Arabic Debates on Al-Jazeera

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1' '... MEJCC BRILL Middle East journal of Culture and Communication 5 (2012) 190-210 brill.nl/mjcc

Debating Arabic on Al-Jazeera: Endangerment and Identity in Divergent Discourses

Camelia Suleiman• and Russell E. Lucasb a) Michigan State University, USA

Email: [email protected] b) Florida International University, USA

Email: [email protected]

Abstract Eight debates on Al-Jazeera specifically, on the Arabic language, highlight the divergent and convergent discourses about the status of the language and its use today in the Arab world. All address the issue of the weakness of the Arabic language, both internally between formal and dialect, and externally in the face of globalizing English. The participants also link the Arabic language to issues of identity and who the Arabs 'are' during this era of globalization. The article outlines the intellectual roots that many of the participants draw upon-that of the Arab nahda of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, the article points out that there is a divergence between the general direction of scholarship produced in the West on the Arabic language and about the Al-Jazeera network and the broader intersection of language and nationalism addressed by the Al-Jazeera participants. Beyond noting the obvious linkage between language and nationalism, how actual participants deal with their intellectual legacies while attempting to prescribe and influence the present deserves greater analysis in the case of the Arabic language and its most noted vehicle today-the Al-Jazeera satellite television network.

Keywords Al-Jazeera, Arabic language, identity, diglossia, nahda

More conscious of their language than any people in the world, seeing it not only as the greatest of their arts but also as their common good, most Arabs, if asked

to define what they meant by 'the Arab nation', would begin by saying that it included all those who spoke the Arabic language.

-Albert Hourani (1983:1)

The Arabic language is dying.... Worse still, no one cares. Arabic no longer has any cachet. Among supposedly sophisticated Arabs, being bad at Arabic has become

fashionable. -Economist (24 Aprilzo10: 47)

C9 Koninklijke Brill NV. Leiden, 2012 DOT 10.1163/187398612X645235

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

C. Suleiman andRE. Lucas/

...And what about the Arabs, shall we throw them in the sea?

-Mohammad Jaber al-Ansari (2oog)

If Mohammad Jaber al-Ansari's vision of anyone being thrown into the sea came to fruition, one could be sure the world would probably learn about it from the satellite television network Al-Jazeera. Over the past decade and a half, the Qatar-based network has become one of the most well known-if not the most infamous-television networks in the world, especially in the West.

While most discussions of Al-Jazeera note that what makes it a pan-Arab network is its use of the Arabic language, generally little else is made of the linguistic role of the channel in fostering the vision of community that the network seems to be promoting. Western analyses of the usage of the Arabic language on Al-Jazeera tend to draw upon a vision of the language as static, as sacred, or as driven by a diglossic situation which splits the language into its formal register (fusha or standard Arabic) and an innumera- ble variety of dialects (s. 'amiyya, pl. 'amiyyat). That is, if the analysis even bothers to consider language practice to begin with.

In contrast, our analysis of interviews and debates on Al-Jazeera about the Arabic language find a concern not with diglossia but rather with the state of the Arabic language as captured above by the Economist. The endangerment and weakness of Arabic provide the prompt for most discussions in our selected interviews. This concern, however, ties into a larger debate about the proper scope and nature of the community that speaks Arabic. As Hourani points out, the Arabic language is a center point of Arab nationalist consciousness. The Arabic language has not only historically been tied to Arab nationalist visions of community, but also to the Islamic umma and to state-centric visions-like that of Egyptian or Lebanese nationalism. The participants in the Al-Jazeera debates analyzed in this article draw upon a long, but contested, legacy of how the Arabic language helps delineate a social and political community.

It is easy to note the divergent discourses between western and Arab scholarship (Sabry 2008: 242) on the nature and place of the Arabic language in these debates on Al-Jazeera. Scholarship on the Arabic language in the English language tends to underutilize advances in linguistics and in other fields in Middle East studies. This article seeks to link these discourses to show both legacies and possibilities for fruitful cross-fertilization.

The first section of this article describes the data of eight programs from Al-Jazeera that aired between 1998 and 2010 which dealt specifically with the Arabic language. The second section outlines the intellectual roots that

C. Suleiman andRE. Lucas/ Middle East journal of Culture and Communication 5 (2012) 190-210 3

many of the participants draw upon-that of the Arab nahda of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The reactions of the Al-Jazeera debaters are tied to three themes of national identity and belonging and their relation to the Arabic language; themes that continue to be contested since the nahda. Finally, the article points out that there is a divergence between the general direction of scholarship produced in the West on the Arabic language and the Al-Jazeera network and the broader intersection of language and nationalism addressed by the Al-Jazeera participants. Beyond noting the obvious linkage between language and nationalism, how actual participants deal with their intellectual legacies while attempting to prescribe and influence the present deserves greater analysis in the case of the Arabic language and its most noted vehicle today-the Al-Jazeera satellite television network.

The Debates

In investigating Al-Jazeera, most research focuses on the symbolism and messages conveyed on and by the network. These macro-level analyses seek to place the network into the global media landscape, distill the political intentions of its staff, or determine the channel's function in the Arab public sphere (Alterman 1gg8; Miles zoos; Lynch zoo6; Pintak zoog). To focus on the use of Arabic on Al-Jazeera, analysts could either perform a large corpus analysis of the linguistic features of language use on the network (Clayman and Heritage 2002), or take a micro-levellinguistic approach to the turn-by-turn language practice of, for example, news interviews in order to show the linkage between linguistic makers and a speaker's self- presentation (Suleiman and O'Connell 2003). However, neither of these sociolinguistic methods seems to be employed in addressing the use of Arabic on Al-Jazeera.

