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Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon by Franck Salameh

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Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon Franck Salameh
Language: English
Page: 319
Format: pdf
ISBN: 0739137387, 9780739137406
Publisher: Lexington Books

Review

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. (Pipes, Daniel )

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. (Fouad Ajami )

Salameh argues that classical Arabic is the source of most of the conflicts in the Middle East today. (Middle East Journal )

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. (Robert Rabil )

Salameh's meticulous research makes for a most worthy book that makes a significant contribution to the literature. (Middle East Quarterly )

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..A valuable, well-documented and rich contribution to the topic of nationalism in the Middle East," and "a seminal impulse for serious debate on ideological diversity in the contemporary Middle East, on rivals of Arab nationalism in the Arab world, and on less known linguistic nationalisms in the region.

(The Journal of the Middle East and Africa )

About the Author

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