and sends the blood coursing in our veins. Any action that does not call forth in us living emotions and does not make us feel the spasms of love [. . .] that does not make our blood race in our veins and our pulse beat faster, is a sterile action.33

Aflaq’s liberal use of vocabulary ordinarily associated with love—physical, sexual love—is neither gratuitous nor frivolous here. His are allusions to the base carnal gratification that cruelty and physical violence are believed to engender in sadistic psychopaths—only the psychopaths that Aflaq is egging on in this passage might have been the sexually repressed

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youth of his Arab nation; a youth whose inhibited sexuality is invited to find release in an orgy of violence against strayed Arabs. This is the same parochial despotic Arab nationalist of Fawaz Turki’s brother 12 Moussa; a traditionalist, conservative bully who clobbered his own —sexually liberated—sister nearly to death, only to subsequently force her to drink a poison- chalice he had himself borne to her lips a few weeks later—her reward for having strayed from cultural exigencies and tradition. In the tradition of Aflaq, Moussa was a bully and a cold-blooded murderer who, as soon as he kills his own sister, proudly races to his balcony, brandishes a gun—a phallic symbol of his own repressed manhood—and spurts out staccato rounds of his baroud d’honneur in the air; a “gun-salute” as it were, broadcasting the death of an apostate and an errant family member, reclaiming his culture’s—and his own—challenged virility. With Aflaq’s prescription above, as with Moussa’s deliberate and brutal reaction to his sister’s straying from the herd, there certainly seems to be a state of ecstasy, clearly preceded by some sort of anticipatory arousal as a prelude to meting out beastly punishment on those rejecting Arabism. “Blood coursing in our veins,” “pulse beating faster,” and “spasms of love,” are part of a phraseology that would clearly belong in the vocabulary of love were they not disturbing references to the “carnal rewards” of acts of brutality and physical annihilation rained on those who stand in the way of tradition and the nation.

ARABISM’S LEBANESE RIVALS

Yet other models of Middle Eastern identities exist. And as this work will attempt to demonstrate, a considerable number of twentieth-century activists and intellectuals opposed to Arab nationalism did make numerous attempts at escaping the bondage of MSA and the ideology spawned by it. They endeavored to elevate their vernacular languages to the level of prestige speech forms and assert in the process their cultural and historical specificity, away from the imperious impulses of Arabism. For, despotism is arguably an issue of language, and Arabism’s tyranny, as Aflaq and al-Husri have made abundantly clear in their political writings, is tyranny meted out, first linguistically, by way of MSA, before it is inflicted physically. But Arab nationalists, conservative Islamists, and their foreign votaries persist in their efforts to denigrate and repress these “independence” attempts. This is so because “if the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Iraqis, and the rest were to develop their vernaculars into national languages, as the Spaniards, the Italians, and the rest had done in Europe, then all hope of a greater Arab unity would be finally lost.”34 And if that “unity” is lost, then the prevalent narrative of modern Middle East studies—upon which venerable careers, eminent academic departments, and a commanding body of literature have been built—would be stultified and thrown out the window. That explains why al-Husri’s ideas Arabism and Its Rivals 13 are still so influential within Arab nationalist circles today—from the fossilized mental remains of Arabist ideologues, to university academic programs and arcane professional associations— even as Arab nationalism’s death knell has long since been sounded, and even as new generations of Middle Easterners, “former Arabs” and Arab intellectuals, have begun charting a different course for themselves and their peoples, away from the vagaries of Arabism.35

Sixty years ago, speaking of the “Lebanese paradox” which, in its cultural and linguistic Salameh, Franck, and Franck Salemeh. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East : The Case for Lebanon, Lexington Books, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csupomona/detail.action?docID=616205. Created from csupomona on 2018-12-20 15:06:12.

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diversity represented a microcosm of the modern Middle East, Lebanese thinker Michel Chiha wrote that:

Conquerors and their conquests have all come, gone, and faded away; yet the Lebanese have remained. We are the meeting-place into which peoples flock and assimilate regardless of their origins. We are the crossroads where varied civilizations drop in on one another, and where bevies of beliefs, languages and cultural rituals salute each other in solemn veneration. We are above all a Mediterranean nation, but a nation, like the Mediterranean itself, discerning and sensitive to the stirring music of universal poetry.36

This is the Middle East! Not an “Arab world,” but a diverse human and cultural space composed of Arabs, to be sure, but teeming with nonArabs as well, a space with topologies, climates, histories, languages, and geographies favorable to diverse cultural and human compositions, synthesizing centuries of intellectual, linguistic, and ethnonational intercourse and traffic. This is the Middle East that the Lebanese Michel Chiha, Amin Maalouf, Georges Naccache, and Rabih Alameddine, the Palestinian Fawaz Turki and Anton Shammas, the Syrian Adonis and Nizar Qabbani, and the Egyptian Ali Salem, Moustapha Safouan, and Taha Husayn have labored to exhume, rehabilitate, and reveal to itself; a diverse, multiform, polyglot, bastardized cocktail of cultures, peoples, and languages. To the Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Egyptian, and Israeli intellectuals mentioned above, and to others—among them Said Akl, whom this work aims to explore at length—the Middle East is a syncretistic pantheon and a patchwork of hybrid ethnicities, languages, and narratives; a millenarian universe of varied civilizations, including those spawned by Muslims and Arabs, where peoples and times touch and blend without dissolving each other, and where languages and histories mesh and fuse without getting confused with one another.

We would be ill-served—as would the Middle East itself—if we were to continue referring to it in faulty and ultimately dangerous bromides, as the “Arab world,” or the “Muslim world,” or even the “Arab Muslim World.” As mentioned earlier, the Middle East is certainly home to Muslims and to Arabs. But it is also home, crucible, and progenitor to some of mankind’s oldest cultures and civilizations, the remnants of which are 14 still extant in modern Egyptians, Lebanese, Israelis, Jordanians, Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis, and others, peoples who see and define themselves in terms different from those of the fashionable labels of modern ideologies.

Georges Naccache

Early twentieth-century Lebanese author, diplomat, and journalist Georges Naccache, through his progressive and inclusive vision of Lebanon, was one such passionate exponent of an expansive, multiform, culturally elastic, Mediterraneanist Middle East. Like many children of his generation, the vision of Lebanon that Naccache championed was one of a millenarian meeting place of peoples, languages, and cultures, impossible to slot into a single, simple, soothing “nationalist” label. Naccache was well at ease with the transparently “bastardized” hybridity of Lebanon’s human and cultural anatomy, in perfect harmony with its kindred Levantine and European Mediterranean. In his view, Lebanese diversity provided a broader,

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more inclusive contextualization of identity, one based on openness and multiplicity rather than on the prevalent national jingoisms and rigidity of his times’ Arab nationalist tendencies.

Naccache was particularly unforgiving vis-à-vis Arabism. And although at times sympathetic to some of Arabism’s national and cultural claims, acknowledging them to be “natural” and “legitimate” to those who champion them, Naccache denounced what he called Arabism’s “limitative” and “exclusivist” proclivities, comparing them to the Inquisition’s auto- da-fé.37 Lebanon’s vocation, he claimed, was that of the authentic and exquisitely original peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean; peoples strewn at the crossroads of races and civilizations, perpetual cosmopolitan exiles, eloquent cultural intermediaries, and faithful synthesizers of Western and Eastern cultural values.38

Although Naccache was accepting of an emergent Arab literary renaissance and an Arab cultural revival in the Middle East, he vehemently rejected Arabism’s negationist impulses and denounced its attempts at stifling the varied cultural, ethnic, and linguistic attributes of the Eastern Mediterranean; attributes which, in his view, were the synthesis of a 6,000-year-old human experience, a Lebanese patrimony and a bequest to the totality of the human race.39

It should be noted that in 1924 Georges Naccache was, along with Gabriel Khabbaz, a cofounding editor of the French-language Lebanese daily L’Orient. During the 1930s L’Orient would become the mouthpiece of Emile Eddé’s National Bloc Party, a committed advocate of Lebanese cultural autonomy and a sworn foe of Arab nationalism. L’Orient was also a political rival of future Lebanese president Bshaara El- Khoury’s camp’s newspaper, Le Jour, itself the brainchild of another illustrious Lebanese Mediterraneanist, the poet and banker Michel Chiha. In 1971, both L’Orient and Le Jour would merge into what would later become Lebanon’s leading French-language daily, L’Orient Le Jour. Interestingly, Naccache was also, along with future Lebanese president Charles Helou and activists Emile Yared, Chafic Nassif, and Pierre Gemayel, one of the founding pillars of the Lebanese Phalanges Party, which they established in November of 1936, and which in later years would become one of the major political exponents of Lebanese national specificity and Lebanese independence—opposed to the varieties of emerging Arab nationalist movements attempting to relegate Lebanon to the status of a “province” in a projected Arab suprastate.

