This time it was the future that won, in 1818, after a grim five-year Arabian campaign by Muhammad Ali’s forces. The captured Wahhabi leaders were executed in Istanbul; the corpses were displayed for three days, then thrown into the sea. (Did the Americans know that when they committed the Wahhabis’ spiritual descendant Usamah Bin Ladin to the deep 200 years later?) It seemed the Wahhabis had met their Waterloo. But the influence of the rebarbative raiders was much harder to eradicate:
An epidemical enthusiasm, compounded of sullen scrupulousness and warlike ferocity, which, in a people resigned to their own thoughts, and who, conversing only with each other, suffered no dilution of their zeal from the gradual influx of new opinions, was long transmitted in its full strength from the old to the young.
That is Samuel Johnson writing in 1775 on the Scots Calvinists; but he might as well have been writing of the Wahhabis of his time and later. In the last third of the nineteenth century, Egypt was conversing with Europe, and never more chattily than in the steam-powered decades of Muhammad Ali’s successors. But five years after Aida premiered at the Cairo opera house in 1871, the English traveller Doughty found that ‘The sour Wahaby fanaticism has in these days cruddled the hearts of the nomads’. Some hearts would remain cruddled (a Doughty archaism for ‘curdled’), and would inspire movements to come – the revived twentieth-century Ikhwan (‘the Brethren’), al-Qa’idah, the ‘Islamic State’, and others yet to be named.
All are muwahhidun, seekers after unity, God’s and man’s. But the unity they search for is never free of that other shade of meaning: wahdah is one-ness, but it is also lone-ness, introversion, isolation. It may just be hindsight, but it is hard to imagine the Wahhabi awakening happening anywhere in the Arabic world other than in that remote upland heart of the peninsula, almost an island within the Arabs’ ‘Island’. In contrast, Egypt’s awakening – to itself and to its arabness, but also to a wider world – took place where the great river of Africa opens the fan of its delta to the Mediterranean.
BORN AGAIN
Like Wahhabi ideology, the secular nationalism that developed with the nineteenth century also sought to create unity. It aimed, however, not at pristine Arab Muslim isolation but at pan-Arab integration; not at unison but at polyphony, with all Arabic voices in harmony. Such vast and motley choruses might work in Aida. In real life they would prove harder to orchestrate.
Under Muhammad Ali Pasha and his heirs, Egypt had been reclaiming its identity and proving its de facto independence from the Ottomans. In particular, that successful war against the Wahhabis had shown that Muhammad Ali was no cat’s paw, but a strong-armed ruler in his own right. Since then, he and his successors had also given Egypt back its Arabic voice, reinstating Arabic as the official language and founding an Arabic press. The voice began to resonate next door, too, in the Levant – and in that denominationally diverse region, it was a call to unity. Egypt, of course, had a big minority of Coptic Christians. But while the Copts had been arabicized, they had never quite been arabized: they were still seen as aliens, conquered natives. In contrast, in Greater Syria, most of the many Christians were, or at least claimed to be, Arabs ab ovo, some of them tracing their descent back to the pre-Islamic Ghassanid kings. It was among them that the idea of a newly gathered word took shape – of a new pan-Arab union, an ummah based not on religion but on language. After all, that first unifier had proved superbly resilient: a thousand years of rule by others, mostly Turks, had not succeeded in turkifying Arabs or depriving them of their ancient tongue.
One of those at the forefront of the revival was Ibrahim al-Yaziji, a Lebanese Maronite Christian from a family of scholars. For him, Arabic was not just a force unifying the ummah; rather, ‘Language is the ummah itself.’ Arabic, in other words, was the essence and substance of the Arab nation. The language, he believed, held Arabs together far more surely than bonds of blood, religion and custom; it transcended geography, class and politics. And this was more than just academic theory: as in ancient times, activists like al-Yaziji would use poetry to transform ideas into deeds. By the 1860s Egypt had divorced itself from the Ottomans, at least with a decree nisi; but the fragmented Levant was still bound to Istanbul, and the Ottoman ‘Sick Man of Europe’ was already a dead weight on Arab progress. So when al-Yaziji’s great ode of 1868 boomed out,
Awake, O Arabs, and arise!
it was a call not just to rise and shine, but to buck up, buck the Turks off their back and reclaim a whole lost identity:
The Turks stole what was yours by right of birth;
in Turkish eyes you’re men devoid of worth.