This article instead takes a middle route. It analyzes a subset of Al-Jazeera programs-specifically all interviews and debate programs that aired on the network between 1998 and 2010 that dealt specifically with the Arabic language. The network has covered to the topic of the Arabic language reg- ularly since the channel's opening in 1996. In other words, this article analyzes the meta-language of how Arabic is talked about in these specific Al-Jazeera programs.

Al-Jazeera aired eight programs (through 2010) that debated the issue of the Arabic language and its status. While the number of these debates on the news channel pales in comparison to the number of debates on explic- itly political topics-such as Palestine or Iraq-it represents a consistent


attention by the network to cultural issues with important political over- tones. Table 1 summarizes the programs, the dates they aired, and the pro- tagonists in the interviews and debates. While all eight interviews touched on the issue of the use and structure of the Arabic language, the programs also tended to focus on three different themes. The first theme questioned if Arabic is in decline and if it should he considered an endangered language. The second theme questioned the relationship between the Arabic language and Islam-especially in relation to Muslims who do not speak Arabic natively. The third theme sought to delineate the place of the Arabic language in the context of globalizing identities.

Table 1: Programs, Hosts, and Guests on Al-Jazeera (All last accessed on 3]anuary2o1o)

Show and Date Interviewer Interviewees Positions

Al-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat

12]uly1gg8

Ahmad Mansur 'Inayat-'Allah 'Iblagh

Hamdi 'Arislan

Karim Ghneim

Kuwait University Marmara

University (Istanbul)

Al-Azhar University

http:/ /www.aljazeera.net/Portal/Templates/Postings/PocketPcDetailedPage .aspx?PrintPage=True&GUID={8F5266E4-DBF6-45DD-8125 -DFoBA4E2114D}&archiveiD=go8o7

Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akisFaisal al-Qasim 28 August 2001

Rafiq Rouhana Nasral-Din

al-Bahra

Lebanese poet Syrian writer

'Isam Nur al- [Not identified] Din(by phone)

http:/ /www.aljazeera.net/Portal/Templates/Postings/PocketPcDetailedPage .aspx?PrintPage=True&GUTD={8F5266E4-DBF6-45DD-8125 -DFoBA4E2114D}&archiveiD=8g859

Al-Kitab Khayru Khalid al-Huroub Yasir Suleiman falls

24 February 2003 Joseph Massad

University of Edinburgh

Columbia University

http:/ /www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/oE216o;;;;-DCF4-4D;;g-AD1D

-C434B8gC68Fs.htm

http://www.aljazeera.net/Portal/Templates/Postings/PocketPcDetailedPage




http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/oE216o%3B%3B%3B%3B-DCF4-4D%3B%3Bg-AD1D


Table 1: (Cont.)

Show and Date Interviewer Interviewees Positions

Al-Shari'a 'Abd al-Samad Yusuf al-Qaradawi Egyptian reformist wa-l-Hayat Nasser cleric and media

28 February 2007 personality

http:/ /www.aljazeera.net/Portal/Templates/Postings/PocketPcDetailedPage .aspx?PrintPage=True&GUID={8F5266E4-DBF6-45DD-8t25-DFoBA4E2u4D }&archiveiD=1058570

MaWara' al-Khabar

Hisham Salah and Faruk Shousha 'Ali al-Zafiri

Arabic Language Academy (Egypt) Damascus

24 April 2008 'Abd al-Nabi Staif University

www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/867BF2oD-DE61-4D5C-A2E2-3F37E455EDBE .htm

Al-Ittijah

al-Mu'akis 6May2oo8

Faisal al-Qasim Rafiq Rouhana Lebanese poet

'Ali 'Uqla 'Ursan [Not identified]

www.aljazeera.net/Channel/archive/archive?Archiveid=1094372

Al-Shari'a 'Othman 'Othman Yusuf al-Qaradawi Egyptian reformist wa-l-Hayat cleric and media

22 March 2009 personality

www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4CE3oB92-7C39-4041-98os-B6191C762BoE.htm

Al-Ittijah Faisal al-Qasim Mamduh Khsara Arabic Language al- Mu'akis Academy (Syria)

10 August 2010 'Anwar 'Imran Syrian Poet

www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E8s691Eo-6E17-4941-B7A4-29D8ooE3AEAC .htm



http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/867BF2oD-DE61-4D5C-A2E2-3F37E455EDBE

http://www.aljazeera.net/Channel/archive/archive?Archiveid=1094372

http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4CE3oB92-7C39-4041-98os-B6191C762BoE.htm

http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E8s691Eo-6E17-4941-B7A4-29D8ooE3AEAC

C. Suleiman andRE. Lucas/

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Middle East journal of Culture and Communication 5 (2012) 190-210 195

Debating ifArabic Is an Endangered Language

Is Arabic an endangered language? Three of the Al-Jazeera programs directly addressed this question in the context of the 'endangerment' of Arabic from two directions: from the weakness of Jusha (standard Arabic) in the face ofits dialects ('am(Y.ya), and the decline of Arabic in comparison to the global prevalence of English. All three are also episodes of Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis [the opposite direction] which aired on 28 August 2001, 6 May 2008 and 16 August 2010. The show is arguably Al-Jazeera's most known program (Miles 2005: 38). Dr. Faisal al-Qasim, a Syrian with a doctorate from Britain, hosts the program.

