Arabic-L:LING:Said on Language

Fri Feb 20 16:05:57 UTC 2004

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1) Subject:Said on Language

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1)
Date: 20 Feb 2004
From:af3 at nyu.edu
Subject:Said on Language

Dear List Members,

In this week's Al-Ahram Weekly, there is an article by the late
Edward Said on the issue of spoken colloquial Arabic versus the
standard version, which he calls "modern classical Arabic." The
article is is published posthumously with the permission of the
writer's wife, Mariam.

Mindful that Dilworth has advised against e-mailing attachment files,
I am appending the article below as plain text for the benefit of the
list members who are interested in reading it.

Ahmed Ferhadi
New York University
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Living in Arabic
The debate on the need to reform Islam, the Arabs and their language
-- by adopting demotic rather than classical Arabic -- continues.
Before his death last September Edward Said argued such a debate
reflects an extraordinary lack of the quotidian experience of living
in Arabic
--------------------------------------------------------------------

The word eloquence is not much in use today. What I have in mind is
the sense that it once conveyed of distinguished verbal (both written
and spoken, but mainly the latter) practice, a skill with words that
may be partly due to an innate gift but which also needs to be
developed and schooled in ways that will mark an eloquent person as
possessing something that others do not. Oratory comes to mind
immediately, as does having a good memory. The unforgettably
brilliant study of the art of memory by the late Frances Yates shows
the connection, but shows also how much that kind of skill has more
or less disappeared, or at least isn't taught as such any more. I've
often wondered whether there was some implicit link in my own mind
between my fascination with eloquence and the fact that Giambattista
Vico, the 18th century Italian philosopher, has been such an
important figure for me and that he was professionally a Professor of
Rhetoric with a specialty in eloquence at the University of Naples.

When today one reads Vico's almost comically antiquated work --
before he came out with the first version of The New Science in 1725
-- you quickly notice that most of it is taken up with the
philological and historical study of how ancient authors used
language formally in ways that could be detailed and subjected to
minute scrutiny. For generations the humanistic study of language
required a knowledge of rhetoric and all sorts of figures of speech
that were taught as recently as three or four decades ago in the
context of college, and maybe even school courses, of composition, as
well as in curricula that tried to teach young men and women how to
read and appreciate literature according to the tropes, figures of
speech, and rhetorical devices that had very specific names and uses
that originated in giving speeches of the kind that Vico himself
gave, studied and wrote imitations of. There is no doubt that display
and virtuosity are part of eloquence, although most classical
  rhetoricians, including Vico, warn against pompous or frivolous
display for its own sake.

Awing your listener with your verbal cleverness, and even your sheer
mastery of rhetorical technique, isn't quite the same thing as real
eloquence. Vico has this to say in his autobiography about his own
ideas concerning eloquence: in the teaching of his subject Vico was
always most interested in the progress of the young men, and to open
their eyes and prevent them from being deceived by false doctors he
was willing to incur the hostility of pedants. He never discussed
matters pertaining to eloquence apart from wisdom, but would say that
eloquence is nothing but wisdom speaking; that his chair [of rhetoric
and eloquence] was the one that should give direction to minds and
make them universal; that others were concerned with the various part
of knowledge, but his should teach it as an integral whole in which
each part accords with every other and gets its meaning from the
whole. No matter what the subject, he showed in his lectures how by
eloquence it was animated as it were
  by a single spirit drawing life from all the sciences that had any
bearing upon it. (198-9).

This highly organic view of what eloquence is anticipates Romantic
interest in poetic form, the topic of a great deal of Coleridge's
writing on the role of the imagination, as well as similar concerns
among his German contemporaries such as the Schlegel brothers. Vico's
interest, however, is in a peculiar way highly antiquarian, or rather
antiquarian and contemporary at the same time, and was enabled, I
think, because his students were all assumed to have a working
knowledge of an older non-demotic language, namely Latin. Perhaps one
reason we have lost the capacity for appreciating that now seemingly
old-fashioned eloquence is that Latin is no longer taught or assumed
to have been learned as a pre-requisite for a well-rounded university
education. No one today even tries to emulate the orotund, Latinate
manner of Dr Johnson or Burke, except perhaps as a comic affectation.
This is probably why there is such emphasis instead on communication,
immediacy of persuasion, and the
ability to "sell" ideas, and why the often stilted and grandiose
manner of contemporary Southern orators such as Barbara Jordan or
Billy Graham seems overdone and out of place, as if they are trying
to do something verbally without adequate background or audience. The
existence of a distant model, as well as one that is difficult to
access without a considerable discipline of attention and
rule-learning, illuminates the considerably ornate and elaborate
verbal performances that Vico and his contemporaries considered
eloquent.

