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This chapter provides a snapshot of different language policies in the Arab world, implemented ones and unimplemented ones, and of the ever-evolving relation between language, ideology, nation and state in the Arab world. Section 5.2 begins with a definition of language policy. Section 5.3 examines the general concept of nation and juxtaposes it with that of state, then discusses the relation between the Arab nation and language. Because both ideologies and policies in the Arab world have been shaped by the history of colonisation in the area, mainly British and French colonisation, Section 5.5 compares and contrasts French and British patterns of colonisation and their impact on ideology and policies. Some countries are examined in detail: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. Section 5.6 considers the linguistic situation in Libya and the Gulf countries, and Section 5.7 discusses Arabic language academies and their main objectives. Section 5.8 provides a case study of two interviews with two presidents of Arab countries Syria and Yemen. Section 5.9 concentrates on the concept of linguistic rights with reference to the Arab world, and finally English and globalisation are discussed in Section 5.10.

How was Arab identity imagined in a world where most Middle Eastern populations stopped calling themselves Arabs? After the mid-ninth century AD, descriptions of Arabs proliferated in Arabic literature, whilst Arab identity as a social/political asset was in decline. In this period, the key spokesmen for the idea of Arabness were philologists who fundamentally reworked impressions of Arab identity as part of new theories about the Arabic language. Diachronic survey of the development of Arabic philology from the late eighth to eleventh centuries reveals shifting intentions and values which standardised the Arabic language via a unique process that focused on the idealisation of Bedouin as paragons of the ‘original Arabs’. Studying Arabic philology within its socio-historical contexts reveals how the grammarians transcended language study and forged paradigmatic changes to the ways Arab history and culture are interpreted. The novel association of Arab with Bedouin became a popular theme in Arabic literature from the early tenth century, and the weight of the resultant writings comprehensively transformed Arabness from the former expression of urban/Muslim elite identity in early Islam to a desert/Bedouin pre-Islamic identity which has cast a long shadow on the notion of Arab identity to the present.

This chapter discusses the twentieth-century history of Saudi Arabia through the biography of Hamad al-Jāsir. More than any other single person, al-Jāsir was responsible for shaping the modern genealogical culture of Saudi Arabia. The chapter examines al-Jāsir's life from his birth in 1909 in a central Arabian village to the beginnings of his genealogical project in the 1970s. It considers al-Jāsir's sometimes tumultuous relationship with his patrons in the Wahhabi religious establishment, his contributions to the development of the Saudi press and public culture, and his views on Arabia's bedouin populations and on the Arabic language. It also explores al-Jāsir's turn toward scholarship and the documenting of Saudi lineages in the last third of his life.

Chapter One analyzes the representation of Palestine in the bilingual Moroccan Marxist-Leninist journal Souffles-Anfas (1966–1971), the first text explicitly to connect cultural change in the Maghreb to an engagement for Palestine. It shows that Palestine was a central interlocutor not only in the journal’s increasingly militant political positions against the Moroccan regime, but also in its efforts at “cultural decolonization,” including the recovery of the Arabic language and the development of experimental literary forms independent from both French and Arabic canons. Abdellatif Laâbi’s translations of Palestinian poetry in particular became the site of a reflection on the politics of culture, displacing the journal’s founding mission—the elaboration of an autonomous Moroccan literature—onto the Palestinian context. If the poets who launched Souffles-Anfas could only write in the colonial tongue, Palestinian poetry in Arabic provided the model for cultural decolonization in an imperfectly decolonized Morocco.

This article, written by Karin C. Ryding, argues that while Arabic has garnered increased attention by the American education system over the past decade, the sociolinguistics of Arabic are being neglected in such educational endeavours. This is despite academic research on this topic, including, notably, Yasir Suleiman’s Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues and Perspectives (1994). Ryding writes that the complexity of teaching and learning Arabic is related to the transcultural realities of living and working in the Arab world. As she demonstrates, Arabic is particularly challenging as the language must be modified to conform to different types of interaction. Ryding then analyses some of the shortfalls in the fi eld of Arabic language instruction, and argues that because Arabic teaching – due to its distinctive diglossic nature – lacks many traditional models to choose from, it must construct its own, which she refers to as ‘the repertoire model’. Ryding summarises by noting that sociolinguistic analyses, like those studied by Suleiman, must be taken into consideration and should force us to come to terms with the linguistic reality of multiple discourse levels and, accordingly, to develop new models for Arabic pedagogy.

