Regional Outlook : The Arabs’ Language of Discord : Once the great unifier, Arabic has strayed far from its roots. Is it now dividing its people?

ALGIERS —  The imam at a mosque in one of this city’s popular quarters was recounting the prophet Mohammed’s last days on Earth. His rapid-fire Arabic began rising in pitch as the tale grew more dramatic. Then the holy man got to the part where the angel Gabriel summoned the prophet to heaven, and suddenly he broke into French.

“Prenez vos valises and partez tout de suite!” the imam exclaimed--”Take your bags and leave right away!”

This man is supposed to be one of the guardians of the language of Islam, yet no one blinked when he slid ingloriously into the language of Algeria’s former colonial occupiers. Everybody does it.

Everyday Arabic here is a disconcerting mix of classical phrasing, colloquial variations and a liberal sprinkling of French words. The best Arabic in Algeria is the modern standard version used on evening newscasts--and most of the population can’t understand it. They switch on French TV instead.

Also, the Algerian pattern is repeated with local variations through much of the Middle East. This from a language that once imposed itself as the everyday vernacular from Persia to Spain, supplanting in many places Coptic, Greek, Aramaic and Latin; indeed, a language that is at the heart of what makes an Arab an Arab.

Most sociologists have given up on any permanent definition of what constitutes the Arab world other than to describe it as that part of the globe in which Arabic is spoken as a mother tongue, tying the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula to the farmers of the Nile Delta and the mountain villagers of Lebanon in a spider web of verbs that for centuries has functioned as a living skeleton.

“Even in the midst of fratricidal wars, the feeling persists that, however painful the conflict, it is merely a temporary disagreement which sooner or later will be settled and which, even while it lasts, in no way infringes upon the principle of Arab brotherhood and Arab national unity,” says Raphael Patai in his book on Arab culture, “The Arab Mind.”

“There can be no doubt but that the Arabic language is the most potent factor in both the creation and maintenance of this overriding myth of Arab nation, Arab unity, Arab brotherhood,” he adds.

Now, in many parts of the Arab world, the Arabic language is slipping further and further from its original roots, becoming not a unifier, but an object of political division.

In Morocco, the school of engineering in Fez was forced to close this year in a debate over whether teaching would be in Arabic or French. In Syria, teaching at the medical schools has been converted to Arabic, prompting doctors elsewhere to complain of a decline in the quality of Syrian physicians, and in Egypt, Islamic fundamentalists regularly challenge the teaching of university-level science and medical courses in English.

Nowhere is the issue more apparent than here in Algeria, where an attempt to reintroduce Arabic into the schools, universities and government ministries has become one of the flash points of the Islamic debate.

The issue became so heated last year that tens of thousands of Algerians took to the streets to challenge a new law banning the use of French in all government announcements, business communications and transactions and schools. The law established fines of up to $500 for private businesses and $10,000 for political parties.

Beginning this year, university level students must undergo all their course work in Arabic, despite the fact that many students completed their high school studies substantially in French.

“Language is a national symbol of every nation, and there is no doubt that the Arabic language is the national symbol of the Arab nation, and it has a certain holiness because it is the language of the Koran,” said Saif Islam Banna, a Muslim Brotherhood spokesman and son of the organization’s founder, Hassan Banna. “It is the only language in the world that has that kind of holiness.

“The spirit of the man is the language,” he added. “All his feelings and thoughts are expressed through his language. It is a crime to prevent any child from learning his own language. It is like you cut his tongue. You kill him.”

In countries like Saudi Arabia, never colonized, it’s the religious arguments that dominate, and university students increasingly are dealing with textbooks that have been translated into Arabic. In Syria, it is a question not of religion but of Arab nationalism, and Syrian scholars began the process of purifying the language from Turkish infiltration as early as the 1920s.

In the North African countries of Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya, the French and Italian languages represent more than a century of occupation, whose lingering cultural effects are increasingly the focus of anti-Western sentiment. Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi went so far as to change the street signs and require Arabic-language passports of anyone entering the country shortly after his revolution in 1969.