There is a rough modern equivalent to all this in the practice of the
speaking and writing of Arabic, which in the US (alas) is considered
to be a highly controversial and quite fearsome language for entirely
ideological reasons that have nothing to do with the way the language
is lived in, deployed, and experienced by native speakers and users.
I don't know where this conception of Arabic as a language
essentially expressing blood- curdling and incomprehensible violence
comes from, but surely all those 40's and 50's Hollywood screen
villains in turbans who snarl at their victims with sadistic relish
have something to do with it, as does the fixation on terrorism to
the exclusion of everything else about the Arabs in the US media. To
a modern educated Arab anywhere in the Arab world, eloquence in fact
is much closer to what Vico experienced and talked about than it is
for English-speakers.

Rhetoric and eloquence in the Arab literary tradition go back a
millennium, to Abbasid writers like Al-Jahiz and Al-Jurjani, who
devised incredibly complex schemes for understanding rhetoric,
eloquence and tropes that seem startlingly modern. But all their work
is based on classical written, not demotic spoken Arabic: in the case
of the former, that is dominated by the presence of the Quran, which
is both origin and model for everything linguistic that comes after
it (as of course a great deal did). This needs some explanation, and
is, I think, quite unfamiliar to users of the modern European
languages, where there is a rough correspondence between spoken and
literary versions, and where scripture has lost its verbal authority
entirely.

All Arabs have a spoken colloquial that varies considerably between
one region or country and another. The written language is quite
different, however, and I will return to it in a moment. I grew up in
a family whose spoken language was an amalgam of what was commonly
spoken in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria: there were small variations
between those three dialects (enough for one resident of the mashriq,
as the Eastern Mediterranean Arab lands are known, to identify
another resident as coming from either, say, Beirut or Jerusalem) but
never enough to prevent easy and direct communication. But because I
went to school in Cairo and spent most of my early youth there I also
was fluent in that colloquial, a much faster, clipped and more
elegant dialect than any of the others that I knew from my parents
and relatives. Spoken Egyptian was made even more widespread by the
fact that nearly all Arabic films, radio dramas and, later, TV
serials, were made principally in Egypt, and thus their spoken idioms
became familiar to and were learned by Arabs everywhere else; I
remember very clearly that young people my age in Lebanon or
Palestine could sing the ditties and mimic the patter of Egyptian
comedians with considerable panache, even though of course they never
sounded quite as fast and as funny as the originals.

During the 1970's and 1980's, as part of the oil boom of those years,
TV dramas were made in other places as well, and they went in for
spoken classical Arabic drama, which rarely caught on. For not only
were they heavy costume dramas of the kind that were meant to be
elevated and suitable for programmatically Muslim (and old-
fashioned, usually more puritanical Christian) Arab tastes that might
have been put off by the racy Cairo films, they were also designed to
be beneficial in ways that to me at least seemed hopelessly
unattractive. For the inveterate surfer of today, even the most
hastily put together Egyptian mousalsal (or serial) is infinitely
more fun to watch than the best of the best-regulated
classical-language dramas. Only Egyptian dialect has this kind of
currency. Thus, if I were to try to understand an Algerian I would
get more or less nowhere, so different and widely varied are the
colloquials from each other once one gets away from the shores of the
Eastern
Mediterranean. The same would be true for me with an Iraqi, Moroccan,
or even a deep Gulf dialect. And yet paradoxically, all Arabic news
broadcasts, discussion programs, as well as documentaries, to say
nothing of meetings, seminars, and oratorical occasions from mosque
sermons to nationalist rallies, as well as daily encounters between
citizens with hugely varying spoken languages are conducted in the
modified and modernized version of the classical language, or an
approximation of it which can be understood all across the Arab
world, from the Gulf to Morocco.