In the first program from 28 August 2001, al-Qasim asked directly if 'Arabic is endangered', and if 'we are also a defeated people, linguistically and non-linguistically'. The studio guests were Dr. Rafiq Rouhana, a writer and poet from Lebanon, and Nasr al-Din al-Bahra, a writer from Syria. Dr. 'Isam Nur al-Din, a university professor from Lebanon, also participated via telephone. Rouhana responded to the opening question by al-Qasim on whether Arabic is endangered by stating that it was not a valid question. Rouhana cited Darwinian evolution as the process at work in arguing that Arabic should give way to the various forms of 'am(Y.ya (Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis 28 August 2001: 2). Rouhana compared the situation of Arabic to French and Hebrew. He argued that in the case of French, people do not experi- ence a split between standard and non-standard language, implying that this is a healthier language situation. As for Hebrew, Rouhana stated that 'Israel is the only country in this region that writes the way it speaks', since modem Hebrew is different from ancient Hebrew (Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis1

28 August 2001: g). In the case of Arabic, 'am(Y.yat have evolved fromfusha into something new and better.

Al-Bahra argued thatfusha today is a synthesis of dialects. He cited the example of Damascus, where migration from the countryside to the city brought the different dialects from all over Syria together into a dialect that approaches the standardfusha. He responded to Rouhana that there would be no end to the divisions of dialects if we were to consider them languages-that one neighborhood in Damascus could have a different dialect from another (Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis} 28 August 2001: 8). Also, al-Bahra believed that language must have a written mode. Since 'am(Y.ya is not written it therefore cannot be a language. He suggested that the push for 'amiyyat to be considered separate languages is part of a long standing colonial and Orientalist agenda to abandon fifteen centuries of Arab heritage and weaken the East.


'lsam Nur al-Din agreed with al-Bahra that the push fromfusha to 'amiyya was an Orientalist and western plot to weaken the Arabs and the Arabic language. For Nur al-Dinfusha is alive, after all it is 'what we do when we turn on our TV' (Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis, 28 August 2001:13). Nur al-Din argued that 'language is one thing and its grammar is something else'. (Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis, 28 August 2001: 14). Grammar, for Nur al-Din, is an attempt to describe the linguistic fact of linking thought to language. In this way, Nur al-Din thought that fusha can be adapted for modern usage. He echoed al-Bahra in stating that there is no end to divisions in making 'amiyyat languages.

The second program ofAl-Ittijah al-Mu'akis about thefusha and its prob- 1ems from 2oo8 again invited Rouhana, this time to debate 'A1i 'Uq1a 'Ursan, who the network did not identify. As the episode begins, a poll was pre- sented to the audience asking 'Is Arabic an endangered language'? Responses from the viewers showed that 86.4 percent of the respondents agreed that is, while 13.6 percent did not. Rouhana repeated many of his arguments from the earlier show. 'Ali 'Uqla 'Ursan agreed that Arabic is weak, and this is a reflection of the political weakness of the Arabs. For 'Ursan, Arabic has been 'conspired against from Cromer [Evelyn Baring] to [Paul] Bremer' (Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis, 6 May 2008: 4).

On the third episode ofAl-Ittijah al-Mu'akis from 10 August 2010, 'Anwar 'Imran, a Syrian poet, argued that the 300 million speakers of Arabic speak dialects, not standard Arabic (Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis, 8 August 2010: 3). In other words,fusha is 'fossilized' and 'belongs only in museums'; 'it is dead and should be buried'. Because of the weakness of the Arabs, the language borrows much of its current vocabulary from foreign languages. Since fusha is not spoken or understood by the people on the street, 'lmran concluded that it should make way for Arabic's dialects.

In contrast, Mamduh Khsara of the Syrian Language Academy saw Arabic as formidable. For Khsara,fusha is living because it does connect with the street. He argued that competency in a standard language varies everywhere and not just in Arabic. He further pointed out that in 1925 a conference of Orientalists and Arabs in Cairo predicted the death offusha and the emergence of dialects as separate languages within 25 years. Khsara stated that 'those people are gone, but Arabic is still there' (Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis, 8 August 2010: 3). Nevertheless, he argued that the language academies alone cannot maintain the integrity of the language, but share that responsibility with all social institutions in reinforcing the proper use of written Arabic and in reforming the education system to make fusha more accessible to students.


The participants in these three programs agreed that Arabic is weakened

but they disagreed on the cause. For Rouhana, Arabic's local dialects repre- sented the potential for greater progress than the inherently flawed standard Arabic. 'Ursan, al-Bahra and Nur al-Din argued that the weakness of Jusha was tied to the general weakened state of the Arabs at the hands of hostile foreign powers. While 'Imran agreed with this political situation, he reached the opposite conclusion and agreed with Rouhana in seeking a move fromfusha to 'amiyya. Khsara, in contrast, saw the cause of weakness of Arabic as social. Governments and societies, not the language, need to be reformed.