In 1949, Georges Naccache, along with L’Orient’s Editor in Chief, Kesrwén Labaki, was sentenced to a six-month prison term for having dared publish an audacious editorial titled Deux négations ne font pas une nation! (Two Negations Don’t Amount to a Nation!). The essay was a combustive critique of Lebanon’s politics of the ostrich and a devastating indictment of Arabs, Arab nationalism, Lebanese Arabists, and the Lebanese national “concession” known as the National Pact—a 1943 political contract establishing Lebanon’s “diversity” but recognizing its “Arab face.” In Naccache’s view, the “two negations”—Lebanon being “neither Eastern nor Western,” and “neither Arab nor ‘non- Arab’”—were an astute balancing act. But he also viewed that formula to have been a national

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“deception” and a “paralyzing equilibrium”; a failed attempt at bridging Lebanon’s ethnic diversity, which in the end eroded the country’s essence and etiolated its true Mediterranean identity—the one based on multiplicity and openness, not on static national monism.40

A full year before the publication of Deux négations ne font pas une na- tion, on September 17, 1948, Naccache penned a stirring editorial titled You Are Certainly What You Are, Lebanon! In it, he paved the way to the iconic 1949 essay, and elaborated on his Braudelian- Mediterraneanist conception of identity; an idea more expansive and accepting than those advocating an imputed, perhaps contrived, often compulsory Arabic national perception.

On July 21, 2006, in the midst of the Hezbollah-Israel summer war in southern Lebanon, the French weekly Valeurs Actuelles, ran an analysis of the Lebanese situation in which political observer Frédéric Pons made use of both of Naccache’s late-1940s editorials, employing Naccache’s exact language to translate the complexities of Lebanon to his French readers. “What is Lebanon?” Pons wondered, paraphrasing Naccache.41 “It is a millenarian contradiction resolved on a daily basis, for the past thousand years; a contradiction that still requires a daily resolution.”42 Lebanon is a tiny plot of land populated by seventeen different ethnoreligious communities, each with its own distinctions, specificities, ethnic connotations, 16 and cultural divergences, predilections and aspirations.43 The argument Pons was making in the summer of 2006 was essentially the same one advanced by Georges Naccache sixty years earlier. Namely that Lebanon, by its very nature and due to the stunning complexity and diversity of its cultural fabric, cannot be plied or reduced to the will of one exclusive and exclusivist ideology or one restricted and restrictive national narrative and national identity. Speaking to this verity in 1948, Naccache wrote:

You are definitely what you are, the way you are, O Lebanon! A precious little promontory drawn out of the placid waters [of the Mediterranean], standing sentry in the face of the Ponent [rising sun], hoisting your distinctive outlines above the edge of a restless Asia. O, you, small heap of limestone and marl, pricked by rugged greeneries; what does exactly confer upon you that special distinction? [. . .] Is it because you are this bright speck of light on a barely comprehensible map; a small stain of white and ochre around which revolves a 6,000-year-old story and a timeless history? All of the planet’s reflexes clamor and echo within you, making you the world’s most sensitive and vibrant meeting place of peoples and cultures. [. . .] They are certainly indigenous to these parts, all these people hailing from all the other “elsewheres,” dropping anchor at your shores. [. . .] For as far back as the memory can stretch, you have been [. . .] the meeting place of all of Man’s major undertakings. [. . .] O land of pure untamed impulse, what is the secret of your order? What is the secret of your defiant equilibrium? [. . .] A hundred times sentenced to death, you still prove your vibrancy and your life, simply by living. You are this country where, not once in the past twenty-five years, have two official clocks succeeded in marking the same hour; [. . .] where any form of national prerogatives can be vetoed by a mortician and hearse-driver. [. . . Must you] forever look catastrophe in the eye, forever walk on the edge of the abyss, yet never trip over and never fall? [. . .] O Lebanon, O most enchanting mess, O most sweet injustice in a world ravaged by excesses of justice and

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order.44

This is the essence of Lebanon and its multifaceted millenarian identity and history; a cacophony of peoples and narratives, rooted in everlasting motion and change, obstinately clinging to their congenital diversity, relentlessly defiant in the face reductive nationalisms —“morticians” and “hearse-drivers” to use Naccache’s pungent image, a clear reference to a sinister and morbid Arab nationalism, impinging on Lebanese sovereignty and smothering its “national prerogatives.” Although written some sixty years ago, describing a fledgling modern Lebanese state still reeling from five centuries of Ottoman domination and a quarter century of French Mandatory rule, Naccache’s was a theme that still seduces and moves a number of modern Lebanese authors and political thinkers. Amine Maalouf for one, another faithful son of the Mediterranean, is another such thinker. Indeed, Maalouf would dedicate the corpus of his literary output of the 1980s and 1990s to this same expansive, Mediterraneanist conception of identity as advocated by Naccache and his peers in the Lebanon of the 1920s and 1930s; an identity that validates and celebrates a complex hybridity, a métissage or a composite of cultures and languages as Maalouf called it, rather than banal reductive labels and exclusivist, ultimately impoverishing and faulty classifications.

Amin Maalouf

In his 1993 novel Le rocher de Tanios, winner of that year’s prestigious French Prix Goncourt literary prize, Maalouf pays tribute and pledges fealty to Lebanon’s hybridity and complex mosaic of identities. He writes:

This is my Mountain! It is at once attachment to the ancestral soil and longing for exile; a sanctuary and a passageway in one; a land of milk and honey, and blood; neither Heaven, nor Hell; but rather, Purgatory. [. . .] Many events had come to pass; [my] village had witnessed so many upheavals, so many destructions, so many bruisings, until one day I resolved to surrender to exile. I whispered my regrets to all the ancestors and [. . . I set out to leave.] At my back, the mountain stood near. At my feet lay the valley whence, at nightfall, the all too familiar howling of jackals would soon begin to creep up. And over there, in the distance, I could see the sea; my cramped plot of sea, narrow and distant, ever moving forward, ever rising towards the horizon, like an endless road.45

These imageries of roads, seas, and mountains—perpetuity, rootedness, and everlasting fluidity and movement—are of paramount importance to someone as physically, affectively, and intellectually invested in the Mediterranean and Mediterranean culture as Maalouf. The Mediterranean “is above all, a sea ringed round by mountains,” and the “mountains [at once] surrounding, strangling, barricading and compartmentalizing the long Mediterranean coastline are the flesh and bones [of the Mediterranean peoples],” wrote Fernand Braudel in his Memory and the Mediterranean.46 For millennia, “the peoples of the Mediterranean have been shaped not only by the sea [. . .], but also by the mountains.”47 This is the predominant theme in Maalouf’s oeuvre, in his conception of identity, and in his perception of the composite

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nature of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean, Mediterranean Lebanon, and the Levant; perpetuity, diversity, and eternal movement. Indeed, Maalouf’s work is especially carping— often using jarring language—against those advocates of reductionist identities. He likens them to “howling jackals” in the conclusion of Le rocher de Tanios. Jackals symbolize death in ancient Near Eastern mythology—as well as modern Lebanese popular superstitions. A jackal is a hated creature that mulls around graveyards and digs up corpses. It 18 would be difficult to believe that Maalouf used jackals frivolously—as opposed to, say, the more fearsome wolves or lions—without some sort of symbolism in mind, without intending to condemn orthodoxy and the despotism of jingoistic nationalisms—perhaps with a round of sous- entendres sniping at Arabism.

In that same vein, and speaking of his nineteenth-century Lebanese ancestral village in his 2004 self-narrative, Origines, Maalouf pokes fun at the stilted and rigid MSA that some members of his own family often ostentatiously paraded on perplexed interlocutors—even as they did not use MSA themselves as a language of daily parlance.48 Conversely, when speaking of his native village’s authentic sui generis speech-form, an elastic and unpretentious mother-tongue, Maalouf affectionately and effusively refers to it as “a country vernacular language with, if that, a very faint relationship to the Arabic language.”49 Indeed, whether in his works of fiction, historical novels, self-narratives, or journalistic output, Amin Maalouf had been one of the most eloquent, most articulate exponents of a blending and multiplicity of identities, identities as a perpetual “workin-progress” unhindered and uncluttered by linguistic and cultural orthodoxy.50 His inspiration and world of reference had always been Lebanon. Not because of nostalgic yearnings for it, but because multiform, diverse, “bastardized” Lebanon held in Maalouf’s view a more just and a more accurate notion of identity—for Lebanon and the Mediterranean Levant as a whole—than the simplistic uniform perceptions diffused by a stolid normative media and an unoriginal modern Middle East scholarship.

“Others would rather speak to you about ‘roots,’” began Maalouf’s preface to Origines “but not I!”51

I dislike the word “roots,” and I dislike the imageries it elicits even more. Roots burrow deep in the soil, they twist and squirm in the mud, they thrive in the darkness, [they] hold the trees above them captive and nourish them by way of blackmail: “You break free, you die!” Trees must resign themselves to this blackmail; trees need their roots; humans don’t. We humans breathe the light and yearn for the skies, and when we sink into the ground, we do so only to rot out and die. The sap of our native soil does not reach our heads by way of our feet. Our feet have only one function; they help us walk and move about. The only things that matter to us humans are roads. It is the road that beckons to us and seduces us. [. . .] The road gives us promises, carries us aloft, pushes us forth, and then abandons us. And so we die in the same manner in which we were born, forlorn on the side of a road that we had not chosen.52

Not unlike the bulk of his literary corpus, Maalouf’s Origines is certainly not a denunciation of Salameh, Franck, and Franck Salemeh. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East : The Case for Lebanon, Lexington Books, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csupomona/detail.action?docID=616205. Created from csupomona on 2018-12-20 15:06:12.

