My roots are calling
- For a considerable period of time I was alienated from my mother tongue. Ever since I finished high school I did not touch an Arabic book,save for the two obligatory syntax-related ones at college. And even then the way in which the subjects were presented was not at all appealing. It makes me sad to see most of my peers unable to appreciate and enjoy the beauty and depth of the books in the Arabic library. I had been one of them for the past three years but now I finally sobered up and I am back on track.
The situation of the Arabic language is simply complicated. It is one of the richest languages and yet one of the most targeted. By whom? My theory is that when occupation came to our lands, colonists (The british in Jordan and Egypt,The french in Syria,Lebanon,Morocco,and Tunisia,The italians in Libya) decided the best way to alienate muslims from their religion is to attack the Holy Quran. Now burning Quran or just making it vanish was not an option since muslims would never allow that, so the bad guys figured : If Quran is the core of Islam, and it is a linguistic miracle ( and a miracle in other aspects as well), then what we could do is distant these muslims from the language of Quran, and then they won't be able to understand it and Islam will be shattered.
They knew it would take a lot of time and sweat, but they did it. Making Arabs and Muslims live in the illusion of the "prestige" that foreign words and expressions hold did work. I do not mean to say that Arabic did not follow the typical course of linguistic evolution and change,like all other languages, thus promoting the various dialects and such. But I have no doubt this was emphasized by those bad guys. As a matter of fact, during the occupations of Arab lands many restrictions were made to prevent people from using Arabic and to force them to use the language of the dominant countries. This has worked, this is what we mean by Cultural Invasion.
If you walk down the street in Amman, you would probably hear so many people using English instead of Arabic. I just told why the case is so. The false prestige of foreign words got to us.It is difficult to try and tell some brain-washed people to use Arabic, they would dismiss the diea as if it was a bad joke.
Back to my argument now. So when Arabs forgot their language, they could no longer relate to what the Holy Quran says, they could no longer read Arabic books without the use of a dictionary, they could no longer write in proper Arabic and actually make sense. This is what's happened to my language and it angers me so much, since I too played a part in doing that to it. I used to write stories in Arabic, I always loved the language and enjoyed it tremendously, where did that go? why did I choose to let it go?
To redeem myself, I began reading Arabic again. I read an amazing novel by Taha Hussein entitled "Do3a2 al karawan" which means " The supplication of the stone curlew". here's a link to a site about the great author :http://www.sis.gov.eg/egyptinf/culture/html/thussein.htm
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