Deprived of being, of title and of name,
your honour lies forgotten, and your fame.
Nearly a thousand years earlier, Turks like Bajkam, with their outlandish names and manners, had pushed Arabs off the coinage and off the throne. Here at last was a passionate plea to restore the Arab name, the Arab face.
Other Christian Arab thinkers would energize the nationalist cause over the coming century of its existence. For them there was no conflict with the Islamic current that ran through the latter half of Arab history. On the contrary, to nationalists like Michel Aflaq, founder of the Ba’th movement in the early 1940s, Islam was, ‘a great historical experience . . . [which] belonged not only to all Arab Muslims, but to all Arabs’. In a sense, his holistic vision was right: Islam is a creed, a confession, but with Muhammad’s move to Medina it also became a political denomination that could embrace Arabs of other faiths. The Wahhabis were trying to reconstruct early Islam according to their own tunnel vision of what it should have been; Arab nationalism, inspired though it was in part by European models, in part by a renascent Egypt, sought instead to recapitulate something more like the Abbasid golden age. In that age, in a great outpouring of ink, a version of Arab identity, history and language was preserved on paper against the depredations of Persian Shu’ubis and other cultural independence movements. Now, in the belated age of Arabic printing, writers could at last celebrate arabness once more, and flaunt it in the face of other national identities. With print, the language gained new life, and literature sprang up again after the barren centuries in which this chapter began. The Wahhabis had confronted the Turks with born-again Islam; the nationalists were doing it with born-again Arabic, and their conversions were linguistic ones. Sometimes they verged on the miraculous: Sati’ al-Husri, for example, hailing from Aleppo but educated solely in Turkish in Istanbul and long employed as an Ottoman official in the Balkans, renounced the Ottomans’ language and embraced Arabic in his fortieth year; he went on to become one of the great theorists of Arab nationalism.
Once again, a new technology of letters had launched a new stage of Arab history. Early writing had influenced and preserved the Qur’an; Umayyad book-keeping had arabicized the empire; paper had defined and recorded Arab identity when the empire was falling apart. Now, long-delayed printing had helped to revive that identity. At the same time, the course of history had a circularity to it. As one observer of Arab civilization wrote, ‘With Arab nationalism we are back at our starting point’. It is a starting point that precedes Islam and dates to a time when diverse peoples and tribes were searching for a unified identity for themselves. Now, once again, ’arabiyyah, the old high Arabic, would be the core of ’asabiyyah, solidarity. As the European Renaissance had rediscovered a classical past, the Nahdah was an Awakening to the existence of the vast treasure of Arabic. It was as if Arabs had hit upon that treasure of ancient odes, buried by the king of al-Hirah, and were investing it in a greater future for themselves.
THE FORKED TONGUE
To begin with, however, the Arab Awakening was largely the Intellectual Christian Levantine Arab Awakening. Most Arabs, the genetically diverse speakers of a loose family of widely differing dialects, inhabiting a hugely varied territory from the Atlantic to the Gulf, slept on. A revived sense of arabness would dawn across the region, but very slowly. My adoptive land of Yemen, for example, was virtuall
y untouched by it until almost a century after al-Yaziji’s ode of 1868; now, another fifty years on, Yemen seems to be sinking back into its old and troubled coma. In the 1980s, the Moroccan cultural historian Muhammad al-Jabiri wrote that ‘the Arab Awakening of modern times . . . has yet to become a reality’. Today, the reality sometimes seems even further off.
Part of the problem was that the modern revival movement was grounded so deeply in that very old, and very difficult, high language. The European Renaissance began just as people were beginning to write widely and creatively in their vernaculars; the later rise of Protestantism and the translation of scripture ensured that, in writing as well as speech, those vernaculars would eventually prevail over Latin and Greek. In contrast, the Arab renaissance, which sought common ground for all Arabs, ensured the victory of the old high language as the sole written medium. The European equivalent would have been for the continent to have rediscovered Virgil, but never to have had a Dante or a Chaucer; for the Latin Vulgate Bible to have had no rivals, and for Luther and Wycliffe never to have been born. Except for those in the Jewish, Christian and other non-Muslim Arab communities who had not studied the high language and wrote in the vernacular (but in Hebrew, Syriac and other characters, not Arabic script), most Arabs had never even thought of writing in dialect. And in more recent centuries – particularly in the historical and literary nadir of the eighteenth century that al-Jabarti described – people had given up writing altogether, or at least writing anything fresh; they simply rehashed. Now, with the Awakening, creative literature took off again – but still in the old language and idiom. Al-Yaziji’s ode, for example, would have raised neither objections nor eyebrows among poets like Abu Tammam, who lived more than a thousand years earlier; the English equivalent would be Byron, say, still writing in the style and even the language of Beowulf. It was all part of that ‘retreat from modernity’, as a poet and critic of our times, Adonis, has called it. The Awakening, in other words, awakened nothing new; it simply ‘returned the present to the past’.