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identity and “roots”; it is simply a celebration of identity as motion and “wings,” a testament to the adaptability and versatility of Man, and above all, a tribute to the ecumenical, pantheistic nature of human identities—perhaps more specifically a validation of Lebanon’s varied Mediterranean personality. No doubt the 2004 Prix Méditerranée was awarded Origines for many reasons, being a testament to Mediterranean culture must certainly have been foremost among those reasons.

Multiplicity and hybridity are a leitmotif and a foundational direction in Maalouf’s work. Speaking of Leo Africanus, a fifteenth-century character in his eponymous book, Léon l’Africain, Maalouf describes thusly his hero’s anthropomorphic cosmopolitan Mediterranean Levant—and, by association, his tiny Lebanon which he holds to be a microcosm of the larger Middle East:

I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the scale-master, I, Jean-Léon de Médici, circumcised at the hands of a barber and baptized at the hands of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fezzi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road; a wayfarer. My homeland is the caravan; my life the most spectacular of pathways, the most riveting of travels. . . . My wrists have rubbed, in turn, against the caresses of silk, the chafing of wool, the gold of princes and the chains of slaves. My fingers have parted a thousand veils, my lips have made a thousand virgins blush, and my eyes have seen cities die and empires collapse. From my mouth you will hear Arabic, Turkish, Castilian, Berber, Hebrew, Latin and Italian vulgari, because all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them. I belong only to God and to the earth, and it is to them that I shall one day soon return.53

So, Hasan, also known as Leo Africanus, with ties to Granada (Spain), the scion of a noble North African Muslim family, who lived as a homeless penniless exile in Morocco, and as a Catholic aristocrat in the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella, was a circumcised Catholic and a Muslim baptized at the hands of his namesake, Pope Leo X—who incidentally christened Hasan “Léon de Médicis.” Not unlike his Lebanese author, the supposedly Muslim Arab North African Moorish European Catholic, was neither Arab, nor African, nor even European, but rather a composite cosmopolitan polyglot, who was intimately familiar with the cultures and ways of Europeans and Arabs alike, and who wielded Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Berber, Latin, and its French, Spanish, and Italian vernaculars, with the ease and affection of a native. Like his author, Leo could not be reduced to a simple, politically soothing national label. He was, as Maalouf described himself in his self-narrative, Origines, a man “of illusive origins”:

the child of a tribe of eternal vagabonds, wandering off endlessly in a limitless desert, wide as the universe is infinite; [. . .] dwelling in tents disguised in costumes made out of rock; holder of varied nationalities that are only a function of random dates in time, or another steamship setting off on a new voyage; sharing only one common denominator [. . .] beyond the generations, beyond the open seas, and beyond the Babel of languages: the

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rustling sound of [. . . an] identity grounded in mythology that I know to be false, but a mythology that I revere regardless, as if it were my only truth.54

This is a canvass set against an infinitely more complex understanding of identity—and a far more broad and fluid perception of the self than demanded by Arab nationalism; a patchwork of cultures, languages, ethnicities, and narratives always in motion, never seduced by facile soothing narrow depictions of singular, homogenized constructs of self-perception. Always a nationality made up of multiple nationalities, always dwelling in a homeland straddling multiple homelands, always a linguistic humanist wielding a “native” language that is a synthesis of multiple languages and the appanage of multiple identities and appurtenances.

Bidding another final farewell to his “home,” on the eve of yet another final exile and another final voyage to the land of his birth, Maalouf’s hero, Leo Africanus, gives advice to his own son in these final words of Leo Africanus the novel, never surrendering to a reductive monochromatic identity, never betraying his cosmopolitan polyglot self:

Once more, my son, I am borne along by that [Mediterranean] sea [. . .] which is now taking you towards your first exile. In Rome, you were “the son of the Rumi.” Wherever you are, some will want to ask questions about your skin or your prayers. Beware of gratifying their instincts, my son, beware of bending before the multitude! Muslim, Jew or Christian, they must take you as you are, or lose you. [. . .] Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.55

Rabih Alameddine

Again, another product of Lebanese hybridity, this time expressed in English, is Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati. Like Lebanon itself, Alameddine’s novel is a rich bewitching tapestry of Levantine metaphor that is in a way the very history, memory, and identity of Lebanon itself. In a nutshell, The Hakawati is the story of the Kharrat family,56 their UrfaTurkey-native patriarch Ismail, the illegitimate love child of a British missionary- physician (Simon Twining, “like the tea”) and his Armenian housekeeper (Lucine Guiragossian). In sum, it is the story of Lebanon and the Lebanese, told through the history of a family of “fibsters” and their patriarch, an Armenian-Lebanese Turkish-speaking Anglican- Druze, Ismail Twining-Guiragossian “hal kharrat” (Anglice “that fibster” or “B.S. artist”).

The Hakawati is also the story of Biblical, Homerian, Phoenician, Turkish, Koranic, Ovidian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Pagan Lebanon, in sum, the story of Lebanese diversity, hybridity, and its cocktail of cultures, identities, languages, and civilizations. The very word “hakawati,” as Alameddine puts it, conjures up images of “a teller of tales, myths, and fables,” deriving from “the Lebanese word ‘haki’ which means ‘talk’ or ‘conversation’”; this suggests that in the Lebanese language the simple feat of talking connotes weaving a fantasy and concocting a story.57 By playing around with the semantic connotations of the words “hakawati,” “hkayé,” and “kharrat,” Alameddine was clearly pointing out Lebanon’s

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congenital diversity—and ultimately the futility of trying to pigeon-hole it into an ideologically soothing label, Arab or otherwise. The fact that digging into the etymological origins of his narrator’s patronym— hkayéét, haki, hkayé—referring to the word’s cognates as “Lebanese” tout court—as opposed to Lebanese-Arabic or Lebanese “dialectal” words—tells legion of Alameddine’s intent to flaunt Lebanon’s distinctness, namely its linguistic distinctness and its linguistic humanism (wielding Armenian, Turkish, “Lebanese,” English and Arabic). Alameddine could have easily chosen the standard reference to Lebanon’s speech-form as a “dialect of Arabic,” or “Lebanese-Arabic,” or simply Arabic. Opting for “Lebanese” tout court was a statement the author was making on behalf of a bona fide “Lebanese” language.

Dealing with the contents of the novel on a more substantive level, Alameddine’s juxtaposition of fables as well as Biblical and Koranic narratives with his own family’s history, is meant to underline that diversity—as was it multiple jabs at and mockeries of religious orthodoxies and monistic prescriptive identities. The last few pages of the novel are particularly poignant. At one point, clasping the hand of his dying father, the narrator proceeds with a drawn out and detailed narration of the family’s history as if to ward off death and buy his father another night among the living. Says he:

Do you hear me? . . . Do you hear me? I don’t know which stories your father told you and which you believed, but I always wondered whether he ever told you the true story of who he is, or the one that seems most true. Did he? [. . .] Your grandmother’s name was Lucine. It’s true. I checked it out. Lucine Guiragossian. Your grandfather was Simon Twining. . . . See, you have English, Armenian, and Druze blood. Oh, and Albanian, too. You’re a man of the world. We always knew that. . . . Your grandmother died while your father was still a baby. Another [Armenian] woman raised him, Anahid Kaladjian. . . . She sent him away when he was eleven. He used to say that all he remembered was that she told him to go south, hide in the mountains of Lebanon, stay with the Christians. . . . Listen. Here’s a story you’d like. Your father was born tiny, as tiny as a rat, a jardown. No one gave him any hope of living. 22 [. . . Yet he] survived, but he didn’t grow up to be a giant of a man, no, did he? Like all of us [his descendents], he wasn’t even very big. He didn’t inherit the subtlety of wine, but the volatility of vinegar. The yogurt gave him not a bitter wisdom but a sour disposition. And the horseshoe turned out to belong not to a horse, but to a mule. . . . So he did end up with the endurance of iron, but also with the stubbornness of a mule. That’s your father.58

This, Alameddine’s Lebanon is a longwinded but fascinating 513-page version of Michel Chiha’s Lebanon: a mountain sanctuary for heterodox minorities—“go hide in the mountains of Lebanon, stay with the Christians,” says one of Alameddine’s characters—a meeting place of peoples and ideas; a thick stew of varied cultures, religions, and languages; “a small country, indeed a very small country; perhaps even a small nation, but certainly a homeland for a race of undying giants”59 who, like the Hakawati, the “teller of tales,” were eternally volatile, sour, and stubborn conduits and cultural intermediaries.

ARABISM’S EGYPTIAN RIVALS Salameh, Franck, and Franck Salemeh. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East : The Case for Lebanon, Lexington Books, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csupomona/detail.action?docID=616205. Created from csupomona on 2018-12-20 15:06:12.