On the other side, teachers, doctors, scientists and intellectuals argue that the Arabization move threatens the Arab world with cultural and technological isolation.

“The problem with the system which has been put in place is that it is not the educators, the specialists who have been put in charge of it, it’s the politicians, and that’s dangerous,” said Mohammed Boukhobza of Algeria’s International Center for Global and Strategic Studies. “It cannot be left as a matter of passion, of emotion, of ideology, simply because in Algeria we have a complex about the French language. We can no longer afford to look at the French language as an element of domination. We have to look at it as a tool to access the rest of the world’s learning.”

Leading the anti-Arabization rally in Algeria was revolutionary war hero Hocine Ait-Ahmed, who like about a third of Algerians, is of Berber, not Arab, descent. Ait-Ahmed scandalized the Algerians last year when he appeared on a popular political debate show speaking French, not Arabic. But it’s not as if he is alone. New Algerian President Mohamed Boudiaf speaks excellent French and good Algerian colloquial Arabic, but his classical Arabic is poor and probably wouldn’t be understood in Egypt or Syria.

Egypt’s Islamic scholars are happy to point out that revered Algerian fundamentalist leader Abassi Madani, jailed since last June for inciting the masses to rise up against the government, speaks bad Arabic. (Madani speaks good French and passable English but, in interviews with Western reporters, he refuses to speak in anything but Arabic, through an interpreter.)

But bad Arabic usually means bad classical Arabic, which most people don’t speak anyway. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak reads his speeches in an Arabic that can be widely understood by educated people throughout the Arab world, but when--as he almost always does--he begins speaking off the cuff, he lapses into an Egyptian colloquial Arabic that some have described as “truck drivers’ Arabic”--loved by Cairenes and incomprehensible to Arabs anywhere else.

Consider that most Arabs have completely different ways of saying things as simple as “How are you?” It’s izzayak in Egypt, keefak in Lebanon, shlownak in Kuwait, shekhbarak in Morocco. Something as basic to the Arabs as water is maya in Egypt, maah in the Gulf.

All of this has always troubled advocates of Arab unity, who argued that dialectical differences were the product of imperialism and who repeatedly launched projects to unify and purify the Arabic language. They persist till now.

But with the demise of the concept of Arab nationalism as a political ideology, most Arab intellectuals now argue that as long as there is a common, classical Arabic in which educated Arabs can converse--the modern standard Arabic that is used at Arab League meetings, for example, or on most television and radio news broadcasts, and in books and newspapers--there isn’t any pressing need for the Algerian in the street to be able to talk to the Saudi in the street.

“People now, I wouldn’t say they’re more materialistic, but they look for what is useful, and what is practical. These are people who are more sophisticated. They are no longer caught up with these slogans about Arab nationalism,” said Hamdi Sakout, head of the Arabic Language Center at the American University of Cairo. Arabs today, he and several other linguists said, need to know not just Arabic, but English, and French, and perhaps German and Japanese.

The focus of the Arabization debate is in the fields of science, medicine and technology, where students and practitioners cannot keep up with new research without being able to access it in a foreign language. Up-to-date textbooks are infrequently available in Arabic.

One Egyptian professor, for example, said he recently attended a conference on Arabizing the field of psychology and learned there are only five Arabic words for describing psychological states. There is no Arabic word for paranoia, for example, or schizophrenia, or even neurosis.

“In general, it is more difficult to Arabize the medical sciences when we are so much behind in research,” said Lebanese cardiologist Nadim Zacca, who studied, in English, at the American University of Beirut. “Medicine originated in this area, with Ibn Sina, but this is a new world. It’s completely different. Things have changed. We should do everything possible to improve ourselves, and if that includes learning from other languages, then it must be so.”