The reason for that is that classical Arabic, like Latin for the
European colloquial languages until a century ago, has maintained a
living presence as the common language of literary expression despite
the lively and readily-available resources of a whole host of spoken
dialects which, except in the Egyptian case I mentioned earlier, have
never attained much currency beyond the local. Moreover, these spoken
dialects don't at all have the large literature in the classical
lingua franca, despite the fact that in every Arab country there
seems to be a substantial body of colloquial poetry, for instance,
which is liked and often recited if only to other speakers of that
colloquial.

Thus, even writers who are considered regional tend to use the modern
classical language most of the time and only occasionally resort to
colloquial Arabic to render not much more than snippets of dialogue.
So in effect then, an educated person has two quite distinct
linguistic personae in the mother-tongue. It's a common enough thing
to be chatting with a newspaper or television reporter in the
colloquial and then, when the recording is switched on, to modulate
without transition into a streamlined version of the classical
language, which is inherently more formal and polite. Thus "what do
you want?" in Lebanese or Palestinian is, when addressed to a man,
very informally, shoo bidak? In classical it would be madha to reed?

Not that there is no connection at all between the two idioms. There
is of course -- letters are often the same, word order is roughly
equivalent, and personal accents can be conveyed in the same tone.
But words and pronunciation are quite different in that classical or
educated Arabic as a standard version of the language loses every
trace of the regional or local dialect and emerges as a sonorous,
carefully modulated, heightened and extraordinarily inflected
instrument capable of great, often (but not always) formulaic
eloquence. Properly used, it is unmatched for precision of expression
and for the amazing way in which individual letters within a word
(but specially at endings) are varied to say quite distinct and
different things.

It is also a language the centrality of which to a whole culture is
matchless in that (as Jaroslav Stetkevych, author of the best modern
book on the language itself has put it), "Venus-like, it was born in
a perfect state of beauty, and it has preserved that beauty in spite
of all the hazards of history and all the corrosive forces of time".
To the Western student "Arabic suggests an idea of almost
mathematical abstraction. The perfect system of the three radical
consonants, the derived verb forms with their basic meanings, the
precise formation of the verbal noun, of the participles --
everything is clarity, logic, system, and abstraction. The language
is like a mathematical formula." But it is also a beautiful object to
look at in its written form; hence the enduring centrality of
calligraphy in Arabic, which is a combinatorial art of the highest
complexity, ever closer to ornament and arabesque than to discursive
explicitation.

And yet I have only known one person who actually spoke classical
Arabic all the time, a Palestinian political scientist and politician
whom my children used to describe as "the man who speaks like a book"
or, on another occasion, as "the man who sounds like Shakespeare" --
a designation to Arabs not fluent in English symbolizing the pinnacle
of classical English, which of course Shakespeare was not, given the
presence of so many clowns, peasants, sailors, and jokers in his
plays. (Milton would be a better example of the weightily sonorous
classical language). All of this Palestinian academic's friends used
to ask him whether he made love in the classical language (which has
always seemed an impossibility, as the spoken dialect is invariably
the language of intimacy), but he afforded them no more than an
enigmatic smile by way of response. Somehow there is an implicit pact
that governs which Arabic is to be used, on which occasions, for how
long, and so forth.

During the early days of the war in Afghanistan I watched the
controversial Al-Jazeera Arabic- language satellite channel for
discussion and news-reporting unavailable in the US media. What I
found striking, quite apart from what was actually said, was the high
level of eloquence among the more embattled and even repellent of the
participants, Osama Bin Laden included. He is (or was) a soft-spoken,
fluent speaker who neither hesitates nor makes the slightest
linguistic slip, surely a factor in his apparent influence; but so
too, on a lower level, are non-Arabs like Burhaneddine Rabbani and
Hikmat Gulbandyar, who clearly know no colloquial Arabic but who
pedal forward with remarkable ease in the classical (Quranic-based)
tongue.