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Interestingly, as pertains to the modern Middle East as a whole, touting smaller national identities outside the narrow perimeters of Arabness is a theme that is no longer specific to Lebanon. Lebanon and the Lebanese have certainly been pioneers in vaunting non-Arab cultural progenitors, but this is a stance that a bevy of other Middle Eastern peoples have, of late, become more forthright and outspoken about. The Pharaonic movement in Egypt (especially with Ali Salem and Taha Husayn), the Canaanite movement among Israelis, Palestinians, and Israeli-Palestinians (with Fawaz Turki and Anton Shammas), and the neo- Mediterraneanism of Arabic-language poets like Adonis and Nizar Qabbani—have all resurfaced during the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—and the aforementioned intellectuals have all begun excavating and rehabilitating their suppressed pre- Arab histories and identities; histories and identities that offer a more inclusive secular alternative to Arabism (and Zionism), and which manifest a genuine interest in the ancient histories and peoples of the Levant—Canaanites, Hebrews, Phoenicians, Egyptian Pharaohs, Assyrians, Armenians, and others.

Ali Salem

One such advocate of Middle Eastern identities antedating and superseding Arabism is the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem. Salem’s ideas are very much in tune with the Braudelian Mediterraneanism as showcased above in the thought and works of Lebanese authors Georges Naccache and Amine Maalouf. It should be noted that one of Ali Salem’s prevalent leitmotifs maintains Egypt—that is, the modern “Arab” Republic of Egypt—to be the daughter of Mediterranean Europe, not an Arabian sand-maiden. His work offers a pungent indictment of the insularity and thuggish instincts of nationalism—mainly Arab nationalism of the Sati’ al- Husri and Michel Aflaq variety—and attempts to provide an ecumenical Egyptian Mediterraneanism as an alternative. In the short satire excerpted below, The Odd Man and the Sea, a verbal duel erupts between an anthropomorphic Arab nationalism and a humanistic Egyptian Mediterraneanism, each trying to convince the other of the validity of their history and their own perception of identity. The outcome, however, is sadly predictable. Predetermined by the story’s very title where the “Sea” symbolizes Mediterranean dynamism and fluidity, and the “Odd Man” represents a universalist humanist dreamer branded “odd” and “crazy” for trying—in vain perhaps—to chart a course for himself and his Egyptians away from the repressive impulses of Arab nationalist and Muslim religious orthodoxy. In “The Odd Man and the Sea” Salem describes an interrupted daydream sequence during which, depicting himself as a lover and disciple of the Mediterranean, he would spend long hours staring at its surface:

looking for the far horizon, as if I wanted to see my neighbors there, in Italy, Greece, Spain, and France. [. . .] We are neighbors, separated by two continents, unified by one sea. [. . . Suddenly,] he appeared. [. . .] He was almost my age, but quite different. His face reflected deep feelings of piety and certainty, while my own betrayed puzzlement and fear of the unknown. He said: “All the people around you are engrossed in doing something useful, why do you sit around doing nothing?”

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“I’m thinking, sir.”

“Of what?”

“Of the sea, of the Mediterranean.”

“Why don’t you think of the Red Sea?”

“I don’t know it. The few times I went there, I didn’t feel any affection toward it. . . .”

“But you feel affection for the Mediterranean?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s one of the human rights to love the sea.”

A cruel look crept upon his face, I felt restless. Once again he started asking questions.

“Do you feel that you belong to the Mediterranean?”

“Egypt itself is of the Mediterranean,” I responded. “One day, thousands of years ago, this sea was just a lake, crossed by ships loaded with thoughts and art toward Greece, carrying the product of minds and souls. [. . .]”

“You didn’t mention that you are an Arab,” he pointed out. 24

“The Arabs are my fathers, but the Egyptians are my forefathers; do you advise me to inherit from my fathers and ignore the treasures left to me by my forefathers?” I asked him.

“I don’t advise you, I order you” he said!60

In the main, what Ali Salem attempts to demonstrate in this passage, is his strong belief in—as evidenced by his powerful validation of—identity as a distinct construct distinguished by its very diversity and complexity rather than by its supposedly monistic exclusivism. In extolling diversity, Salem also indicts the insularity and reductionism of Arabism and Islam. “Egypt itself is [the product] of the Mediterranean,” he tells his Arabist interlocutor, and the Mediterranean itself is “a lake” linking Egypt to Europe’s cultural and intellectual heritage. Unlike Arabism, Salem’s Egyptian nationalism—an outcome of a humanistic universalism in his view—is not exclusivist and does not exhibit anti-Arab parochialism—at least not in the manner in which al-Husri’s and Aflaq’s Arabism negated non-Arabs. “The Arabs are my fathers,” Salem concedes to his story’s Arabist enforcer, “but the Egyptians are my forefathers.”61 So, in a sense, Salem acquiesces in his kinship to the Arabs, but at the same time he refuses to disengage from his equally—if not more—important non-Arab and pre-Arab ancestry.

In the conclusion of his satire, Salem’s narrator is physically taken back in time to nineteenth- century Egypt, where mules are the common mode of transportation, where firewood and

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candlelight are employed for heating, cooking and lighting, and where the narrator is compelled to seek out the assistance of then Egypt’s Ottoman Viceroy, Muhammad Ali Pasha. Besides demonstrating how relinquishing a single component of ones identity—in this case Egypt’s non-Arab component—devalues one as a human being and stunts one’s ability for movement and progress, this scene brings Egypt’s Pasha to the fore as savior and protector of diversity as advocated by Salem’s narrator. It should be remembered that Muhammad Ali Pasha is commonly recognized as the father and founder of Modern Egypt. Although a Muslim and an Ottoman subject, the Pasha was not an Arab, nor a native Egyptian for that matter. He was a Macedonianborn ethnic Albanian who never even spoke Arabic. Yet he was credited with the modernization and industrialization of Egypt; he oriented the Egyptian economy toward cotton production; embarked on large-scale building projects (hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, canals, factories); modernized the Egyptian army, and attempted to treat all his subjects equally—most importantly, he brought Coptic Christian Egyptians back to the forefront of Egyptian society after centuries of marginalization, isolation, persecutions, and discrimination. So, in a sense, Salem’s narrator appears to have sought out the Pasha’s help precisely because of the latter’s reputation as a reformer and a challenge to orthodoxy, and in the hope that there would be intellectual affinity and sympathy between the two to ward off the specter and blunt the tyranny of the Arabist character in the play. But Salem’s character quickly learns that reform is costly, that it comes with burdens and responsibilities, and that it demands nothing less than defying authority and orthodoxy head on. Were the modern Egyptians prepared to challenge the Arabists and Islamists among them asked the Pasha? In the end, Salem’s character resigns himself to living in the obscurity of the nineteenth century, where he didn’t challenge or question tradition, and where tradition did not harass him as long as he quietly submitted to it and toed the line.

But in reality, Salem’s ostensible resignation was a pungent statement against the tyranny of Arabism. At one point in the satire, when Salem’s narrator inquires whether his Arabist interlocutor was advising him to “inherit from [his Arab] fathers and ignore the treasures left for [him by his Egyptian] forefathers?” the domineering Arabist responds “I do not advise you, I order you!” This is an attitude very much in line with the dogmatism, negationism, and coercion—as national integrators—as advocated by two of the most influential Arab nationalist ideologues of the twentieth century, Michel Aflaq and Sati’ al-Husri. Indeed, al- Husri’s mantra “you’re an Arab if I say so” had become a well nigh cabalistic incantation brandished by Arabist diehards still unable to come to terms with the reality of an ecumenical non-Arab Middle East and still unwilling to reconcile themselves to the authenticity—and perhaps even the endurance—of the modern Middle East’s state-system and Middle Eastern state-nationalism.62

But Salem, the ever witty and subtle satirist, does not allow Arabism to escape his caustic scalpel unharmed. In the opening paragraphs of The Odd Man and the Sea, an Arab nationalism clearly inhospitable to freethinking wonders why Salem’s character, who was clearly engrossed in thinking, sat idly by, “doing nothing” of value, while true Arabs were “doing something useful, [. . .] playing dominos, cards and backgammon.”63 Salem’s

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insinuation was that Arabists were submissive besotted automatons, who never questioned authority and never disputed the official line, as if mental exercises and pondering questions of identity and pre-Arab progenitors were dangerous intellectual enterprises in Arab nationalist political thought. Worthy Arabs do not deviate from their “group-think” mentalities; they do “something useful” instead; they play “backgammon, cards and dominoes.”64

Taha Husayn

Over half a century prior to Ali Salem’s Odd Man and the Sea, Michel Chiha’s Mediterraneanism was summed up in words very similar to Sa-26 lem’s “do you advise me to inherit from my fathers and ignore [. . .] my forefathers?” Chiha wrote in 1942 that

the past fifteen centuries [of Lebanon’s history, presumably fifteen centuries of Arab domination], should not make [the Lebanese] oblivious or disrespectful of the fifty centuries that preceded them! [. . .] Even if relying entirely on conjecture, the blood, the civilization, and the language of today’s Lebanese cannot possibly be anything other than the legacy and synthesis of fifty centuries of progenitors and ancestors.65