This past idiom is essentially what most Arabs attempt to use today, at least when they are writing formal prose or speaking formally in public. Foreign learners of it are told that they are being taught something called ‘Modern Standard Arabic’. It sounds as if it should be something new and shiny, but in reality it is to classical high Arabic rather as medieval Latin is to Latin of the golden age: a bit dumbed down syntactically; clunkier stylistically; broader lexically, yes; but in essence the same. Even a modern poet who may not use the old metres and rhymes still uses the ancient language:
Whoever today can read Nizar Qabbani [died 1998] can read al-Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf [died c. 803] . . . This is a strange and amazing phenomenon, rarely encountered in other cultures.
Indeed it is, and it is part of the knotty nexus of what makes Arabs distinctive, and what holds them together, not just over space but also over time; even if part of the togetherness is being at each other’s throats.
When Arabs write or speechify, therefore, they are using a language which is not exactly ‘foreign’, but which certainly is non-native. The distance from everyday speech to written Arabic, at its greatest – in Casablanca, say – can be as wide as that between Petrarch and Petronius, Romance and Latin. Getting the wording right is usually the first concern; content tends to be secondary. (The grammar of numbers is so easy to get wrong that a whole minting of tens of millions of coins was in circulation in my adoptive country before anyone noticed the small but dreadful error: they read ’ishruna riyalin, ‘twenty riyals [genitive]’ instead of ’ishruna riyalan, ‘twenty riyals [accusative]’. The devil is in the detail.) Stuck on the horns of a diglossic dilemma, there are plenty of educated Arabs who take the easy way down, by speaking in Arabic but writing in other languages. Almost all scientific research is written up in English or other non-Arabic languages. The double problem of getting the Arabic right and finding the vocabulary is too daunting.
Does the linguistic duality really matter? It might do, if a danger some observers have warned of is real – that so forked a tongue as Arabic enables users to think with a forked mind. One critic has written of the ‘ideal self’ expressed, and believed, in ‘the loftiest moral tone’ of high Arabic, contrasting with the ‘lower stratum of moral behavior’ expressed in colloquial speech. I know what he means. I have listened, for example, to an acquaintance lambasting the fasad, the (high) ‘corruption’, of government ministers, and immediately going on to praise the ability of his wife, a ministry employee, to get haqq Abi Hadi, a (low) ‘bit on the side’. That said, linguistic double standards are found in other languages; only a lot of hard research could establish whether Arabic was a special case.
There is a greater, and undoubted, danger. Even today, when official literacy figures are much higher than as little as a generation ago, very few Arabs feel comfortable writing their own ‘national’ language, and even fewer are comfortable speaking it. Over time, in fact, most Arabs have been scared speechless by the language that bears their name, deprived of their individual voices. Again and again they are silenced by dictators – in the word’s most etymological sense, ‘those who speak out loud all the time’. As one analyst has put it, most Arabs are excluded from their own language: ‘In the language, I am not present – not as a person giving expression to my individual self.’
Social media, in which Arabs tend to write in colloquial form, may bring about change; but it would be change in the direction of diversity, not unity. It is too early to tell: most tweeting is in dialect, but most propaganda is still in high Arabic. And the propaganda has power: the old sacred tongue, the ‘dead language that refuses to die’, as Paul Bowles called it, still bewitches, mystifies and silences the masses as it did in the mouths of pre-Islamic poets and seers. It still has a weight and a volume that mutes the twittering. And it remains the most potent symbol of a long-elusive unity: ‘We do not live in a land, but in a language.’ Do away with that one shared territory, that almost impossibly difficult language, and you do away with the only aspect of unity that is not a mirage.