This is not to say that what has come to be called modern standard
(i.e. modern classical) Arabic is exactly the same as that of the
Quran, 14 centuries ago. It isn't the same: although the Quran
remains a much-studied text, its language (as in the example of the
classical speaker I gave above) is an antique, even stilted and for
daily life unusable, and compared to the modern prose used everywhere
today resembles a very "high" sounding prose-poetry.

The modern classical is the result mainly of a fascinating
modernisation of the language that begins during the last decades of
the 19th century -- the period of the Nahda, or renaissance --
carried out mainly by a group of men in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and
Egypt (a striking number of them Christian) who set themselves the
collective task of bringing Arabic as a language into the modern
world by modifying and somewhat simplifying its syntax, through the
process of Arabising (isti'rab) the 7th century original, that is
introducing such words as "train" and "company" and "democracy" and
"socialism" that couldn't have existed during the classical period,
and by excavating the language's immense resources through the
technical grammatical process of al-qiyas, or analogy (a subject
brilliantly discussed by Stekevych who demonstrates in minute detail
how Arabic's grammatical laws of derivation were mobilised by the
Nahda reformers to absorb new words and concepts into the system
without in any way upsetting it); thereby, in a sense, these men
forced on classical Arabic a whole new vocabulary, which is roughly
60 per cent of today's classical standard language.

The Nahda brought freedom from the religious texts, and a
surreptitiously introduced new secularism into what Arabs said and
wrote. Thus contemporary complaints by New York Times idiot-savant
Thomas Friedman and tired old Orientalists like Bernard Lewis who
keep repeating the formula that Islam (and the Arabs) need a
Reformation have no basis at all, since their knowledge of the
language is so superficial and their use of it non-existent as they
show no acquaintance whatever with actual Arabic usage where the
traces of reformation in thought and practice are everywhere to be
found.

Even some Arabs who for various reasons left the Arab world
relatively early in life and now work in the West repeat the same
nonsense, though in the same breath they admit to having no serious
knowledge of the classical language. I was struck that Leila Ahmed,
an Egyptian woman who was a close friend of my sisters in Cairo, went
to the same English schools that we attended and came from an
Arabic-speaking educated family, got her PhD in English Literature
from Cambridge, wrote an interesting book on gender in Islam almost
two decades ago, has now re-emerged as a campaigner against the
classical language and, oddly enough, a Professor of religion (Islam
in fact) at Harvard. In her memoir A Border Passage: From Cairo to
America -- A Woman's Journey (1999), she waxes eloquent on the
virtues of spoken Egyptian while admitting that she really doesn't
know the fus-ha (classical Arabic) at all; this doesn't seem to have
impeded her teaching of Islam at Harvard even though it scarcely
needs repeating that Arabic is Islam and Islam Arabic at some very
profound level.

Because of an extraordinary lack of quotidian experience or living in
the language, it doesn't seem to occur to her that educated Arabs
actually use both the demotic and the classical, and that this
totally common practice neither prohibits naturalness and beauty of
expression nor in and of itself does it automatically encourage a
stilted and didactic tone as she seems to think. The two languages
are porous and the user flows in and out of one into another as an
essential aspect of what living in Arabic means. Reading Ahmed's
pathetic tirade makes one feel sorry that she never bothered to learn
her own language, an easy enough thing for her to have done if she
had an open mind and was so inclined.

For the first 15 years of my life I lived exclusively in
Arabic-speaking countries, although I went only to English-speaking
colonial schools, administered either by one or other church
missionary group or by the secular British Council. Classical Arabic
was taught in my schools, of course, but it remained of the order of
a local equivalent of Latin, i.e. a dead and forbidding language (and
hence, the sense that Leila Ahmed had of it). I learned to speak
Arabic and English at my mother's knee, simultaneously, and was
always able to switch in and out of both, but my classical Arabic was
soon outstripped by the much greater investment made in school by
attention to English. During my early years the classical language
was symbolic of parentally and institutionally enforced, not to say
imprisoning, circumstances, where I would have to sit in church
regaled by interminable sermons, or in all sorts of secular
assemblies preached at by orators proclaiming a king's or a
minister's or
  a doctor's or a student's virtue, and where as a form of resistance
to the occasion I would tune out the droning and gradually come to
gain a sort of dumb incomprehension. In practice, I knew passages
from the hymnal, the Book of Common Prayer (including the Lord's
Prayer) and such similar devotional material by heart, and even some
(to me at the time) intolerably smarmy and usually patriotic odes in
classical poetry, but it was only years later that I realised how the
atmosphere of rote-learning, lamentably ungifted and repressive
teachers and clergymen, and a sort of enforced "it's good for you"
attitude against which I was in perpetual rebellion undermined the
project altogether.