But in addition to their obvious Lebanese “inspiration,” Ali Salem’s ideas did have indigenous Egyptian progenitors; more exactly in the form of a local Mediterraneanism that flourished in Egypt of the 1920s and 1930s, and which was propounded through the person and works of what some consider the doyen of modern Arabic literature, Taha Husayn. Indeed, even by today’s standards, the ideas advocated by Husayn during the 1930s were considered radical and revolutionary. Claiming Egypt, as Husayn did, to the millenarian tradition of ancient Mediterranean Greece and Rome, and disengaging it from the East and Araby, bordered almost on blasphemy against both Arabism and Islam. Egypt is not only a Western nation, claimed Husayn, it is the crucible, progenitor, and cradle of Western civilization. Unlike Ali Salem, Taha Husayn was an educator as well as a man of letters and public intellectual; he did not feel the need to rely on works of satire and allegory, and elude “the authorities” and their prevalent orthodoxies, in order to drive his ideas across. Husayn was, at different times through the 1940s and 1950s, an Egyptian public official, founding Rector of the University of Alexandria, and Minister of Education. He articulated his ideas plainly and unequivocally by building school curricula, publishing works of cultural pedagogy and social criticisms, as well as through works of literature with social and political content. Husayn believed that Egyptian culture and Arab culture were irreconcilable polar opposites, stressing that Egypt’s only path to modernity and progress was through disengaging it from its imposed Arab history, shedding its alien Arab acquisitions and reclaiming its ancient Pharaonic, Greek, and Roman Mediterranean past. There exists no scientific basis for Egypt’s purported Arabness, argued Husayn. Pharaonism is deeply anchored in the souls of Egyptians and will forever remain so, he claimed, “an Egyptian is an Egyptian first and foremost [. . . and] he will never relinquish his Egyptian identity, no matter what the circumstances.”66

In his The Future of Culture in Egypt, his magnum opus published in 1939 and was meant as a Salameh, Franck, and Franck Salemeh. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East : The Case for Lebanon, Lexington Books, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csupomona/detail.action?docID=616205. Created from csupomona on 2018-12-20 15:06:12.

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set of guidelines for educational reform in Egypt, Husayn attempted to define Egyptian identity and placed it squarely at the center of European-Mediterranean heritage. He wrote that:

At the outset we must answer this fundamental question: is Egypt of the East or of the West? Naturally, I mean East or West in the cultural, not the geographical sense. It seems to me that there are two distinctly and bitterly antagonistic cultures on the earth. Both have existed since time immemorial, the one in Europe, the other in the Far East. We may paraphrase the question as follows: Is the Egyptian mind Eastern or Western in its imagination, perception, comprehension, and judgment? More succinctly put—which is easier for the Egyptian mind: to understand a Chinese or Japanese, or to understand an Englishman or a Frenchman? This is the question that we must answer before we begin to think of the foundations on which we shall have to base our culture and education. It seems to me that the simplest way to do this is by tracing the complicated development of the Egyptian mind from earliest times to the present.

. . . The Egyptian mind had no serious contact with the Far Eastern mind; nor did it live harmoniously with the Persian mind. The Egyptian mind has had regular, peaceful, and mutually beneficial relations only with the Near East and Greece. In short, it has been influenced from earliest times by the Mediterranean Sea and the various peoples living around it. [. . .] The ancient Egyptian mind is not an Eastern mind [. . .] It developed in Egypt as a result of the conditions, natural and human, that prevailed there [in Egypt.] It only exerted influence on and was in turn influenced by the neighboring nonEgyptian peoples, principally the Greeks.

From these clear and long since proven facts, Egyptians have deduced the weird and illogical conclusion that they are Easterners not merely in the geographical sense of the term, but in mentality and culture. They regard themselves as being closer to the [Easterners] than to the Greeks, Italians, and Frenchmen. I have never been able to understand or accept this shocking misconception. I still recall the astonishment I felt several years ago when I became familiar with the activities of a group in Egypt that called itself the “Eastern Link Association” and sought to promote contacts with the peoples of the Far East rather than with the peoples of the Near West. I clearly, indeed intuitively, understand our consciousness of the positive relationships existing between us and the Near East [. . .] because of geographical propinquity as well as similarity of origin and historical evolution. When we go beyond the Near East, however, these factors no longer obtain, except for religion and temporary considerations of a political or economic nature. History shows that religious and linguistic unity do not necessarily go hand in hand with political unity, nor are they the props on which states rely.67

So, not only is Egypt not Arab in Husayn’s definition of Egyptian identity, but its cultural affinities lay with the ancient and modern civilizations of Europe, Canaan, Phoenicia, and the rest of the Mediterranean—in other words France, Britain, Italy, and Greece, not the Arab Middle East, to which Husayn refers euphemistically as the “East” and the “Far

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East.” Egyptian kinship and contacts with the “Near East” are admissible in Husayn’s estimation—perhaps mainly because Greece is traditionally 28 considered to be part of that official “Near East,” but also because other Near Eastern neighbors of Egypt’s in Husayn’s times, Lebanese and Israelis, were already harking back to non-Arab, Canaanite, Phoenician, and Hebrew progenitors during the 1920s and 1930s.

Husayn’s most brazen attempt at severing Egypt from its Arab accretions touches on the issue of language. Under the guise of advocating for a “reformation” of the “Classical” Arabic language—in other words calling for its rehabilitation, modernization, secularization and simplification, as well as ending its monopolization by clerics who have “confiscated it”— Husayn well-nigh declares Arabic to be a dead language and calls for relinquishing it. Said he:

Arabic [MSA] in Egypt is now virtually a foreign language. Nobody speaks it at home or school or the streets or in clubs; it is not even used in [the] AlAzhar [Islamic university] itself. People everywhere speak a language that is definitely not Arabic, despite the partial resemblance to it. Throughout the Near East there are a number of cultivated people who understand, read, and write classical Arabic well (in the main not Azhar graduates.) However, even of these the majority cannot speak it fluently. When you write a book for the masses you have to simplify your grammar and syntax considerably [use colloquialisms] in order to be fully understood. If we were to test the capacity of so- called literates to understand the meaning of a chapter by some contemporary author, the results would be painful and ludicrous.68

Husayn asserts that the language commonly referred to as Arabic, both MSA and Classical, “is a foreign language” to Egyptians; a language that “nobody speaks.” His reference to Egypt’s spoken language being “definitely not Arabic,” and the invitation he extends to Egyptian intellectuals to write in a language “fully understood” by the masses is a clear articulation of his rejection of MSA as a national language and a call for its replacement by vernacular Egyptian—even as he continued to write in MSA himself. Husayn even makes the argument that the Arabic language is an inadequate learning tool unfit as a vehicle for progress and modernity. Indeed he pokes at the heart of a traditional Egyptian education system that does not address its young learners in their “native language,” namely in the Egyptian vernacular, and that produces ostensibly “literate” users of MSA who cannot even use MSA “at home or school or the streets or in clubs.” “Although Arabic is part of the basic educational syllabus that is obligatory for everyone” says Husayn:

very few people have been able to master its intricacies. Even fewer are prepared to spend years learning the rules of grammar only to find ultimately that their knowledge is imperfect. An educational system that does not teach the youth to read and write their native language well is a mockery.69

Not only does Husayn call for the normalization of Egypt’s spoken demotic language, he also goes as far as demanding the Arabic script and the Arabic writing system itself be done away

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with:

. . . we should do something about our system of writing which leads the people to make so many errors. [. . .] People should read in order to understand, not understand in order to read. The [Egyptian] writing system must be made to serve the cause of clarity, to render sounds accurately and fully, with due regard for speed and economy of effort. [We must] proceed cautiously in this matter and begin by organizing a competition throughout the world, setting up technical committees to decide what reforms may be adopted lest it arouse angry opposition for that reason. The reform of Arabic writing is, however, a fundamental step in the reform of education.70

It should be noted that Husayn was not the lone Middle Easterner flirting with the idea of “reforming” the Arabic script—a reform that constituted the underpinnings of his more important battle; the normalization and intellectualization of “colloquial” Egyptian, and ultimately the “deArabization” of Egypt. Husayn lived in societies, and interacted with intellectual elites that were already imbued in the Kemalist project in Turkey. The linguistic modernization, secularization, and scriptal Romanization venture that Mustapha Kemal Ataturk embarked upon in Turkey during the 1920s had the double purpose of simplifying Turkish writing—and consequently democratizing literacy, to be sure—but it, more importantly, sought to sever modern Turkey’s linguistic, cultural, and religious ties with its Muslim-Arab past. Similarly, the linguistic and scriptal “reforms” that Taha Husayn was advocating in his The Future of Culture in Egypt were part and parcel of his “de-Arabization” project, although he did remain wary as to not overly offend Arabic-language purists, Arab nationalists, and Muslim traditionalists still beholden to the presumptive purity and sanctity of the Arabic language. Consequently, all the while calling on Egyptians to adopt their spoken vernacular as a national language and urging a “reformation” of the Arabic writing system, Husayn made sure to document his—perhaps feigned—opposition to an outright Romanization of the Arabic script. After all, he was the “doyen of Arabic literature” and presumably a champion of its writing instrument, the Arabic script, not a herald of its doom.