Chapter Three analyzes the best-selling author Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Algerian trilogy, which deploys the figure of the Palestinian guerrilla fighter and poet as a transnational allegory of revolution in the era of postcolonial disillusionment, reversing the classic nationalist trope of nation as woman. Mosteghanemi’s contrapuntal allegories of Algeria and Palestine are symptomatic of “the transcolonial exotic”: a marketing of the margins (Algeria and Palestine) for consumption at the center (Beirut and Cairo). This is even more evident in the Syrian television series based on her first novel, which aired during the 2010 Ramadan in Tunis, months before the onset of the Tunisian revolution. Partly due to the constraints of the teledrama genre, the series goes even further than the original in exoticizing Palestine and Algeria for mass consumption, removing all traces of criticism of national allegory and postcolonial Algeria in the interest of pan-Arab patriotism.

Developing Chapter 1’s findings on pre-Islamic Arabian society, this chapter proposes a new origin point for Arab communal consciousness. Chapter 2 seeks the first groups of people who called themselves ‘Arabs’ and explores how those people can be identified from historical records. We begin by appraising the evidence about Arabic language: when and where did it evolve and to what extent does Arabic-language use delineate Arab communal identity? We evaluate the surprising paucity of pre-Islamic Arabic records, and next turn to pre-Islamic poetry to examine its citation of the word ‘Arab’ alongside the senses of community the poets articulate. Pre-Islamic poetic reference to ‘Arabs’ is also almost non-existent, whereas alternative forms of communal identity are clearly expressed, in particular, a people known as Maʿadd. Marshalling theories of ethnogenesis to interpret the evidence, this chapter sheds new light on pre-Islamic Arabia’s fragmented communal boundaries. Chapter 2 closes with early Islamic-era poetry where poets first begin to call themselves ‘Arabs’, suggesting that Arab ethnogenesis was a result, not a cause of the rise of Islam.

This article, jointly written by Ashraf Abdelhay and Sinfree Makoni, lays out a series of critical reflections on the discourses of language anxiety that characterise Arabic as a ‘threatened language’. Examining Arabic as a site of social contestation in the Sudan, Abdelhay and Makoni analyse three statements that express a specific set of ideas and social attitudes about language, identity and society. The first statement was made at a rally by President Bashir a few weeks before the southern referendum held in 2011. The second statement comes from an article written by the Sudanese journalist Hussein Khojali. Finally, the third statement is a metalinguistic commentary made by the late South Sudanese leader John Garang de Mabior. Despite the different contexts surrounding their statements and the differences between them, Abdelhay and Makoni demonstrate that all three statements are metalinguistic commentaries which bring language to the fore as a proxy for articulating wider social and political concerns. All statements are ideological; they all link language with the extra-linguistic world of identity politics and power. The authors thus conclude that in contexts of conflict, individuals display awareness of the indexical values of language, ‘and they exploit the symbolism of language to articulate social and political issues’.

This article, written by Maisalon Dallashi, relates to a rather tragic survey which demonstrated a significant decline in knowledge of Arabic among Arab Jews following their immigration to Israel. The survey results, presented here in English for the fi rst time, form the backdrop for an analysis of command of Arabic among three generations of Arab Jews in comparison with non-Arab Jews living in Israel. Dallashi’s nuanced analysis of the complex relationship between Arab Jews and Arabic demonstrates that language is harnessed to promote two different discourses in Israel: on the one hand, it is a means of connection, while, on the other hand, it is a tool of segregation. By focusing on the Arab-Jewish community in Israel, Dallashi sheds light on processes that have resulted in what she calls ‘the dialectical relations in which Arabic concomitantly represents various, contradicting and even dissonant values’.

This chapter discusses the difficult position of the Arabic language from the point of view of the ‘volatile conditions’ of Arab citizenship in Israel. Azmi Bishara’s political career is a good example of the limits of citizenship for the Arabs in Israel. The chapter also discusses the meaning of ‘official’ languages, the role of language academies, the language arrangement in bilingual schools, and lastly the new imagined nationality of ‘Aramean’ and its genealogical connection to Aramaic. This new identity is in line with the state’s continuous attempts to fracture the Palestinian community in Israel, but at the same time it is drawing inspiration from the fragmentation of Arab communities in surrounding states such as Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

This chapter discusses issues concerning the language and culture of Arab minority in Israel during the period from 1967—1981. The Arabs value their language, not only as a means of communication but also as a symbol of ethnic and cultural identity, and as one of the essential bases for the preservation of their existence. However, most economic life, banking, politics, and military matters are conducted in the Hebrew language. This left the Arabs in a dilemma of whether to learn Hebrew at the expense of Arabic or sacrifice the linguistic inadequacy of Arab school graduates. Arabic literature in Israel continued to evolve after the British rule in Palestine, however, in recent times publications of a political nature have been censored by the Jewish authority.

In June 1999, in keeping with its twice-yearly tradition, the American University in Cairo (AUC) awarded Edward Said an honorary doctorate. On that occasion, Said delivered a commencement address that focused on the idea of a university to the very last class of the twentieth century. He dispelled the notion that liberal education is a European or western mode of study and reminded his audience that the principle of ijtihad, i.e. the central role of individual effort in study and interpretation, constituted the core of the Arab-Islamic culture. He proceeded to note the special status that every society assigns to the academy “whether it exempts it from intercourse with the everyday world or whether it involves it directly in that world”. The rest of this chapter looks at the changing faces of AUC in Egypt since its establishment in 1919.