Debating Arabic's Place in Islam

Next to Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis, Al-Jazeera's most known program is Al-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat [Islamic law and life].The first episode under consideration was aired on 12July1998. Ahmad Mansour interviewed Dr. 'Inayat-'Allah 'Iblagh, an Afghani who teaches Arabic at Kuwait University, Dr. Hamdi 'Arislan, a professor at Marmara University in Istanbul, and Dr. Karim Ghnaim, a science professor at al-Azhar University. The topic was the Arabic language and the interest of Muslims in Arabic. 'Jblagh and 'Arislan do not speak Arabic natively. The second and third programs of Al-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat interviewed Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi on 28 February 2007 and on 22 March 2009. Al-Qaradawi is a famous Egyptian Islamic cleric residing in Qatar and a frequent guest on the show. Both of al-Qaradawi's interviews focused on the topic of the future of Arabic and the challenges it faces. The three episodes of Al-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat paralleled the discussions of Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis on how the Arabic language is threatened. However, in the episodes of Al-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat the Arabic language was linked to Islamic religious practice.

Kuwait University's 'Inayat-'Allah 'Iblagh stated at the beginning of his interview that Arabic grammar must not change. Rather Muslims should improve their study of the language. He explained that Arabic serves two purposes: communicative and religious. In his travels in the non-Arab Muslim world he noticed that mosque imams and shaykhs have very lim- ited knowledge of Arabic-a situation that he found as problematic. For 'Iblagh, knowledge of Arabic grammar was necessary for a deeper understanding the Qur'an (Al-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat, 12 July 1998: 14). He, however, argued that the purpose of Islam was never to Arabize people, but rather to instill the love of the Arabic language in them for the betterment of Islam (Al-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat,12 July 1998: 3).


Hamdi 'Arislan from Marmara University claimed that the threat to Arabic from other languages is not new. 'Arislan explained that the use of the Arabic language during Ottoman rule underwent two phases. Until the Tanzimat reforms of 1839, the Ottomans promoted Arabic as the language of the educated. 'Arislan argued that at that time the Turkish language took 8o percent of its vocabulary from Arabic and Persian (Al-Shari'a wa-l-Hayat, 12 July 1998: 4). After the Tanzimat, however, 'Arislan noted, a process of modernization took place. A need to learn European languages emerged in the pursuit of reorganization. Thus, Arabic fell victim to the process that culminated in the efforts to Turkity the Ottoman Empire in its last years.

Lastly, Karim Ghnaim from al-Azhar commented that while Arabic is the official language of instruction in higher education institutions, this is not enforced. He rejected the claim that Arab scientists need to know foreign languages of the more developed countries in order to transmit this knowledge. He thought that Arabic academies need to do a better job in keeping pace with the global development of knowledge. Moreover, the Arabic academies need to coordinate their efforts so that Syria does not have its own terminology, Egypt another translation, and Tunisia a third (Al-Shari'a wa-l-Hayat,12 July 1998: 6). In other words, he sought practical solutions to strengthen Arabic.

'Iblagh, 'Arislan and Ghnaim all agreed that Arabic is indeed weakened. 'Iblagh was not happy about the lack of knowledge of Arabic among non- Arab Muslims. He saw Arabic as the glue that holds the umma together at a religious level. 'Arislan's historic narrative of the decline of Arabic in Turkey did not carry with it such a condemnation. Rather he treated it as a fact resulting from nations setting their own national goals regarding progress. On the other hand, Ghnaim's prescription of endorsing Arabic fully in higher education in the Arab world can be taken as a call to restore the historic place of Arabic as a transmitter of knowledge for Arabs and Muslims.

In his two interviews in 2001 and in 2009, Yusuf al-Qaradawi was asked whether he thought Arabic is sacred. The popular Egyptian cleric answered that it is not. Rather Arabic is an exalted (mu'azzama) language because God chose it for a revelation. But the language in and of itself is not sacred-to say it is sacred had its own theological implications (Al-Shari'a wa-l-Hayat, 28 February 2007: 1). Moreover for al-Qaradawi, Arabic was not threatened because the Qur'an guaranteed its permanence (baqa') (Al-Shari'a wa-l-Hayat, 28 February 2007: 1). But today, when the umma is in decline, its language declines too. For al-Qaradawi the process of colonialism was an attack on the Arabic language. Today English enjoys


the status Arabic enjoyed in the Middle Ages, in that educated people aspire to know it. Further, he discussed how the English speaking states support English as a global language by investing in institutes such as the British Council, while today Arabic lacks similar institutions. Lastly, al-Qaradawi called for making the grammar rules of Arabic accessible to its users (taysir), and that taysir on the language was done throughout all the ages. It should not stop now (Al-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat, 28 February 2007: 7)·

On the point of the weakness of the umma, al-Qaradawi offered the example of non-Arabic speaking South Asians who work as domestic help- ers in the Gulf States. Because they help raise the children, the children do not acquire their native tongue properly (Al-Shari'awa-1-Hayat, 2S February 2007: 2-3). He also advocated a change in the way Arabic teachers are viewed in the Arab world namely by increasing the respect given them and strengthening the teaching of Arabic in schools and in institutes of higher education. He stated that Syria is the only country which follows through in Arabic teaching at all levels and in all subjects.