Even the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood has recognized the need to proceed slowly with Arabization in the technical disciplines. “In the Middle Ages, we were at the forefront of history, and people would come to learn from us. They would learn Arabic because it was the language of science,” said Banna. “We are realists now. We have to confess that the world is ahead of us in science and technology, and we are in need of them to acquire technology. For this reason, we have to help our specialists learn other languages, and not just English. Many languages.”

But the calls for Arabization persist. “Why shouldn’t medicine be taught in Arabic?” said one Cairo linguist. “When the patient speaks Arabic, and the doctor speaks Arabic, why shouldn’t the doctor be able to explain to him what is wrong with him in his own language?”

The purists have tried to keep up. In a small office in the heart of Cairo’s Zamalek district, 90-year-old Ibrahim Bayoumy Madkour heads the Arabic Language Academy, which gathers experts in a variety of disciplines to prepare new lexicons of the Arabic language.

In a new dictionary of psychological terms, the academy scrapped the old word for homosexual, which was essentially pervert , and came up with a term that stretches across one-and-a-quarter columns of type and essentially says sexual enjoyment from the same type.

In other lexicons, the academy recently has struggled with such tongue-benders as alternating current circuit theory and athermal transformation.

“It’s important that Arab scientists feel that their language is capable of managing complicated subjects,” Madkour said.

“The process of trying to unify the Arabic language is only 20 or 30 years old, after hundreds of years of having different dialects,” but the process has made substantial inroads, he said. And it all gets back to how Arabs look at Arabic.

“Arabic is the language of Islam,” said Madkour. “The Arab is someone from a Muslim country who embraces the language of Islam. I don’t see why it should be a political issue.”

Arabic: A Primer

Some 200 million people speak Arabic. It is a Semitic language, like Hebrew and Aramaic, which was the language of Jesus. But Arabic surpasses the others in its large vocabulary and elaborate verbal forms. The alphabet has 28 letters, all consonants; vowel symbols are inserted above or below the letters. The script, read from right to left, takes various forms, including naskhi , the ordinary cursive writing, and kufic , a bold, decorative form that adorns buildings. The Islamic Koran (7th Century), was the first prose work in Arabic, and it remains the model for written Arabic. But there are many spoken dialects.

SOURCE: Encyclopedia Americana

Strictly Speaking... It’s all called Arabic, but the local equivalent of the simplest expressions varies widely around the Arab world. A few examples:

ENGLISH MOROCCO LEBANON EGYPT KUWAIT CLASSICAL OK, fine wakha tayib mashi zein wahwa kathalik good mzian mnieh kwayis zein hassan bad khaib ‘atil wahash battaal sayi’ two zowj tneen itneen ithneen ithnayn how much? sh’hal? addaish? bikam? shged? kam? none khasse mafi mafish mako la yujid where feen ween feen ween ayna how are you shekhbarak keefak izzayak shlownak kaifalhalak

The World’s Major Languages

Total number of speakers in 1991: Language: Millions Chinese (Mandarin): 885 English: 450 Hindi: 367 Spanish: 352 Russian: 294 ARABIC: 202 Bengali: 187 Portuguese: 175 Malay-Indonesian: 145 Japanese: 126 French: 122 German: 118 Urdu: 94 Punjabi: 87 Korean: 72

SOURCE: World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1992

Of Money and Language

Arab-speaking nations vary widely in wealth and literacy, frustrating attempts to unify them.

Per-Capita Literacy Country GNP/GDP Rate Algeria $2,130 50% Bahrain 7,000 77 Chad 205 30 Djibouti 1,030 48 Egypt 700 48 Iraq 1,940 60 Jordan 1,400 80 Kuwait 9,700 74 Lebanon 1,000 80 Libya 5,860 64 Mauritania 500 34 Morocco 990 50 Oman 6,400 N/A Qatar 12,500 76 Saudi Arabia 4,800 62 Somalia 210 24 Sudan 330 27 Syria 1,600 64 Tunisia 1,235 65 United Arab Emirates 12,100 68 Yemen 545 38

NOTE: Most figures are 1989 and 1990, estimated

SOURCE: CIA World Factbook, 1991