THE LAGGING LEXICON
In the nineteenth century, it was all very well for movers of the Awakening to reinvigorate Arabic letters and hope that language, the old catalyst of unity, would bring Arabs together in a new age. But there was a problem with the basic stuff of language – words: it was a long time since the Arabic Adam, like his Hebrew self in Genesis, had been taught the names of everything in creation. The Arabic dictionary was by now desperately far behind the needs of the age. For al-Jabarti, the greatest literary product of recent times was his teacher al-Zabidi’s thumping great lexicon, finished in 1767 and forty volumes long in the edition I have. It was an expanded version of the already massive late fourteenth-century Qamus, the ‘Oceanus’ of words – expanded, but only with new citations and definitions, not with new entries. Anything post-classical was not ‘chaste’, and was excluded from the dictionary like a trollop from a nunnery.
The lexicon had ceased to reflect real life in the age of steam and opera. In practice, Arabic was adapting old words, coining new ones and absorbing many from European languages; but it was doing so organically. From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the pioneering nationalist intellectuals in the Levant tried to drag the dictionary up to date and to standardize recent coinages: they realized that to unify Arabic’s new vocabulary – to gather the words – would help to ‘gather the word’ of its users and bring pan-Arab political unity an important step nearer. But in the vast and still largely printless clime from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Strait of Hormuz, in which any education other than Qur’an schools was patchy at best, and travel was often as slow as it had been in the time of that first known Arab, the ninth-century BC camel-owning Gindibu (Damascus to Baghdad still took three weeks by camel in the early twentieth century), the reformers’ best intentions were doomed.
The supposedly unifying language thus developed a disunited new vocabulary. ‘Pen
dulum’, for example, is bandul (French pendule) in Egypt, raqqas (‘dancer’) in Iraq and nawwas (‘swinger, dangler’) in Syria. ‘Tyre’ is often tayr (from the English), sometimes dulab (really ‘wheel’), sometimes kafar (supposedly from English ‘cover’, although the root sense is the same in Arabic); in ‘standard’ Arabic it is itar (‘rim’) and in Egypt kawitsh (‘rubber’, French caoutchouc, ultimately from Quechua). Sometimes there were successes, like hatif for ‘telephone’, originally a disembodied voice crying in the wilderness, or coming from the entrails of a calf sacrificed to an idol; it ousted the less appealing irziz (‘tremor, thunder’). Qitar (‘train of camels’) was an obvious choice for mechanical trains, but jammaz (‘trotting camel, frisking ass’) for ‘tram’ soon gave way to the loan taramway. ‘Revolution’ began as fitnah (‘burning, trial, temptation, discord, slaughter, madness’) and ended as the less coloured thawrah, ‘an excitement’.
Sometimes, however, when a word was a straight loan but the thing named was abstract and complex, the whole idea was lost in transliteration; dimuqratiyah has been a notable example. But in translation, too, and usage, there are many losses. ‘Republic’, which began in Napoleonic Egypt, rather strangely, as mashyakhah (‘shaykhdom’), but by the 1870s had become jumhuriyyah or ‘[rule-]of-the-mass’, is a word that appears in the official names of many Arab countries; its sense has almost never been even the shadow of a reality on the ground. ‘Citizens’, to take another example, started as ra’iyyah (‘subjects’ – originally ‘flocks, herds’), then became the more appropriate sha’b (that ancient word for a ‘people’ in contrast to a tribe), but has ended up as the bland muwatinun, ‘fellow countrymen’. But in any case citizens – as civil legal entities in a reciprocal relationship with the state they live in, bound by rights and duties on both sides – are still an almost unknown species; they are like those mousy early mammals, waiting for the extinction of Tyrannosaurus rex. Politically, the Arabic world is one big Jurassic Park: it is one of the most pronounced features of that ever-present past. In practice, even ‘republics’ have subjects, not citizens. ‘When will we learn our rights and responsibilities?’ asked the Lebanese writer Faris al-Shidyaq, a leader of the literary and national revival and a coiner of new words, in 1867. As to many such questions the answer 150 years on is, ‘Not yet.’ Given the intimate and causal connexion between word, thought and deed, Arabic lexicography is not just a record of the language. It is also political activism, history-in-the-making.
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