It is interesting that the interviewer did not press al-Qaradawi to define the word umma, despite its frequent use. Al-Qaradawi left the term ambiguous as to whether he meant all Muslims, or all Arab Muslims, or all Arabs. However, al-Qaradawi emphasized that knowledge of Arabic is a religious imperative (fard wajib) of all Muslims (Al-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat, 28 February 2007: 1). In sum, al-Qaradawi considered the weakness of the Arabic language as a mirror of the weakness of the umma-especially relative to foreign powers.

Debating Arabic's Place among Globalizing Identities

In the third set of interviews, two other programs held debates focused more directly on the place of the Arabic language within the globalizing world of nations. In the first program, Al-Kitab Khayru falls [Books are the best companions] aired on 24 February 2003, Khalid al-Hroub interviewed Dr. Yasir Suleiman, a linguist at the University of Edinburgh (at the time of the interview), and Dr. Joseph Massad of Columbia Univer- sity. The interview took place soon after Suleiman published his 2003 book on Arab nationalism and the Arabic language. The program focused on the relationship between Arabic and national identity from a scholarly perspective. The second program Ma Wara' al-Khabar [What is behind the news] aired on 24 April 2008. Hisham Salah and 'Ali al- Zafiri interviewed Faruk Shousha, the general secretary of the Arabic


language academy in Egypt, and Dr. 'Abd al-Nabi Staif, a professor of comparative literature at Damascus University. The topic of discussion was the situation of the Arabic language and the challenges it faces from globalization.

Yasir Suleiman placed the topic of Arabic's role in a globalizing world within a historical framework. He defended his argument that Arab nationalism was not merely a reaction to the Turkification process in the Ottoman Empire, but also an engagement with the ideas of French and German nationalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He also stated that Arab nationalism resembles German nationalism in that both emphasized culture over territoriality. Suleiman argued that today cultural nationalism is alive among the Arabs, whereas the politica1 nationalism of territoria1 unification is dead (Al-Kitab Khayru falls, 24 February 2003: 3). Lastly, Suleiman stated that Arabs have had pride in their language throughout the centuries.

In the discussion, Massad mainly responded to Suleiman instead of elaborating his own arguments. Massad claimed that Suleiman read too much into the historic record about parallels between Arab nationalism and German nationalism and veneration of their language could only he taken so far. Massad argued that German pride also led to biological racism, but that the pride of Arabs in their language could not be read the same way. He made the point that love of any language (not just Arabic) does not necessarily lead to racial pride. He then argued that during the colonial period Arab nationalism was a reaction to the discourse of the inferiority of the East to the West by Orientalists and not just a response to the Ottomans. Massad perceived modernization (hadatha) during the nahda to mean 'Europeanization' (Al-Kitab Khayrujalis, 24 February 2003: 3). Specifically, Arab intellectuals wanted to be part of the European intellectual order. Lastly, Massad stated that pan-Arabism (qawmiyya) and state-centric nationalism (qutriyya) in terms of the Arabic language were two sides of the same coin. Both treated Arabic as static and unchanging from the Abbasid times to the nahda. In sum, both drew from the same discourse as the Orientalists.

In the second program under consideration here, Faruk Shousha and 'Abd al-Nabi Staif debated the current condition of the Arabic language and its challenges-again linking them to the issue of the endangerment of Arabic. Shousha began by stating that the condition of the Arabic language should be a pan-Arab concern (qadiyya qawmiyya). He thought that schools and language academies should both work to strengthen Arabic, as they are primarily responsible for maintaining a standard. Further, he made a


comparison-common among social scientists-of nineteenth-century Japan and Egypt. Although both countries had the same starting point, Japan achieved more as a state that Egypt did. But instead of blaming the global economic order, or colonialism, for Egypt's inability to become a member of the 'first world', Shousha blamed the situation of the Arabic language. In his opinion, Japan and Egypt were two nations who had the same catalysts for joining the developed world. Japan succeeded by supporting Japanese as a national language, while Egypt did not succeed because of its negligence of Arabic as its national language (Ma Wara' al-Khabar, 24 April 2008:1). He blamed the lack of support of Arabic at the institutional level. Shousha's position implied an Egyptian nation expressing itself in the Arabic language.

Staif, from Damascus University, blamed the political weakness resulting from the fragmentation of the Arabs for the weakness of the language. Qutriyya was to blame. Like Karim Ghnaim (Al-Shari'a wa-l-Hayat, 12 July 1998), Staif argued that in the Middle Ages, the Arabs were producers of knowledge because the Arab nation was powerful and united. So Arabic became a global language. Today, however, Arabs are consumers of knowledge, science and even literature. Arabs are therefore subordinate as consumers to those producing knowledge. Staif concluded that the Arabs need to 'take better care of ourselves' in order to 'take care of our language' (Ma Wara' al-Khabar, 24 April 2008: 2). For Staif if the Arabs were united politically then their language would be too.

The participants in these two debate programs tended to focus on the legacies of the past in their discussion of the relation of Arabic to issues of identity-in spite of the topic being the contemporary focus on globalization. Arabic was continually compared with other languages and nations. Again, Arabic was found to be weak relative both to its past achievements and to other languages today. For Suleiman, the borrowing of ideas from Europe strengthened the language back to its historic roots. Massad disagreed and sees attempts to reify the Arabic language as falling into the same philosophy as Orientalism, which portrays Arabic as eternally unchanging. Shousha pointed to the necessity of countries like Egypt to strengthen themselves by nationalizing the specificities of their language. Staif found that the political disunity of the Arabs produced their cultural weakness. In their focus on the past as producing the present, these four participants brought out how discussants on all eight programs built their arguments about the Arabic language today based on a rich intellectual tra- dition-and a set of unresolved nineteenth and early twentieth-century debates.