Arabic grammar is so sophisticated and logically appealing, I think,
that it is perhaps best studied by an older pupil who can appreciate
the niceties of its reasoning; as it is, ironically enough, the best
Arabic teaching is done for non- Arabs at language institutes in
Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon and Vermont. What I never really
easily mastered, however, was what I referred to above, the ability
to switch from one mode to another, colloquial to classical, informal
to formal linguistically speaking. So alienated was I from the layers
of repressive authority blanketing my person as a child and teenager
that rebellion took the form of keeping to the language of the
streets, reserving the respectable classical language solely for use
as all-purpose mockery, savage imitations of tedious pomposity, and
imprecations against church, state and school.

But when, having already been in the US (with frequent visits to home
in Cairo and Lebanon) since 1951, and having only studied European
languages and literatures during my entire 16- year school and
university career here, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war pushed me
unwillingly into political engagement at a distance, the first thing
that struck me is that politics weren't conducted in the 'amiya, or
language of the general public, as colloquial Arabic is called, but
more often in the rigorous and formal fus-ha (pronounced fuss- ha,
the double "esses" and the "h" deriving from deep gutturals that have
no European equivalent), or classical language. Recalling my
childhood attitudes to the formal language I soon felt that, as
presented at rallies or meetings, political analyses were made to
sound more profound than they were, or that much of what was said in
these rather-too-pedantic approximations of formal speech were based
on models of eloquence that had been rote-learned as emulations of
seriousness, rather than the thing itself. This, I discovered to my
chagrin, was especially the case with approximations to Marxist and
liberation-movement jargon at the time, in which descriptions of
class, material interests, capital, and social struggle -- with all
the trappings of contradiction, antithesis, and "wretched of the
earth" that had been Fanon's legacy to us -- were Arabised and turned
to use in long monologues addressed not to the people but to other
sophisticated militants. In private, popular leaders like Arafat and
Nasser, with some of whom I had contact, used the colloquial to much
greater effect than the Marxists (who were also better educated than
either the Palestinian or the Egyptian leader) I thought at the time;
Nasser in particular did, in effect, address his masses of followers
in the Egyptian dialect mixed with resounding phrases from the
fus-ha. And, since eloquence in Arabic has a great deal to do with
dramatic delivery, Arafat usually
emerges in his rare public addresses as a below- average orator, his
mispronunciations, hesitations and awkward circumlocutions seeming to
an educated ear to be the equivalent of an elephant tramping
aimlessly through a flower-patch.

In a few years I felt I had no alternative than to commit myself to a
re-education in Arabic philology and grammar (incidentally, the word
for grammar is the plural qawa'id, the singular form is qua'ida, also
the word for a military base, as well as a rule, in the grammatical
sense). I was fortunate in having an old friend of my father's,
retired professor of Semitic Languages Anis Frayha at the American
University of Beirut, as my tutor and who, like me, was an early
riser; for almost a year between the morning hours of seven and ten
he took me on daily explorations through the language without a
text-book, but with hundreds of passages from the Quran, which at
bottom is the foundation of Arabic usage, classical authors like
Al-Ghazzali, Ibn Khaldun and Al-Mas'udi, and modern writers, from
Ahmed Shawki to Mahfouz. An amazingly effective teacher, his
tutorials disclosed the workings of the language for me in a way that
suited my professional interests and philological training in Western
comparative literature, in which roughly at just that time I was
giving seminars on speculations about language (I called it the
literature of language) by 18th and 19th century authors such as
Vico, Rousseau, Herder, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Humboldt, Renan,
Nietzsche, Freud and de Saussure. Thanks to Frayha I was introduced
to, and later introduced into my own teaching and writing Arab
grammarians and linguistic speculators, including Al-Khalil ibn
Ahmad, Sebawayh, and Ibn Hazm, whose work antedated my European
figures by seven centuries.

