The cultures and politics of nations around the world may be understood (or misunderstood) in any number of ways. For the Arab world, language is the crucial link for a better understanding of both. Classical Arabic is the official language of all Arab states although it is not spoken as a mother tongue by any group of Arabs. As the language of the Qur'an, it is also considered to be sacred. For more than a century and a half, writers and institutions have been engaged in struggles to modernize Classical Arabic in order to render it into a language of contemporary life. What have been the achievements and failures of such attempts? Can Classical Arabic be sacred and contemporary at one and the same time? This book attempts to answer such questions through an interpretation of the role that language plays in shaping the relations between culture, politics, and religion in Egypt.

How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference offers a new understanding of Arabic’s global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances. By tracing controversies over the use of Arabic in three countries with distinct colonial legacies, Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal, the book presents a new approach to the study of postcolonial literatures, anticolonial nationalisms, and the global circulation of pluralist ideas. Annette Damayanti Lienau presents the largely untold story of how Arabic, often understood in Africa and Asia as a language of Islamic ritual and precolonial commerce, assumed a transregional role as an anticolonial literary medium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining how major writers and intellectuals across several generations grappled with the cultural asymmetries imposed by imperial Europe, Lienau shows that Arabic—as a cosmopolitan, interethnic, and interreligious language—complicated debates over questions of indigeneity, religious pluralism, counter-imperial nationalisms, and emerging nation-states. Unearthing parallels from West Africa to Southeast Asia, Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference argues that debates comparing the status of Arabic to other languages challenged not only Eurocentric but Arabocentric forms of ethnolinguistic and racial prejudice in both local and global terms.

Taha Hussein (1889–1973) is one of Egypt's most iconic figures. A graduate of al-Azhar, Egypt's oldest university, a civil servant and public intellectual, and ultimately Egyptian Minister of Public Instruction, Hussein was central to key social and political developments in Egypt during the parliamentary period between 1922 and 1952. Influential in the introduction of a new secular university and a burgeoning press in Egypt—and prominent in public debates over nationalism and the roles of religion, women, and education in making a modern independent nation—Hussein remains a subject of continued admiration and controversy to this day. The Last Nahdawi offers the first biography of Hussein in which his intellectual outlook and public career are taken equally seriously. Examining Hussein's actions against the backdrop of his complex relationship with the Egyptian state, the religious establishment, and the French government, Hussam R. Ahmed reveals modern Egypt's cultural influence in the Arab and Islamic world within the various structural changes and political processes of the parliamentary period. Ahmed offers both a history of modern state formation, revealing how the Egyptian state came to hold such a strong grip over culture and education—and a compelling examination of the life of the country's most renowned intellectual.

A look at some of the raging debates in the arts in Egypt

Arabic, Self, and Identity uses autoethnography, autobiography, and a detailed study of names to investigate the links between conflict and displacement, and between the Self and group identity.

In this second edition of Arabic Sociolinguistics, Reem Bassiouney expands the discussion of major theoretical approaches since the publication of the book’s first edition to account for new sociolinguistic theories in Arabic contexts with up-to-date examples, data, and approaches. The second edition features revised sections on diglossia, code-switching, gender discourse, language variation, and language policy in the region while adding a chapter on critical sociolinguistics—a new framework for critiquing the scholarly practices of sociolinguistics. Bassiouney also examines the impact of politics and new media on Arabic language. Arabic Sociolinguistics continues to be a uniquely valuable resource for understanding the theoretical framework of the language.

The book explores the change over time in language-society relations in a multilingual periphery of Egypt. It examines the role of language ideologies in the construction and negotiation of social identities in the processes of contact, maintenance and shift typical of multilingualism. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, it is the first of its kind to portray the inventory of linguistic and accompanying non-linguistic behaviors observed within and between different ethnolinguistic groups in the Siwa Oasis. It provides first-hand information about the linguistic habits of Siwan women, an aspect which is generally difficult to access in this gender-segregated community. The book sheds light on Berber-Arabic contact at the core of the Arab world and at a critical time when individual linguistic repertoires are expanding and Arabic is emerging as a powerful resource.

The notion of empire is associated with economic and political mechanisms of dominance. For the last decades, however, there has been a lively debate concerning the question whether this concept can be transferred to the field of linguistics, specifically to research on situations of language spread on the one hand and concomitant marginalization of minority languages on the other. The authors who contributed to this volume concur as to the applicability of the notion of empire to language-related issues. They address the processes, potential merits and drawbacks of language spread as well as the marginalization of minority languages, language endangerment and revitalization, contact-induced language change, the emergence of mixed languages, and identity issues. An emphasis is on the dominance of non-Western languages such as Arabic, Chinese, and, particularly, Russian. The studies demonstrate that the emergence, spread and decline of language empires is a promising area of research, particularly from a comparative perspective.

This innovative collection offers a pan-Southern rejoinder to hegemonies of Northern sociolinguistics. It showcases voices from the Global South that substitute alternative and complementary narrations of the link between language and society for canonical renditions of the field. Drawing on Southern epistemologies, the volume critically explores the entangled histories of racial colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy in perpetuating prejudice in and around language as a means of encouraging the conceptualization of alternative epistemological futures for sociolinguistics. The book features work by both established and emerging scholars, and is organized around four parts: The politics of the constitution of language, and its metalanguage, in the Global South; Who gets published in sociolinguistics? Language in the Global South and the social inscription of difference; and Learning and the quotidian experience of language in the Global South. This book will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, critical race and ethnic studies, and philosophy of knowledge. Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Covering all aspects of the history of Arabic, the Arabic linguistic tradition, Arabic dialects, sociolinguistics and Arabic as a world language, this introductory guide is perfect for students of Arabic, Arabic historical linguistics and Arabic sociolinguistics. Concentrating on the difference between the two types of Arabic the classical standard language and the dialects Kees Versteegh charts the history and development of the Arabic language from its earliest beginnings to modern times. Students will gain a solid grounding in the structure of the language, its historical context and its use in various literary and non-literary genres, as well as an understanding of the role of Arabic as a cultural, religious and political world language. New for this edition: additional chapters on the structure of Arabic, Bilingualism and Arabic pidgins and creoles; a full explanation of the use of conventional Arabic transcription and IPA characters; an updated bibliography and all chapters have been revised and updated in light of recent research.