Intellectual Roots of the Al-Jazeera Debates

In the debate between Shousha and Staif the role of the historical continuity with earlier debates about the place of language within conceptions of national identity was quite obvious. Yet, all of the participants in the eight interviews made reference in one way or another to the era of the Arab nahda. Thus, it is important to point out that their various perspectives on the issue of the endangerment of Arabic and of the contested relationship between Arabic and multiple national identities are not new. Rather, the Al-Jazeera debaters were building on preexisting discourses of national identity and the place of the Arabic language within it.

The Nahda Debate

During the Arab nahda, many debates focused on the nature of Arab identity and the relation of the Arabic language to that identity. Some of the interviewees already referred to the fact that the Arabic language went through a revitalization process with the introduction of mass print media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The nahda resulted in new experiments with the Arabic language which took it and its literary heritage to new dimensions. The synthesis of Arab literary heritage with new ideas and methods of writing and printing-often European inspired-pushed Arabic into nineteenth-century genres.

At the heart of the nahda, the focus on the Arabic language involved several questions: of 'who are we in the modern age?' and 'how does this correspond with the political realities of the Arab lands?' particularly in the aftermath ofWorld War I. While the debate on Arabic stretched across the Arab world, it was mainly centered in the Levant and in Egypt. In these debates the role and use of the Arabic language provided a common point of reference. However, during this time period the implied cultural, social and political community provoked points of difference. Scholars tend to identity three trends in Arab thought that emerged during the nahda: the Islamic, the Arabist and the local nationalist (qutriyya or wataniyya) (Sharabi 1970; Hourani 1983; Y. Suleiman 2003).

The Islamic trend of nationalism conceptualized a modern Muslim umma engaged with the dominant global intellectual order arising in Europe. Authors in this Islamic trend, such as Jamal al-Din al-Mghani (1838-1897), Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) and Rashid Rida (1865-1935) called for a strengthening of the umma against the Europeans through


solidarity and reform (Abduh 1963; Amara 1968; Keddie 1983; Bulayq 1998; Enayat zoos).

The interviewees on Al-Jazeera continued this Islamic frame from the nahda era, in pointing to the essential necessity of Arabic for Islam; stating that the Arabic language was not just for the Arabs but for all Muslims; and emphasizing the need to defend Arabic from local nationalistic dilutions that would take Arabic's use in Islam away from the classical formulation into 'amiyya or even into another language. Both Shaykh Yousuf al-Qaradawi and 'Iblagh articulated these positions most clearly. One can see that in light of their nahda predecessors, both agreed on the causes of the contemporary decline of Arabic; however, they differed in their response. 'Iblagh saw Ambic grammar as fixed and immutable: he feared that if the grammar is simplified (tabsit), which could imply omitting the complicated parts of it, then Muslims would no longer have recourse to a good understanding of the Qur'an (AI-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat, 12 July 1998: 14). Al-Qaradawi instead called for taysir al-lugha and its rules with regard to Arabic grammar (AI-Shari'a wa-1-Hayat, 28 February 2007: 7). 'Iblagh wished to raise public understanding up to the level of the exalted language, whereas al-Qaradawi wanted to have the language accommodate the common man.

The Arabist form of nationalism (qawmiyya 'Arabiyya) during the nahda also promoted the Jusha as the language of the Arabs. Sati' al-Husri (1985: : o) refered to Arabic as 'united' and 'uniting'. But rather than uniting all Muslims on religious grounds, ethnic identification as Arabs brought both a cultural affinity and demands for political unity (Rabbath 1962)-ideas that led to the political platforms of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Ba'ath party in Syria and Iraq. This tension between cultural and political unity drove many of the debates within this Arabist trend since the nahda (Tibi 1997; Choueiri zooo).

Many of the Al-Jazeera participants tended to agree with al-Husri's notions of the role the Arabic language plays in forging a cultural unity in an Arab nation. 'Isam Nur al-Din stated that 'I am an Arab nationalist' (AI-Ittijah ai-Mua'kis, 28 August 2001: 14). 'Abd al-Nabi Staif, as well as the Syrian writer Nasr al-Din al-Bahra, followed al-Husri's ideas about the unifying force of the Arabic language. Over the course of the twentieth century Arabic language academies were founded in Cairo and Damascus-as well as many other Arab countries-with the aim of unifying the Arabic language. Yet, as al-Azhar professor Karim Ghnaim pointed out, the language academies of different countries inadvertently wreak havoc on the Arabic language, because their efforts are not coordinated. Also, some scholars essentialized the Arabic language as something unchanging throughout


the ages. Others saw the revitalization of fusha as part of the process of renewal of the Arab peoples.