As illuminated and explained by Frayha, the passage between
colloquial and classical Arabic was a riveting experience for me,
especially as I made mental comparisons with vocabulary and grammar
in French and English. In the first place, since Arabic is a minutely
inflected language, one can learn the nine most commonly used formal
derivations of a verb -- the core of the language -- from a
three-consonant root, which syntactically makes available those
commonly-used forms (most Arabic sentences begin with a verb) from
which the writer-speaker must choose, although over time this becomes
automatic. Then, secondly, Arabic vocabulary is the richest part of
the language, since words can be formed by a dizzyingly logical
method from roots, and roots of roots more or less endlessly, and
with what seems to be perfect regularity. There are of course
variations in expression that have occurred over time, but archaisms
and modern slang in the classical discourse do not present the same
problems they do in modern English or French, for example.

Classical Arabic, its rules, inflections, syntactical modes, and
overpoweringly beautiful richness seems to exist in a sort of abiding
simultaneity of existence that is quite unlike any other linguistic
state that I know of, even though when colloquial conversations take
a turn for the serious or complex one then resorts to it as a
momentary or intermittent episode: the need for personal small talk
like "pass the sugar," or "it's time for me to go" returns one to the
demotic. But, on the occasions when it is declaimed at a public
gathering that could be a business meeting or a seminar or an
academic panel or lecture, speakers are transformed into the bearers
of this other language, in which even expressions like "I am happy to
be here today" or "I don't want to take too much of your time" can be
rendered in classical formulas that function as an organic part of
the whole discourse itself.

Parenthetically, I should mention that the Al- Jazeera channel, much
maligned in the US media by pseudo-experts and which I can easily
watch on my satellite dish receiver, not only conveys a far wider
range of political opinions than any available in the mainstream US
media, but because of the use of classical standard there is none of
the dreadful verbal tough-guy vulgarity that disfigures talk-shows
and panel discussions here, even when discussants hotly dispute major
issues in politics and religion.

I have never escaped the amusingly dissonant jolt that comes with
hearing a commonly used word that has totally incompatible meanings
in the two languages. The name Sami, for example. In English one
immediately thinks of Sam Weller, or Sammy Glick, a comic, or at
least an inelegant nickname or a shortened, familiar form of the much
grander "Samuel" with its biblical resonance not quite appropriate to
our time. In Arabic Sami is also a common first name for a man (the
feminine is Samia, which is also the word for "semitic"), but it
derives from the word for "heaven", sama, and therefore means "high"
or "heavenly" which is about as far from Sam or Sammy as one can get.
They co-exist in the bilingual ear, unresolved, never at peace.

Unlike English, spoken Arabic -- either the standard or the local
dialects -- is full of polite formulas that comprise what is called
adab al lugha, or proper behavior in the language. An individual who
is not a close friend is always addressed in the plural, and
questions like "what is your name?" are always asked indirectly and
with honorifics. Like Japanese and, to a lesser degree French,
German, Italian and Spanish, Arabic users make all sorts of
distinctions in tone and vocabulary as to how to address each other
in given situations and on special subjects. The Quran is always
referred to as al-Quran al- kareem, the honorable Quran, and after
saying the Prophet Mohammed's name it is obligatory to say a phrase
meaning, may God pray and deliver him; a slightly shorter version of
the same phrase applies to Jesus, and in regular Arabic conversation
God's name is invoked dozens of times in an extraordinarily varied
arsenal of phrases that recall the Latin deo volente, or Spanish
ojala, or English in God's name, but many times more.

When one is asked how one is feeling or doing, the immediate response
is invariably al- hamdulillah, for example, and what can follow is a
whole series of questions, also invoking God, that concern members of
the family none of whom is usually referred to by name but by
position of love and prestige (a son is not referred to by his name
but as al-mahrouss, the one whom God preserves). I have an uncle who,
when he worked as a bank executive, had a positive genius for going
on and on with polite indirection for 15 minutes of courtly
wool-gathering, unimaginable in English but learned early in life and
concentrated for use in situations when there is more verbally to say
than there is substance to treat. I always found it miraculously
entertaining, particularly because I found it very hard to do myself,
except for a moment or two.

