Books
The talking cure
Published 18 October 2007
Why Are the Arabs Not Free?
Moustapha Safouan Blackwell, 128pp, £12.99
The disparity between written and spoken Arabic is so great that talking to an audience is often a discouraging test for Arab writers. To use the vernacular, one would probably have to avoid sophisticated arguments and deep thoughts. But to talk in standard (written) language is to risk sounding pompous and rhetorical - and, worst of all, to fail to reach those who have had no school education. Given the high level of illiteracy in the Arab world, this means losing the attention of a great proportion of the public.
The dilemma is particularly daunting for those of us bilingual Arab writers who, through writing in English or French, have become used to the idea of written and spoken language being the same. The Franco-Egyptian writer Moustapha Safouan's solution to the problem is a call for writers to abandon standard Arabic and use the spoken dialects instead. Safouan claims that writing in rarefied standard Arabic is a major cause of the absence of freedom and democracy in the Arab world. He calls this the "politics of writing" - written language is the privilege of the elite, the educated few who are faithfully in the service of their paymasters: the despotic Arab rulers and their political regimes.
Safouan was born in Alexandria just after the First World War. Though he has lived in France since 1947, his work in Arabic, particularly his masterful translations of Étienne de la Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and Hegel's introduction to Phenomenology of Spirit, testifies to his roots in the rich Egyptian cultural life of the first half of the 20th century. His use of rich literary language and his wide range of interests in philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics and literature make him a typical writer and scholar of that era, an advocate of knowledge and a practitioner of the high arts who disregards boundaries between different disciplines. But in Why Are the Arabs Not Free?, Safouan seems to rebel against his early education, at least with regard to the use of classical Arabic.
Far from giving a straightforward answer to the question in the title, this book is a collection of reflections on writing and political power through different ages and across many cultures, from ancient Athens to the rise of commerce and culture in medieval Europe; and from the Arab conquest of Egypt to the American Revolution. Safouan is so erudite that he easily moves from discussing Aristotle's definition of "city" to Carl Schmitt's concept of "sovereignty", and from the Muslim philosopher Fakhr Eddin al-Razi's distinction between muhkamat (the perfectly elaborated) and mutashabihat (the allegorical) to Martin Luther's translation of the Bible. It is only when he tries to give a direct answer to the above question that it becomes hard to appreciate his vast knowledge.
Arguing for writing in Arabic dialect, Safouan makes many refutable claims. He claims standard Arabic is a dead language - so how do we explain the fact that poets such as the Syrian Nizar Qabbani and the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, both elegant writers of standard Arabic, have been read and recited by millions of people across the Arab world? His claim that Arab rulers prevent the use of dialects is also absurd: many poets of the vernacular were and have been pampered by Arab regimes; the Egyptian Salah Jaheen was a star during the Nasser era, the Iraqi Muzafer al-Nouab has been a most welcome guest at the court of leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi and the late Hafez al-Assad.
Safouan's call for writing in dialect is familiar and has long been discredited; apart from using it in the performing and popular arts, attempts to write in spoken Arabic have proven to be a miserable failure. Above all, standard Arabic has for decades served as a potent means of political dissent for Arab opposition movements and individuals. Thousands of writers and journalists have been prosecuted in the Arab world not because they tried to write in the spoken language but because of what they have tried to say in, quite often, an eloquent standard Arabic.
In spite of his frequent references to recent political events, it seems that Safouan has lived far too long in Paris to see the political changes - changes mostly for the worse - that have taken place over the past six decades. The disparity between spoken and written Arabic is certainly a pressing problem, but, sadly, Safouan's recipe is no solution.
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