The modern state figured importantly in its role in promoting a third trend of nahda thought, local nationalism (qutriyya or wataniyya). The trend was most visible in Egypt and in Lebanon, which should not seem surprising, given that elements of 'stateness' had emerged in these locali- ties earlier than anywhere else in the Ottoman lands. The role of Arabic for qutriyya nationalists seems much more ambiguous in contrast to those in the Islamic and the Arabist trend that see a clear linkage between the Arabic language and the Muslim umma or the Arab nation (respectively). For some state nationalists, like Egypt's Taha Husayn (1889-1973) or Lebanon's Abdallah Lahhud (1S99-??),fusha was an authentic expression of the state's people. For both thinkers, Arabic carried the specific heritage of locals while still tying the community to the larger Arab and Muslim surroundings (Husayn 1944; Lahhud 1993). In other words, there is a connection-not competition-between the Arabic language and the local state. In the Al-Jazeera interviews, the position of Faruk Shousha (of the Egyptian Language Academy) could be interpreted as the closest to that of Husayn and Lahhud. Both Shousha's analogy between Egypt and Japan, and his statement that strengthening Arabic should be a pan-Arab concern indicated that he saw a unique identity of the Egyptian people that is expressed in the Arabic language.

In contrast, some authors saw that abandoning.fusha and promoting the local 'amiyya would more closely align the identity of 'the people' with their state. During the nahda in Egypt, Salama Musa (1928; 1964) called fur writing Egyptian 'amiyya in the Latin alphabet. Many Lebanese authors sought to use the French language to propel Lebanon outside of the Arab cultural sphere and into the West (Y. Suleiman 2003: 205). Thus, calls by Rouhana and 'Imran for moving away fromfusha to 'amiyya fit into a longer heritage of local, state-centric nationalism.

Connections and Disconnections with Western Debates

While the debates on Arabic on Al-Jazeera showed continuity with earlier perspectives about the place of the Arabic language within differing visions of the political community that originated in the nahda, the Al-Jazeera debates also displayed a surprising disconnect with contemporary western social science analysis about the place of Arabic and the political community. The venue of the debates-Al-Jazeera-has been given a great deal of attention from western scholars. Like with the nahda, a period of


technological advancement in communications led to structural transfor- mations of the Arab public sphere-today with the advent of satellite television and the Internet. However, when addressing the influence of Al-Jazeera, western scholars tend to underestimate the effects of the new 'transnational public sphere' on the Arabic language. In a surprising contrast, the Al-Jazeera interviewees underplayed the importance of the medium that their debates are being conducted within.

Beyond the specifics of the news media, some western analysts also note that the new Arab public sphere offers a chance for a new type of Arab nationalism built around cultural rather than political ties. The new media creates shared experiences that transcend state boundaries and is led by publics rather than states. In the eyes of some scholars, the new Arab media, led by Arab journalists, highlights a consciousness of victim- hood at the hands of outside powers to develop an imagined watan (Pintak 2oog).

The use of formal Arabic by news channels within the transnational public sphere makes it an Arab public sphere. This coupled with the expo- sure to varieties of 'amiyya are 'breaking down some of the verbal barriers that divide the region' (Alterman tgg8: 56). Western scholarship in this regard, however, tends to be thin on the actual effects of the new technological innovations on the use of Arabic in the media. Most studies tend to draw on the simple distinction betweenfusha and 'amiyya in relation to a future linguistic 'homogenization' that is still a long way off' (Alterman tgg8: 56). One area that deserves much more attention than it has received concerns the specific ways that Arabic is not only being transformed by the new media, but also how the living use of Arabic has changed market and communication strategies of the new media.

As such, the Al-Jazeera interviewees' concerns about the endangerment of the Arabic language perhaps seemed exaggerated. Moreover, in light of the voluminous western scholarship on the role of Al-Jazeera in forming and channeling Arab identity, it is surprising that the interviewees generally lacked a degree of self-reference that their debate was occurring on Al-Jazeera-with a few exceptions like 'Isam Nur al-Din (Al-Ittijah al- Mu'akis, 28 August 2001: 13). Likewise the interviewees did not seem to incorporate into their discussions the reality that their debate about the status of Arabic was happening in formal Arabic on a pan-Arab station. A rare other instance of self-referential language choice in the debates was exhibited by 'Anwar 'Imran, a Syrian poet, who identified himself as speaking a 'middle language' (lughawusta) inhisAl-Jazeeraappearance (Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis, 10 August 2010: 8).

C. Suleiman andRE. Lucas/ 206 Middle East journal of Culture and Communication 5 (2012) 190-210

As the Al-Jazeera interviewees attest to, the choice of language and the

theories of linguistic practice that guide them do reflect issues of identity and power relations-even if the participants do not self-reflexively dis- play that knowledge. But issues ofjusha and 'amiyya usually arise in relation to external political, not internal linguistic concerns. This again stands in contrast to the linguistic study of Arabic in the West-or at least that written in the English language-where one of major areas of study is the issue of diglossia in the Arabic language.

Since the seminal work by Charles Ferguson (1959) on diglossia, the analysis of language style and choice has been a popular preoccupation of scholars in the West in reference to the Arabic language (Bassiouney 2009). Ferguson identifies diglossia as a language situation whereby the high register is used for official communication and writing and a low register for everyday use. Reflecting on the study of diglossia in 1991, Ferguson laments that the bulk of research did not theorize diglossia, instead it merely described discrete language situations (Ferguson 1991).