One of my earliest memories of how much is expected of the classical
Arabic speaker, or khatib, the word for orator, in a formal situation
was a story told to me many years ago by my mother and my great aunt,
a teacher of Arabic, after attending an academic speech in Cairo
given by a well- known Egyptian personality, who might have been Taha
Hussein or Ahmad Lutfi Al-Sayyid. The occasion may have been
political or it may have been commemorative, I have forgotten which,
but I do remember them saying that there were a number of Azhar
sheikhs in attendance. Punctuating the very solemn and elaborate
speech, my mother had noted, one or another sheikh would stand up and
say "allahoma", then sit down immediately, the one word expression
explained to me as showing approval (or disapproval) for fineness of
expression (or a mistake in vocalisation).

The story itself illustrates the great significance attached to
eloquence, or conversely, failures in it. It helps to know that
Al-Azhar University in Cairo is not only the oldest institution of
higher learning in the world, it is considered to be the seat of
orthodoxy for Islam, its Rector being for Sunni Egypt the highest
religious authority in the country. More important is that Al-Azhar
essentially, but not exclusively, teaches Islamic learning of which
the core is the Quran, and all that goes with it in terms of methods
of interpretation, jurisprudence, hadith, language and grammar.
Mastery of classical Arabic is thus clearly the very heart of Islamic
teaching for Arabs and other Muslims at Al-Azhar since the language
of the Quran -- which is considered to be the uncreated Word of God
that "descended" (the Arabic word is munzal) in a series of
revelations to Mohammed -- is sacred, with rules and paradigms in it
that are considered obligatory and binding on users althoug
h, paradoxically enough, they cannot by doctrinal fiat (ijaz) be
directly imitative of it or, as in the case of The Satanic Verses, in
any way challenge its entirely divine provenance.

Sixty years ago orators were listened to and commented on endlessly
for the correctness and felicity of their language as much as for
what they had to say in it. I myself have never witnessed such an
occurrence as the story told to me, even though I recall with some
embarrassment that when I gave my first speech in Arabic (in Cairo
again) two decades ago, and after years of speaking publicly in
English and French but never in my own native language, a young
relative of mine came up to me after I had finished to tell me how
disappointed he was that I hadn't been more eloquent. But you
understood what I said, I asked him plaintively, since being
understood on some sensitive political and philosophical points was
my main concern. Oh yes, of course, he replied dismissively, no
problem: but you weren't rhetorical or eloquent enough. And that
complaint still dogs me when I speak since I am unable to transform
myself into a classical faseeh, or eloquent orator. I mix colloquial
and
  classical idioms pragmatically, with results (I was once amiably
told) that resembled someone who owned a Rolls Royce but preferred to
use a Volkswagen. I'm still trying to sort the problem out because,
as someone who works in several languages, I don't want to be accused
of saying one thing in English that I don't say exactly the same way
in Arabic.

I must say that, despite my pleading that my way of speaking avoids
the circumlocution and ornamental preciosity (often consisting mostly
of endless synonyms, and the use of either of "and" as a device for
elaborating thoughts without regard for logic or development, or the
use of an array of rote-learned formulae for indirection and
euphemism of the kind that Orwell mocks in "Politics and the English
Language," but which are to be found in every language) endemic to
the decline of contemporary political, journalistic and critical
writing in Arabic, it is also an excuse I use to cover my sense of
still loitering on the fringes of the language rather than standing
confidently at its centre.