This chapter discusses the unique and conflicting positions of Arabic music and language in Indonesia. The study was conducted among the settlements of ethnic Arabs in the Gorontalo region of Sulawesi. For these ethnic Arab communities, orkes gambus music—small ensemble music featuring Arab-derived instruments including the gambus lute—is a celebratory and ethnic tradition. Throughout most of the archipelago, however, this music is performed and consumed within Islamic settings and considered Islamic, partially because of the instrumentation, the ethnicity of the performers, and the use of Arabic, the language of the Qur'an and the Prophet. Critics, who object to the claim that Arab vernacular popular music is anything more than just that, make a sharp distinction between orkes gambus, on the one hand, and musik islami on the other. The chapter focuses on the power of sonic symbolism and aesthetics in the context of global and local religious affiliations and communities, and reveals the trends and tensions in religious expression and identity in a modern non-Arab Islamic nation.

Despite the extensive discussion of Darwin in the Arabic press since at least the early 1870s, his Origin of Species was not translated until well into the twentieth century. This chapter examines the works of Isma‘il Mazhar, one of the last of the major Arab evolutionists and science popularizers. It focuses on his work on translation and his efforts at language reform in general, for Mazhar was an avid translator, and he spent a considerable amount of time deliberating on the literary, stylistic and conceptual implications of translation. (Later he would also go on to participate in one of Egypt’s first Arabic Language Academies, where he worked specifically on the problem of modern scientific translation.) In particular, the chapter considers his readings of Darwin in the face of growing suspicions of evolution’s entrenched materialism. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mazhar campaigned tirelessly against this perspective, and his own stance was as neo-positivist as it was transcendentalist. Nevertheless, the very subject of his work was quickly losing favour with Arabic readers, and his ideas on evolution and social progress, alongside his views on religion, language and politics, gained him few followers.

This chapter turns to the realm of Islamic mathematics, which lasted longer than both the era of classical Greek mathematics and the age of “modern mathematics.” In the Islamic world, mathematics arose in various centers linked by networks of communication, primarily using the Arabic language, that persisted despite the general absence of political unity. Scholars turned to Greek and Mesopotamian sources, and also drew from a wellspring of “subscientific” sources. Islamic scholars during the first few hundred years of Islamic rule did more than just bring these sources together, however. They amalgamated them into a new whole and infused their mathematics with what they felt was divine inspiration, however, attitudes toward mathematical studies would change according to religious mandate. This chapter explores the history of Islamic mathematics as well as the algebraic formulations attributed to Islamic scholars.

This chapter explores how intellectuals—in the Arabic press and in the Arabic theater—reached to the spatial and sensorial transformation of Cairo and the work of the khedivate. The intellectual production within or associated with government circles constituted a “gentle revolution.” The gentle revolution was an attempt to make patriotism the official ideology of the khedivate. This involved the use of the learned Arabic language as official language of the khedivate and the retelling of Muslim history of Egypt as an Arab narrative. This new Muslim memory has to compete with and conform the European aesthetics of Ismail Pasha and the actual Ottoman belonging of Egypt. Spatial transformation brought politics to be performed in front of the powerful. Thus, the language as a public representation had to be adjusted.

This article, written by Chaoqun Lian, begins by pointing out that in Arabic metalanguage discourse one often encounters metaphors associating the form and situation of Arabic to non-linguistic entities and activities. Many of these metaphors, according to Lian, belong to ‘organic metaphors’, as they depict Arabic and its varieties as living organisms. In his article, Lian investigates the recurrence of ‘organic metaphors’ in language policy discussions within the Arabic language academies in Damascus and Cairo. By carefully analysing selected cases of metaphor-making, Lian unearths the normally covert link between language perception and socio-political circumstances in the Arabic-speaking world. According to Lian, when these socio-political circumstances are taken into consideration, academic research will be able to produce a more nuanced, dialectic understanding of the ‘organic’ perception of languages.

This chapter explores trends in Arabic-language learning during years before and after 9/11 to shed light on the relationship between the federal government's pressing need for regional specialists and the ability of federally funded Title VI area studies centers to meet this demand. It combines data from the US Department of Education's Evaluation of Exchange, Language, International and Area Studies database with findings from qualitative research of six Title VI-funded Centers for Middle East Studies across the country to analyze course enrollment, attrition rates, language instructor status, and work placement of students after graduation. It argues that there is a disconnect between the government's need for proficient speakers of Middle Eastern languages and the ability of Title VI centers to produce them, particularly at the MA level.