Alan Hudson (2002) sees language situations, and not the identity of the speakers, as driving diglossia. Ralph Fasold (2002) disagrees with Hudson by calling for an emphasis on the communal aspect of diglossia.Yet, Fasold does not push the notion of identity further into how it specifically plays into diglossia. The debates on Al-Jazeera are a testimony that language choice is about identity, and more specifically about national identity of 'what it is to be an Arab?' As noted above, much of the discussions of Al-Jazeera and the 'New Arab Media' rely on the classification of Arabic into two separate registers-in contrast to some of the Al-Jazeera interviewees. Yet some interviewees agreed on the linguistic bifurcation of Arabic-not for structural linguistic reasons, but rather for issues of identity.

Without a critical, linguistically grounded analysis that recognizes the linkage between language and identity, many of these western authors essentialize a fluid language situation. The competitor to Jusha is not only the 'low form' expanding its functions to the realms of the high, but rather, the competition with English and to a lesser extent today, French. While English or French bilingualism for the educated Arab has existed for over a century, the destabilizing factor might relate to Arab identity today as well as with the effect of economic and cultural 'stampede towards English' in the first place (see Blommaert 2010: 49). Lastly, most studies of diglossia treat Arabic users as shifting constantly between the two modes of language. This may not be the case from the perspective of the language user (El-Hassan 1977; Al-Sharkawi zoos; C. Suleiman 2010).


Fifty years after Ferguson's first publication on diglossia, the language

situation in the Arab world has gone through drastic changes. In addition, research on Arabic diglossia does not investigate 'official' and 'non-official' language policies (Schiffman 1996) of the different Arab countries and how the school curricula are designed to strengthen (or not) the use of Jusha. In other words, the language situation in the Arab world is treated as static and unchanging-as both Orientalists and nationalists would argue. Language change and variation are well studied topics in investigating the language situation of other languages like English, Russian or Tamil (Schiffman tgg6; Labov 2006). The role of language policies in prompting such change and variation is also commonly addressed.The study of Arabic, however, generally remains divorced from both advances in other western social sciences about language and also from debates in Arabic about itself.

Conclusion

The discussions of the eight debates on Al-Jazeera on the Arabic language highlighted the divergent and convergent discourses about the status of the language and its use today in the Arab world. Underlying these analyses of the Arabic language-both by Arabs on Al-Jazeera and by western scholars-are notions about the nature of the Arabic language that draw from a range of historical discourses that Albert Hourani and others have identified. In locating the roots of contemporary Al-Jazeera debates in the nahda and pointing out their divergence from western scholarly debates, this article hopes to identify areas for future research that build on self- reflexive applications of social science that do not fall into Orientalist or nationalist tropes of inflexibility and essentialist differences of Arabic from other more 'normal' languages.

The eight debates on Al-Jazeera that focus on the Arabic language all addressed the issue of its weakness in the face of both a division between

Jusha and 'amiyya and from competition with globalizing English. Participants in these debates differed on why the Arabic language has been weakened-from natural developments in the language, from foreign interference, or from sociopolitical developments in the Arab world. However, these positions drew from a long history of perspectives on how Arabs and Muslims should deal with the changes that have taken place over the past two centuries. The three-sided debate from the nahda about the proper scope of the community (Muslim, Arab or local) provided a reference point for the debaters to draw from. The role of the Arabic language as


a source of identification to the community has been important as part of this long running debate.

It is also notable that these debates tended not to address the issues that concern western scholars. The venue of the debates-Al-Jazeera-as part of the new Arab media has been theorized as both a source of Arabic language usage and as playing an important part in shaping Arab identity today. The preoccupation of western scholars about digolssia in the Arabic language parallels many of the debaters' thoughts aboutfosha and 'amiyya. Nevertheless, the phrase 'izdiwajiyyat al-lugha (diglossia) was absent from the debates. Thus, the lack of naming of the phenomenon should perhaps guide and inform western scholarship, which insists on investigating Arabic primari1y through the ]ens of dig1ossia and not identity.

In identifYing these legacies and divergences we hope that in the future Arab and western scholars will bring both the long heritage of Arabic and advances in social sciences to bear on their investigations into the Arabic language. In doing so the study of Arabic and social science would be enriched by abandoning an assumption about the fixed and unchanging nature of Arabic. The actual language use and the perspectives of the language users should be taken into account instead of assuming the diglossic nature of Arabic. While the context oflanguage use is crucial in these studies, the role of identity in language use should also be a center point of future research. The perspective of the speaker draws not only on the immediate context of conversation. Speakers' perspectives also draw on participants' identities and roles that are constantly negotiated through interaction.While this happens in the micro-contexts of conversation, they are also part of a larger process of national identity formation and reforma- tion. This article does not address these micro-contexts. Rather it prepares for future nuanced micro-analyses by pointing to both the macro process of long running and unresolved debates about the role of language and nationalism in relation to Arabic. Moreover, the notion that language and nationalism are related must be specified and through the Al-Jazeera interviews this article seeks to highlight the contests about the relationship between the Arabic language and global historical processes of political power that have influenced the perception of identity by the interviewees. Language is one ingredient of national projects. However, local, regional and global processes of political, economic and social trends do not allow language to be formed statically or in a vacuum. These elements are part of social science research about other languages such as English or French, and there is no reason that Arabic should be excluded from this research


agenda by scholars in the West or participants such as those interviewed on Al-Jazeera.

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Arabic Debates on Al-Jazeera

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