It's only in the last ten or 15 years that I've discovered that the
finest, leanest, most steely Arabic prose that I have either read or
heard is produced by novelists (not critics) like Elias Khoury or
Gamal El-Ghitany, or by two of our greatest living poets, Adonis and
Mahmoud Darwish, each of whom in his odes soars to such lofty
rhapsodic heights as to drive huge audiences into frenzies of
enthusiastic rapture, but for whom each of which prose is a
razor-sharp Aristotelian instrument the elegance of which resembles
Empson's or Newman's. But their knowledge of the language is so
virtuosic and natural that they can be both eloquent and clear by
virtue of their gift for not needing fillers, or tiresome verbosity,
or display for its own sake, whereas for a relative latecomer to the
classical idiom such as myself -- someone who did not learn it as
part of a specifically Islamic training, or in the national Arab (as
opposed to colonial) school system -- I still have to think
consciously about putting a classical sentence together correctly and
clearly, with not always elegant results, to put it mildly.

Because Arabic and English are such different languages in the way
they operate, and also because the ideal of eloquence in one language
is not the same as in the other, a perfect bilingualism of the kind
that I often dream about, and sometimes boldly think that I have
almost achieved, is not really possible. There is a massive technical
literature about bilingualism, but what I've seen of it simply cannot
deal with the aspect of actually living in, as opposed to knowing,
two languages from two different worlds and two different linguistic
families. This isn't to say that one can't be somehow brilliant, as
the Polish native Conrad was, in English, but the strangeness stays
there forever. Besides, what does it mean to be perfectly, in a
completely equal way, bilingual? Has anyone studied the ways in which
each language creates barriers against other languages, just in case
one might slip over into new territory?

I often find myself noting aspects of the experience and gathering
evidence from around me that reinforces both the tantalising
imperfection (for me) and the dynamic state of both languages, their
perfect inequality that is, which is so much more satisfying than a
frozen, completed but in the end only theoretical attainment such as
the kind professional interpreters and translators seem to have but
in my opinion don't since they cannot by definition be eloquent.
Having left behind locales that have either been ruined by war or for
other reasons no longer exist, and having very little by way of
property and objects that come from my earlier life, I seem to have
made of those two languages at play, as experiences, an environment
that I can carry about within me, complete with timbre, pitch, and
accent specific to the time, the place and the person. I remember and
still listen to what people say, how they say it, what words carry
the stress and exactly how and this, I think, is
  why in English poetry it is Hopkins and Shakespeare's comic
characters who have marked my ears so indelibly.

I think of my earliest years, therefore, in terms both of striking
images that seem as vivid to me now as they did then, and of states
of language in Arabic and English that always begin in the intimacy
of family: my mother's strangely accented and musical English,
acquired in mission schools and a cultivated Palestinian milieu early
in the century, her wonderfully expressive Arabic, vacillating
charmingly between the demotic of her native Nazareth and Beirut, and
that of her long later residence in Cairo, my father's eccentric
Anglo-American dialect, his much poorer Jerusalem and Cairo melange,
the sense he gave me both of admonishment and an often unsuccessful
search for the right word in English as well as Arabic. And then,
more recently, my wife Mariam's Arabic, a language learned naturally
in national school without the disturbance of English and French at
first, although both were acquired a little later. Hence her ease in
moving back and forth between classical and colloquial, which I could
never do as she does or feel as completely at home in as she does.
And my son's amazing knowledge of the Arabic language as a
magnificent, somehow self-conscious structure which he painstakingly
got on his own at university and then through long residence in
Cairo, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, noting down every new
expression legal, Quranic, poetical, dialectical that he learned
until he, a New York city kid now a lawyer whose obvious first
language was English, has in effect become a learned user of his
great-great-grandfather's (Mariam's grandfather) "matter," the Arabic
language which he taught as a university professor in Beirut before
World War One; or my daughter's perfect ear as accomplished actress
and as a precociously early literary talent who, while she didn't do
what her older brother did and go out and make herself master the
strange quirks of our original Muttersprach, can mime the sounds
exactly right, and has been called on (especially now) to play parts
in commercial films, TV serials, and plays, roles that are of the
"generic" Middle Eastern woman, and which has slowly led her to an
interest in learning the common family language for the first time in
her young life.

* Published by permission of Mariam Cortas-Said

C a p t i o n : 'Nasser in particular did, in effect, address his
masses of followers in the Egyptian dialect mixed with resounding
phrases from the fus-ha'

Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 12 - 18 February 2004 (Issue No. 677)

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End of Arabic-L:  20 Feb  2004