Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East

Since the West's very early flirtations with the modern Near East, and especially in the past 100 years of East-West relations, there has been considerable difficulty in understanding and defining the Middle East, the Arab world, pan-Arabism, Arab nationalism, and Middle Eastern identities in general. The Western impulse of conflating national identity with language, state, and ethnicity—often subsuming Arabic language into Arab ethnicity—has contributed to this misunderstanding and misreading of the region. For, while the Middle East can be accurately referred to by way of the generic "Arab world" label, the appellation itself is a misleading oversimplification that conceals an inherent diversity and multiplicity of Middle Eastern cultures, ethnicities, languages, and nationalities. And while there is certainly a dominant Arab ethnos, there are also significant numbers of Middle Eastern peoples and nationalities with historical memories and ethno-cultural bonds that challenge the dominant Arabist paradigm. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East proposes a new reading of modern Middle Eastern history and suggests alternate solutions to the region's problems. The book is an attempt to rehabilitate and bring back to the fore of Middle East Studies the issue of language as a key factor in shaping (and misshaping) the region, with the hope of rediscovering a broader, more honest, and less ideologically tainted discussion on the Middle East. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East has a special focus on Lebanon, a "Christian homeland," because Lebanon has traditionally acted as the region's template for change and a barometer gauging its problems and charting its progress.

In a stunning polemic, a well-known professor of Arabic indicts the classical and modern standard forms of the language as 'a key factor in the Middle East’s turbulence, authoritarianism, intellectual torpor, cultural rigidity, and lack of freedoms.' In their stead, Franck Salameh argues for a 'linguistic humanism' that recognizes and celebrates the Middle East’s diversity of language and culture. His deeply researched and utterly original study fascinated me., Arab nationalists, and their foreign supporters, have constructed a dominant image of a monolithic Arab world held together by modern standard Arabic. In this passionate and illuminating book of intellectual revisionism, Professor Franck Salameh goes a long way toward demolishing that myth. Underneath the official Arabic edifice, he finds another map, a world of vernacular languages more true to the cultures and identities of the region. Lebanon is his case study, but his is a broader assault. A book of great originality and considerable courage. The canon of Arab nationalism has been dealt a powerful blow. Franck Salameh’s book is one of the most searching yet of the nexus between language and identity in modern Middle Eastern life. This book deserves a wide audience, in the academy and beyond., Salameh argues that classical Arabic is the source of most of the conflicts in the Middle East today., In an intellectual and cultural climate dominated by Arabism and an ascendant Islamism and obscurely expressed by Modern Standard Arabic, Language, Memory and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon offers a fresh perspective for better understanding the Middle East. This study not only sheds light on the complexity, plurality, diversity of the Middle East, and specifically Lebanon as a case in point, but also breaks the barrier of "Arabist" tautological scholarship which heretofore obfuscated a pellucid and honest reading of the history, peoples, and civilizations of the Middle East., Salameh's meticulous research makes for a most worthy book that makes a significant contribution to the literature.

Franck Salameh is assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Boston College.