But one wonders what kind of scriptal reform Husayn could have been advocating, if not outright Romanization. Could he have been suggesting the adoption of Nagari? Chinese Characters? Hieroglyphics? After all, he 30 felt very strongly about this scriptal “reform” and the replacement of the Arabic writing system, but he still seemed to feign resistance to Romanization, all the while maintaining that a reformation now would

obviate the necessity for resorting to the solution found by the Turks, namely, replacement of Arabic alphabet with the Latin. Although many people approve this idea, I have resisted and always will resist the use of Latin letters for several reasons which I do not propose to take up here.71

Husayn appeared to be prevaricating here, placating and paying lip service to traditionalists and defenders of the Arabic script, but at the same time warning them that Romanization is

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looming were they to persist in clinging to the obsolete and knotty Arabic script. He argued that for reasons he did not wish to mention he will “always resist the use of Latin letters” for rendering the Arabic language (or the Egyptian “dialect”) in writing. But his “resistance” here does not seem to stem from conviction as much as it was a sign of stonewalling and delaying. Mentioning Romanization (the “Latin letters”) and then “resisting” seems to suggest that the idea was already being deliberated at the time of Husayn’s writing—and as we shall see later in this work, was being seriously considered by some of his cohorts. Then again, Husayn cautions his readers that were scriptal reforms to tarry on, Romanization would become all but certain, as if inexorably ordained. Said he, “such resistance [to Romanization], however strong, will not be enough unless we hasten to modify the writing system and thus overcome the arguments of those who propose a radical [Romanization] solution.”72 Again, one wonders what kind of a “modification” Husayn was alluding to, if not Romanization. As a committed and meticulous educator, he certainly was not referring to pictograms, but rather aiming for an honest simplification and popularization of writing, and consequently for a true democratization of literacy. It seems that Romanization would have been the most logical solution here; clipped, simple, and elegant twenty-six Latin symbols seem to trump the burdensome six hundred Arabic ones anytime.73 We should “stop fooling ourselves,” said Taha Husayn, “by making a virtue of necessity, [and by] reform[ing] a [defective] system of reading and writing.”74 Clarity, simplicity, accuracy, and functionality; those were the main features of the efficient writing system that Husayn was alluding to and advocating for: “The writing system must be made to serve the cause of clarity, to render sounds accurately and fully, with due regard for speed and economy of effort.”75 If the intimation in Husayn’s semantics here were not for the adoption of the Roman script, then it certainly appears to be not exactly for preserving the Arabic one either. Like all conscientious Middle Eastern reformers, Husayn remained—even if only psychologically—beholden to the presumed sanctity of the Arabic language, and was easily intimidated and bullied by the wardens of Arab nationalism. To him, balancing his reformist instincts against the pressures and coercive tactics of Arabist apparatchiks—intellectuals and ruffians alike—was a matter of survival—literally, literarily, and metaphorically.76 In the end, Taha Husayn’s balancing act, like that of many others who followed in his reticent footsteps, doomed to failure what might have been initially a noble enterprise.

ARABISM’S SYRIAN RIVALS

Although the Lebanese and Egyptian opponents of the Arabist narrative professed and advocated for an undivided allegiance respectively to Lebanon and Egypt, completely rejecting Arabism or a national identity smacking—even if only tenuously—of an Arab character or Arab history, there were a number of Syrian rivals of Arabism who were initially Arab nationalists, but who ultimately had a change of heart. The most illustrious among those Syrians were Ali Ahmad al-Said (Adonis), and Nizar Qabbani.

Nizar Qabbani

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Although recognized as the Arab world’s leading feminist and advocate of women’s rights, Nizar Qabbani’s post 1967 poetry turned into anti-Arab vitriol and a violent response to the Arabs’ defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; a virulent indictment of Arab politics and culture. Qabbani was actually one of very few Arab intellectuals to have referred to this 1967 event as a “defeat,” avoiding the traditional Arab escapisms and euphemisms painting it as a “tragedy” or a “setback,” and therefore something “written” (Ar. maktoub) and fated, that the Arabs could not have possibly avoided. It should be mentioned that there exists a tendency, generally among Middle Easterners as a whole, but certainly among Arabs, to avoid calling certain events and circumstances by their names—especially as concerns negative or ominous events —as if to exorcise them, ward them off, or wish them away. By way of this sort of semantic witchcraft, a verbal talisman of sorts, fearsome or undesirable circumstances or facts of life are occulted and averted—even if only perceptually and psychologically. Cancer the illness for instance, is never referred to by name in Arabic, but rather always by way or circumlocutions and verbal amulets like, “that unnamed illness,” or “that unnamed thing, may He keep it far from us.” Physical intimacy and sexuality being at the forefront of the Arabs’ taboo topics, are also referred to euphemistically as “that thing,” and more formally as “the practice,” or 32 “the act.” By the same token, the state of Israel, among Arabs, is almost never referred to by name directly, but rather through euphemisms and attributes, often derogatory attributes such as “the entity,” “the scourge,” and “the Zionist presence”—but again by way of “protective” amulets, as if to exorcize Israel, ward it off, and wish it away.

Although Qabbani would remain until his death in 1998 true to his reputation as an engaged feminist and a pungent critic of Arab misogyny and the Arabs’ hyper-virile mentality, his post- 1967 works were primarily an all-out assault on all features of Arab life; from its political, to its social, linguistic, religious, familial, and intellectual facets. And although Qabbani’s panacea to the Arabs’ ills never explicitly called for the abandonment of the Arabic language —as did Husayn and others among Qabbani’s contemporary reformists—he was persuaded that no political, cultural, and social issues can be addressed in the Arab world without a radical linguistic overhaul. He mocked Arab traditions and advocated for a complete break with the Arabs’ past, their history, and their language. Yet he never himself abandoned that language—nor did he explicitly disown his own Arabness, or if he did, it was more out of frustration and resentment rather than conviction. Instead, Qabbani set out to demolish the Arabs’ infatuation with language—and “stilted semantics” as he called it—working hard to write in a pellucid, simple, fluid language—bordering on the dialectal—rather than stick to the traditional verbiage and semantic wizardry of traditional Arab intellectuals, politicians, and orators. Still, he did all that in Arabic.

In June of 1967, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Qabbani wrote a poem titled Marginalia on the Notebook of Defeat, where he lamented dilapidated Arab culture and the Arabic language, which he referred to as the language of “abuse and depravity,” and which he ultimately judged to be not a language at all, wondering “what value has the people who have no tongue?” (that is, no language). He wrote in his Maginalia:

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My friends, I bring you news of the death of our old language and our old books,/ I bring you news of the death of our hollow vocabulary and our abusive word-lists of debauchery, defamation, and insult./ I bring you news of the death of the ideas that led us on the road to defeat./ [. . .] We mustn’t be surprised by our defeat on the battlefield,/ for, we wage our wars armed with the Oriental’s knack for oration and verbiage, bravado and rhetorical arm-flexing [. . .]/ It pains me to listen to your News in the morning./ It pains me to listen to your barking. [. . .] Five thousand years./ and we’re still languishing in the dungeon . . ./ with overgrown beards, a curious and unknown currency,/ and eyes that have become harbors for maggots and flies./ My friends: [. . .] why don’t you try to cleanse your thoughts and wash your clothes?/ My friends: why don’t you try to read a book?/ Better yet, why not try writing a book for once?/ [. . .] Try sailing to the lands of snows and fog . . ./ People beyond your dungeon don’t know who you are . . ./ People must think you’re some curious breed of beast . . ./ [. . .] Our souls are bankrupt./ Our days are spent idly, engaging in witchcraft rituals,/ playing chess, or slumbering. . . . We memorize and regurgitate verses mindlessly. [. . .] We praise like frogs./ we curse like frogs./ we make our thugs into heroes./ and we dismiss our righteous as crooks and villains. . . . We mill around our mosques./ torpid, shiftless, indolent . . ./ We write pointless poetry,/ we contrive corny proverbs . . ./ And we beg Allah to hand us victory and withhold it from our enemy . . ./ [. . .] because half of our people have no tongue. What value has the people who have no tongue?77

This speaks not only to the despair of the Arabs after the 1967 defeat. It indicts the Arabs’ lack of initiative, indolence, stagnation, and cultural backwardness, all of which Qabbani attributes to the loss of language; the loss of tongue. Yet Qabbani’s poetry is not all about gloom and sorrow; it is more about anger and annoyance with the Arabs and their language; a language that is more instrument of flattery and submission than it is a tool of dynamism and movement. In the mid-1990s, a few years before his death, Qabbani appeared to have completely lost patience with Arabic culture and abandoned all faith in the possibility of its redemption. In 1996 he penned a devastating denunciation of the Arabs, begging for someone to write their obituary (already), and personally hand-deliver him the news of their death. This was in many ways reminiscent of the “obituary” he had penned himself in 1967—announcing the “death of [the] old language and [the] old books” of the Arabs—but it seems that in 1996 Qabbani was seeking “independent confirmation” that the “dilapidated culture” for which he had written the requiem in 1967, was indeed dead and buried and completely done away with. When Will Someone Finally Announce the Death of the Arabs? was Qabbani’s entreaty for that “independent confirmation?” He wrote:

I’ve been trying, since my very early beginnings,/ to be different from you all,/ to shun your stilted pre-packaged, hollow language,/ to shun the worship of your idols,/ to set fire to your Texts,/ to set fire to the language you have forced me to wear!/ But some of our poetry is a graveyard,/ and some of our language, a funerary shroud./ I’ve been trying to set myself free from your stifling semantics,/ from the curse of the ‘Subject and Predicate’78 . . ./ I’ve been trying to scrub the dust of your dead language off of my skin,/ cleanse my face with rain-water . . ./ and free myself from the tyranny of your sands . . ./ So long Qureish,/ So long Kulayb,/ So

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long Mudar!79/ [. . .] And I erased all the ancient wars/ between women and men,/ between doves, and those who slay doves,/ and between marble and those who lacerate the whiteness of marble . . ./ But, alas, they shut down my lovers’ sanctuary,/ and they told me that passion is unbecoming of the History of the Arabs,/ unbecoming of the chastity of the Arabs,/ unbecoming of the 34 patrimony of the Arabs!/ Amazing, those Arabs!! [. . .] Through poetry, I’ve been trying to grapple with the impossible . . ./ I’ve been trying to plant datepalms,/ But people in my land/ uproot the date-palms . . . / [. . .] I’ve been trying to love you, my beloved . . ./ Trying to love you clear of all rituals,/ past all Texts,/ and outside all Shari’as and systems of laws . . . [. . .] For the past fifty years,/ I’ve been writing down my impressions . . . [. . .] But all I could see was Arabism,/ on display at an old-furniture auction . . ./ yet, alas, I could see no Arabs.80

Beginning with his opening stanza, Qabbani declares the Arabs to be nonextant. Yet he never loses faith and persists in searching for them, attempting to revive them, even trying his hand at sketching out an adumbration of what they might have been, what they could have been—a united people, free of phobias, tolerant of others around them, respectful of women, uninhibited by “Shari’as” and restrictive “systems of laws,” impulsive, liberated, unhindered by the constraints of language and tradition. Alas, Qabbani admits, his Arabs still eluded him, like a mirage fading out in the quicksands of the desert, like an illusion that had appeared real in the fleeting trance of a dream, but that actually never was. Qabbani would finally resign himself to the reality that the Arabs were some odd antiquarian’s curiosity, unworthy of being preserved —let alone being revived—”on display at an old-furniture auction,” where no Arabs were anywhere in sight.

Perhaps the most disturbing of all of Qabbani’s indictments of the Arabs, Arab nationalism, and the Arabic language, was one of his final poems, written shortly before his death in 1998, titled I Reject You. In it, he says:

I reject you, all of you,/ This is the end of dialogue . . ./ My language has despaired of you/ And I have set fire to my clothes,/ and I have set fire to your language and your lexicons . . ./ I want out of your poetry/ and out of your tedious literature . . ./ I want out of my voice,/ I want out of my writings,/ I want out of my place of birth,/ out of your cities of salt/ and out of your hollow poetry of clay . . . / [. . .] I planted poetry in your barren wombs/ but you muffled and choked up my rimes . . ./ [. . .] I did try to uproot you from your [. . .] tedious language and your silly myths and lore . . ./ [. . .] I did try to save you from the moving sands swallowing you by day and by night . . ./ [. . . And] I tried to plant nails into your dead skins,/ but I despaired of your skins/ and I despaired of my nails,/ and the thickness of your walls81

This is clearly a final good-bye and final despaired cri de coeur of a broken despondent man; a prisoner of a culture and a language that he clearly loved, but a culture and a language that have failed him many times over, and from which he had labored feverishly to disengage—all in vain. But even as he wrote in exquisitely disturbing and angry MSA; and even as he set alight his verses, his old books, his clothes and all that connected him to the Arabs; even as he

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begged to be let go from the embrace of the Arabic language, its literature, and its voice, Qabbani remained chained to all these facets of Arabic culture, as if in an eternal lover’s embrace. After all, as Fawaz Turki has shown earlier in this work, “Tradition is tradition. It takes as long to remove as it had taken to create.”

Adonis

Adonis (born Ali Ahmad al-Said) is another Syrian—and perhaps the world’s best known Arabic-language poet today—to have virulently indicted his culture and risen against it. Like Qabbani and his Egyptian and Lebanese cohorts, Adonis argued that the Arab peoples—and Middle Easterners as a whole—are ailing, and that the source of their ailment was essentially their Arabic Language. Even Adonis’s nom de plume, borrowed from Phoenician and Greek mythology, was adopted as advocacy for death and renewal, as if a culture’s revival can be actuated only by slaying all the elements of its previous retrogressive existence; from its language, to its cultural and social rituals.

Where Qabbani poured scorn and rage on the illusions and failures of Arab culture—all the while embracing “the nation” and attempting to breathe new life into it—Adonis sought to rediscover “the self,” the nation as it were, by embracing “the other,” by espousing diversity. Adonis criticized the exclusivist religious ethos of Arab societies—not spirituality, but religion, and more specifically “organized religion”—and advocated for a “coming together” of all of the cultures of the Middle East—Arabs, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Christians, Jews, and others—in a civilizational, linguistic, and ethnoreligious amalgam.

Adonis was critical of Arabism and Arab nationalism in that he viewed in them a negationist ethos, an instinct that rejected “the other,” denied the legitimacy of “the other,” and refused to “reflect on the other” in language, temperament, and social habits. Arab culture, claimed Adonis, was one “completely closed on itself,” incompatible with the Middle East’s richly textured layers of identities. In one of his most recent Frenchlanguage works, Adonis maintained that:

In the Arab world, one can no longer write. People and intellectuals are harking back to a closed, blinkered, repetitive kind of culture, where there is nary an opening to the outside, where the only “other” is Evil, Hell, Satan [Israel, America . . .]. The prevalent logic is the following: “you are either like me, or you’re nothing.” Distinctness and plurality are not accepted, let alone are they celebrated. Arabs during the ninth and tenth centuries used to say: “I am the alterity, the otherness, the distinctness, the distinction.” Instead of saying [in the words of the French child-poet Arthur Rimbaud] “Je est un Autre” [the “self” is “otherness”], the Arabs used to say “the other” is “myself.” Today, there is a return among Arabs, towards the negationist “I” which refuses “the other,” as if “the other” is not in the image of “the self.”82

This Arabist jingoism is a sort of “cultural pollution” claims Adonis, whereby Arabs condone and submit to a “cultural obscurantism” institutionalized by way of a language—presumably

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MSA—and a religious traditionalism in symbiosis with the Arabic language.83 While Qabbani rung out the Arabs’ obituary and sought to erase the traces of language and tradition that bound them to him, Adonis simply declared them to be extinct, like the ancient “Sumerians, Greeks, and Pharaohs.”84 He confessed in a recent interview that he was:

no longer able to understand what is happening in Arab society today. I am unable to interpret this situation, except by way of making the following hypothesis: When I look at the Arab world, with all its resources, the capacities of Arab individuals [. . .] and I compare what they have achieved over the past century with what others have achieved in that same period, I would have to say that we Arabs are in a phase of extinction, in the sense that we no longer have a creative presence in the world. [. . .] We have become extinct. [. . .] A people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity and the capacity to change the world around it. [. . .] The great Sumerians became extinct, the great Greeks became extinct, and the Pharaohs became extinct. The clearest sign of this extinction is when we intellectuals continue to think in the context of this extinction. [. . .] That is our real intellectual crisis. We are facing a new world with ideas that no longer exist, and in a context that is obsolete. We must sever ourselves completely from that context, on all levels, and think of a new Arab identity, a new culture, and a new Arab society.85

The “obsolete context” of which Adonis is talking is clearly the one embodied in the traditions, intellectual output, religious and cultural references, and creative energy of the Arabs, all conveyed by way of a dead language, MSA; dead stuff transmitted by way of a dead idiom, as shown by Fouad Ajami.86

That is why linguistic humanism is one of the recurrent themes in this work, and that is why Lebanon—an avid practitioner of cultural and linguistic hybridity—is used as a case study. For, again, only an honest recognition of the Middle East’s diversity, heterogeneity, and multiplicity of cultures can lead to a clearer, more accurate, and less dogmatic awareness and understanding of the region. This could in turn pave the way to lasting peace and acceptance in a part of the world symbolized by conflict and intolerance.

NOTES

1. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode (Paris: Edition G. F., 1966), 95.

Et si j’écris en français, qui est la langue de mon pays, plutôt qu’en latin, qui est celle de mes précepteurs, c’est à cause que j’espère que ceux qui ne se servent que de leur raison naturelle toute pure jugeront mieux de mes opinions que ceux qui ne croient qu’aux livres anciens. Et pour ceux qui joignent le bon sens avec l’étude, lesquels seuls je souhaite pour mes juges, ils ne seront point, je m’assure, si partiaux pour le latin, qu’ils refusent d’entendre mes raisons, parce que je les explique en langue vulgaire.

