Has Arabic Language Become Arabs’ Modern Curse?
Source: Huffington Post
By: George Batah, Contributor
The Arabic language has always been the jewel of that culture. In the modern era, it has also become its curse. The beauty of the words is what counts – the content is of little importance. The language has become a tool for avoiding resolutions and instead is used to mesmerize and hypnotize the listener, and the Arab world has retreated into the labyrinths of its language rather than confront the many crises it faces today. Where directness in words and actions is needed, the easier path – safer, more controlling – has been into flowery phrases and symbolism. That path has led to nowhere.
As a secondary school student in Damascus, Arabic language class was the most challenging. We were asked to deal with an ancient language that was undeniably beautiful and romantic but cumbersome in its strictures and conventions. Looking back, I remember one particular homework assignment where I was asked to construct a hypothetical conversation between myself and a flower I was about to pluck. Full of sensual melodies, poetic tones, artistic expressions and great versatility, the Arabic language was a superb tool for impressing my teacher with the power of language as opposed to the rationality of my argument or the merit of my ideas. Where beauty and delivery play such an important role, content will be annulled. And this is where so many of the problems of Syria and wider Middle East take root.
Arab political theorists in the 50’s and 60’s, especially in the Fertile Crescent, have lived verbal lives, leveraging their mastery of the Arabic language to manipulate their audiences and followers and to compensate for their intellectual bankruptcy by using a combination of sonorous clichés, well-crafted slogans and empty promises. In Arab capitals across the region, their followers came to power riding the wave of emotions generated by words while their intellectual and moral shortcomings have been widely ignored.
Bassam Tibbi, a German-educated Syrian-born scholar, rightly noted that these so-called intellectuals “have inflicted on the Arab world superficial thought and endless slogans.” Most of the ideas were imported, flawed, incoherent. They took refuge in poetic promises and were under no compulsion to offer realistic alternative. And the Arabic language itself has played an important role in validating their claims and promises. “[Arabic] language had provided catharsis and relief and had enabled Arabs to run away from their weakness” – was the opinion of one social analyst.
The plight of the Arabs in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s was compounded by the systematic sidelining of politicians and intellectuals associated with the West by labeling-even the most patriotic of them- as “traitors” and “tails of colonialism” by the less educated, less realistic yet significantly more fiery radical nationalists such as Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, Ahmad Shukeiri of the PLO, Hafez al Assad of Syria and Saddam Hussein of Iraq who promised the world. Everything was possible – from the liberation of Palestine to the creation of Arab unity to socialism. Successful governance models were rejected solely on the basis of their associations. No serious inquiry was paid them in the face of the emotions fired by nationalist rhetoric. And it was the rising nationalist sentiment that opened the door to the corruption, dictatorship, and institutional dysfunction that we witness now in many Arab countries.
Freed from the grip of Europeans after WWII, the new generation of Arabs sought a fresh start, politically and socially, for their world. The poetic ideals preached by philosophers and political theorists were highly seductive and suggested an exit from the desperate realities imposed on Arabs after independence. Simply looking for a place in the new world order, the Arabic language with its aesthetic sensibility offered a measure of national pride. With this in place, it was used as a tool to bridge the gap between the hard realities of the contemporary Middle East and the glorious past of the history books, never acknowledging that the glorious past itself and its practices were -in part- the reason behind the current decay.
But past and present are linked by threads that have never been unraveled – and left a society never made whole in its time. In my opinion, this phenomenon comes from two historical and cultural factors that are somewhat specific to the Arab world: The centrality of the ruler and the pre-eminent place of the language in Arab culture. Both have stifled life in their own way and shut down the pathways to progress and open expression.
Arabs exalt the strongman. Religious and social factors have conspired to aggrandize the man at the helm to the point where the ruler ultimately has little or no accountability to the people. In communities with fragile institutions – which includes every Arab country today as well as the caliphate of the past – the proximity to and affection of the ruler is the prerequisite for social and political advancement. For the ambitious intellectual or artist the surest way to climb the prominence ladder was to focus on the beauty of the work rather than the content. Adonis, the celebrated Syrian poet and intellectual, has rightly noted this. “Tell me, o political regime, what your policy is and I can tell you what kind of literature and culture are (you will have).” The result has been to degrade scientific inquiry and the skills of reasoning and logic and to adopt a more emotional, idealistic view facilitated by the Arabic language and its ability to convince. In our modern age, poetry that once praised rulers has become a tool to twist the ambitions and aspirations of the masses.
The second factor is the elevation of the written and spoken words beyond all other forms of expression in Arab culture. For almost its entire history, aniconism in Islam has excluded of the figurative and performing arts and given pride of place to the language as the only honorable medium for self-expression which over the course of the history led to all kinds of exaggerations and linguistic manipulation. For the Arab world., language has always been more than a means of communication. In his book, ‘The Dream Palace of the Arabs”, renowned Lebanese-American scholar Fouad Ajami, wrote that “Poetry was to Arabs what philosophy was to the Greeks, law to the Romans, and art to the Persians: the repository and purest expression of their distinctive spirit.”
To recover the way forward for the Arabs, there must be a recovery process from the language itself. To borrow from Abraham Lincoln, the Arabs must “disenthrall themselves”. The word must carry meaning and must be used as a positive tool to address the present, redesign the future and come to terms with the past. Learning and the path to academic excellence must incentivize original thinking. Ultimately we must bring meaning and content back to language rather than focusing solely on beauty and delivery.