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Arabic and its Alternatives pdf download

ARABIC AND ITS ALTERNATIVES
Book Title Arabic And Its Alternatives
Book AuthorHeleen Murrevan
Total Pages333
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Arabic and its Alternatives – Religious Minorities and Their Languages in the Emerging Nation States of the Middle East (1920–1950) – Edited by Heleen Murrevan – den Berg – Karène Sanchez Summerer – Tijmen C. Baarda

ARABIC AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

When in the mid-eighties I entered the field of Semitic Studies via the study of Hebrew and Aramaic, “Classical Syriac” was one of the obligatory courses of the program. Through the careful study of grammar and a variety of texts, these classes took me into the world of the Syriac churches.

It was to take me some years to start getting the bigger picture of their histories and contemporary situation, but one thing I accepted as a given from the earliest stages of my studies: that there was an undeniable link between the “Syriac” language and the “Syriac” churches.

This message was conveyed by the texts we read, by the convenient subdivision into “East” and “West” Syriac scripts and “East” and “West” Syrian Churches,2 and by the references made by the contemporary churches (which at that period were settling in Europe, including the Netherlands) to Syriac as ‘their’ language.

This conceptual link was further strengthened by the fact that for the closely related Aramaic languages used by other religious communities (“Jewish,” “Samaritan,” “Mandaic”), different scripts were used and separate pieces of literature had emerged.3

That this exclusive link between Syriac churches and the Classical Syriac language in the modern and contemporary period is as much a matter of ideology as of practice, I began to realize when I started specialization in so-called Modern or Neo-Aramaic, the variety used by the (East Syriac) Assyrian Christians of Urmia in Iran.

Whereas most linguists prefer to emphasize the connection of these modern languages to the wider Aramaic language group, Syriac Christians usually prefer the term Sureth/Surait (“Syriac”) for both the Classical and the Modern language – thereby conceptualizing the modern language form as firmly part of their Syriac heritage.

Linguistically, however, the boundaries between the ‘Syriac’ of the Syriac churches and other Aramaic languages and cultures were much fuzzier than I had previously assumed. The most important realization, however, came when I engaged with Arabic as part of the Christian heritage of the Middle East.

I learnt that when in the early twentieth century the Syriac churches put a strong emphasis on the importance, and hence preservation, of their “Syriac heritage,”4 in fact most of the writings about this heritage were in Arabic rather than in Syriac.

 Thus, while Syriac was shaped more and more into the most important common identifier of Syriac Christianity, Syriac Christians were making use of a variety of other languages in religious as well as secular contexts.

Alongside a host of languages including English, French, German, Persian, Turkish and Kurdish (to name a few), it was Arabic that prevailed in most of the Syriac communities.5

The question is, therefore: if Arabic was in actual practice as important as Syriac, despite all the attention the latter receives in ecclesial as well as secular circles, what would explain this gap between language ideology and language practice? And, if indeed there is a gap between ideology and practice, is it the same for all Syriac churches? Further, do we find a similar divergence between ideology and practice in other Middle-Eastern communities? And how is this related to the role Syriac and Arabic play as religious, ritual, languages?

And what has all of this to do with the rise of new Middle-Eastern nationalisms in which language and language reform play crucial roles: Turkish, Arab, Iranian, Armenian, Assyrian and Zionist? And, finally: what does the case of Arabic in the Middle East tell us about persisting but varied and varying connections between language, religion, and communal identities more generally?

It is this cluster of questions that formed the impetus to a comparative project that was financed by the Dutch Research Council NWO, under the title “Arabic and its Alternatives: Religious Minorities in the Formative Years of the Modern Middle East (1920–1950).”

In September 2013, the group organized its first conference under the title “Common Ground: Changing Interpretations of Public Space in the Middle East among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” the proceedings of which were recently published.6

During this conference as well as in the ensuing volume, the language issue was contextualized within larger questions of changing ideologies and practices of public space.

It addressed the ways in which language (in schools, journalism, and publishing) as much as other cultural practices (dress, urbanization, the resettlement of WWI-refugees, funeral practices, religious processions, music) in the period following WWI was used simultaneously to include some and exclude other non-Muslims in the newly emerging public sphere of the Mandate and early independent states.

It is the changing interpretations of the so-called millet system under the influence of modernization, secularization, and competing nationalisms, as well as the contextualized concept of the term ‘minority as it developed in the twentieth century, that underlie the discussions in the present volume.7

In June 2016, the research group organized a second conference in Leiden and The Hague, this time zooming in on the issue of language, with a slight variation on the title of the program as a whole: “Arabic and its Alternatives: Religious minorities and their languages in the emerging nation states of the Middle East (1920–1950).”

In this volume most of the contributions of the 2016 conference are collected, complemented with relevant essays by the conference organizers that were not presented during the conference.

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