2. See the United Nations Development Programme’s Arab Human Develop- ment Report Salameh, Franck, and Franck Salemeh. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East : The Case for Lebanon, Lexington Books, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csupomona/detail.action?docID=616205. Created from csupomona on 2018-12-20 15:06:12.

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2002 (New York: United Nations Publications, 2002), 51. 3. Elie Kedourie, “Not So Grand Illusions,” in New York Times Review of Books, vol. 9, no. 9 (Nov. 23, 1967).

4. Milton Esman and Itamar Rabinovich, Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the State in the Middle East (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press), 4. 5. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years (New York: Scribner), 246–47.

6. See Franck Salameh’s “Arab Nationalism Run Rampant at Middlebury,” in Real Clear Politics, August 18, 2006, www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/arab_nationalism_run_rampant_a.html (12 Dec. 2008).

7. Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2.

8. Bernard Lewis, “The Political Map of the Middle East: A Guide to the Perplexed,” The American Scholar, vol. 58, no. 1 (Winter 1988–1989), 19–20.

9. Lewis, “Political Map,” 20.

10. Lewis, Babel to Dragomans, 3

11. Raymond G. Gordon, Ethnologue: Languages of the World (Dallas, Tex.: SIL International, 2005), www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=arb (1 Mar. 2009).

12. Samar Farah, “So You’d Like to Learn Arabic: Got a Decade or So?” Chris- tian Science Monitor, 17 January 2002.

13. See Franck Salameh’s “Privileging the Vernacular,” in Middle East Quarterly, vol. XIV, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 85–86.

14. Kees Versteegh, “History of Arabic Language Teaching,” in Kassem Wahba, et al., Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals in the 21st Century (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 7.

15. Efraim Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789– 1923 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2–3.

16. Farah, “So, You’d Like to Learn Arabic.”

17. Farah, “So, You’d Like to Learn Arabic.” Reflecting this sociolinguistic reality—though, admittedly not necessarily sensitive to the ideological predilections of Arabist orthodoxy— reference to “users of Arabic” will be made throughout this work, in lieu of the traditional “Arabic speakers.”

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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/arab_nationalism_run_rampant_a.html

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=arb

18. Bernard Lewis, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 40–41.

19. Lewis, Multiple Identities, 31.

20. Martin Kramer, “Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity,” Daedalus (Summer 1993), 171– 206.

21. William Safran, “Nationalism,” in Joshua A. Fishman, ed., Handbook of Lan- guage and Ethnic Identity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 77–78.

22. See, for instance, The Prophet (1923), Jesus, the Son of Man (1928), and The Garden of the Prophet (1931).

23. Kamal Salibi, Maronite Historians of Mediaeval Lebanon (Beirut, Lebanon: American University of Beirut, 1959), 31–32.

24. It can be argued that even the language of Nagib Mahfouz’ Modern Standard Arabic texts appear to be adapted to Colloquial Egyptian. See, for instance, The Mockery of the Fates (1939), Rhadopis (1943), The Struggles of Thebes (1944), and Khufu’s Wisdom, Akhenaten: In Truth Dewller (1985), and Voices from the Other World: Egyptian Tales (2002).

25. See, for example, Kees Versteegh, The Arabic Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 48, 57–58.

26. Niloofar Haeri, Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003), 3, 38–39.

27. Farah, “So, You’d Like to Learn Arabic.”

28. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitariansim (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979), 223–24.

29. Abu Khaldun Sati’ al-Husri, Abhaath Mukhtaara fii al-Qawmiyya al-’Arabiyya (Beirut, Lebanon: Markaz Diraasaat al-Wihda al-’Arabiyya, 1985), 80.

30. Lewis, Multiple Identities, 53.

31. Michel Aflaq, Fii Sabiil al-Baath (Beirut: Dar at-Tali’a, 1963), 67–70.

32. See Kanaan Makiya’s Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 206.

33. Aflaq, Fii Sabiil al-Baath, 40–41; see also Makiya, Republic of Fear, 206.

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34. Makiya, Republic of Fear, 206.

35. See, for example, Franck Salameh’s “Middlebury’s Arabic Morass,” Middle East Quarterly, vol. XIII, no. 3 (Summer 2006), 39–46, and “How the Arabs Compare: Arab Human Development Report,” Middle East Quarterly, vol. IX, no. 1 (Fall 2002), 59–67. See also Adeed Dawisha’s Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (2003), and Martin Kramer’s Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival (1996).

36. Michel Chiha, Visage et présence du Liban, 2ÈME édition (Beyrouth: Le Cénacle libanais, 1984), 49. 37. Georges Naccache, “Nationalisme culturel, renaissance arabe, autodafés . . . ,“ in Un rêve Libanais, 1943–1972 (Paris: Editions FMA, 1983), 35.

38. Naccache, Un rêve, 36.

39. Naccache, Un rêve, 36, 49.

40. Naccache, “Deux négations ne font pas une nation,” in Un rêve, 55–56.

41. Frédéric Pons, “Le conflit en trois questions,” in Valeurs Actuelles (Paris: 21 July, 2006): 27.

42. Pons, “Le Conflit,” 27. See also Naccache’s Un rêve, “Deux négations,” 55–56.

43. Pons, “Le conflit,” 27.

44. Naccache, Un rêve, 49–50.

45. Amin Maalouf, Le rocher de Tanios (Paris: Grasset, 1993), 276–77. 46. Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001), 4–5.

47. Braudel, Memory, 5.

48. Amin Maalouf, Origines (Paris: Editions Grasset, 2004), 34.

49. Maalouf, Origines, 34.

50. In addition to Le rocher de Tanios, see for instance Léon l’Africain, Identitées meurtrières, and Origines.

51. Maalouf, Origines, 7.

52. Maalouf, Origines, 7.

53. Maalouf, Léon l’Africain (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1986), 9.

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54. Maalouf, Origines, 8.

55. Amin Maalouf, Leo Africanus (Chicago: New Amsterdam, Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1988), 360.

56. In Lebanese, the word “kharrat,” which is a common patronym, means “fibbster” or “fabricator,” in sum, a storyteller, a Hakawati.

57. Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2008), 36.

58. Alameddine, Hakawati, 511–13.

59. Charles Corm, La montagne inspirée (Beyrouth: Editions de la Revue Phénicienne, 1987), 104.

60. Ali Salem, “The Odd Man and the Sea,” Beirut Daily Star, 17 August 2004.

61. Salem, Odd Man.

62. See for example Franck Salameh’s “Vous êtes Arabe puisque je vous le dis,” in Middle Eastern Review of International Affairs (MERIA), vol. I, no. 1 (Spring 2006).

63. Salem, Odd Man.

64. Salem, Odd Man.

65. Michel Chiha, Le Liban d’aujourd’hui (1942) (Beyrouth, Lebanon: Editions du Trident, 1961), 49–52.

66. Ghali Shukri, Salama Musa wa Azmat al-Damiir al-’Arabi (Salama Musa and the Arab Conscience Crisis). (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanaji, 1962), 32–33.

67. Taha Husayn, The Future of Culture in Egypt (Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1954), 3–5.

68. Husayn, The Future, 86–87.

69. Husayn, The Future, 89.

70. Husayn, The Future, 89.

71. Husayn, The Future, 90.

72. Husayn, The Future, 90.

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73. Received knowledge holds the Arabic alphabet to consist of twenty-eight symbols. That is incorrect. Arabic has indeed twenty-eight sounds represented alphabetically by twenty-eight basic shapes. But those twenty-eight basic skeletal shapes are amorphous and vary markedly in their morphology depending on whether they are connector or nonconnector letters, and whether they occur as “initial,” “medial,” “final,” or “stand alone” letters. Add to that the diacritics, short vowels, and other spelling and inflectional markers, and the Arabic script easily reaches six hundred distinct shapes; not twenty-eight.

74. Husayn, The Future, 90.

75. Husayn, The Future, 89.

76. See for example Bassam Tibi’s Arab Nationalism: A Critical Inquiry, Second Edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 186–88.

77. Nizar Qabbani, Marginalia on the Notebook of Defeat (June 1967), nizar .ealwan.com/poetry.php?id=103 (1 March 2009).

78. The “Subject and Predicate” is one of the basic sentence structures in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic syntax. Disengaging from this structure would be tantamount to doing away with the language altogether.

79. Qureish is one of the tribes of Arabia during the Prophet Muhammad’s era, a Meccan tribe that Muhammad himself belonged to before he received the revelation of Islam. Kulayb, a diminutive of Kalb (Ar. Dog), is also a notable preIslamic Arabian tribe, famous for its poets.

80. Qabbani, When Will Someone Finally Declare the Death of the Arabs, nizar .ealwan.com/poetry.php?id=110 (1 March 2009).

81. Qabbani, I Reject You, www.titanic-arwad.com/vb/showthread.php?t=16762 5 May 2009).

82. Adonis, Identité inachevée, 22–23, 36.

83. Adonis, Identité inachevée, 22–23, 36.

84. Interview with Adonis on Dubai TV, March 11, 2006. memri.org/bin/articles.cgi? Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP112106 (5 Dec. 2006). 85. Interview with Adonis on Dubai TV, March 11, 2006.

86. Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 34–35.

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