Abstract
This article examines new notions about race, ethnicity and language current in modern movements of Arabic literary and cultural revival. I argue that the Arab print market before World War I adopted the racial category of the Semite as highly relevant to Arab ethnicity and language, but the philological and literary significations of the term subverted the negative constructions affiliated with the Semitic races in Western race theories. Combining elements from the study of linguistics, religion, and political philosophy, Arabic journals, books, and works of historical fiction, created a Semitic and Arab universe, populated by grand historical figures and mesmerizing literary and cultural artifacts. Such publications advanced the notion that the Arab races belonged to Semitic cultures and civilizations whose achievements should be a source of pride and rejuvenation. These printed products also conveyed the idea that the Arabic language and Arab ethnicity can create ecumenical and pluralistic conversations. Motivated by the desire to find a rational explanation to phenomena they identified with cultural and literary decline, Arab authors also hoped to reconstruct the modes with which their Semitic and Arab ancestors dealt with questions relating to community and civilization. By publishing scientific articles on philology, literature, and linguistics, the print media illustrated that Arabic itself was a language capable of expressing complex scientific concepts and arguments.
Highlights
In 1917, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland featured an article on “The Physical Characters of the Arabs” by Charles Gabriel Seligman (1873–1940), a British physician and ethnologist who taught at the London School of Economics and whose students included such noted anthropologists as Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard
Having published about the Hamite and Semite features of the Africans, he provided the following notes on the Arabs: Probably there is no country in the world of equal area with Arabia, certainly there is none approaching it in historic interest, of whose inhabitants we are so profoundly ignorant
An article on the prevalent languages in Syria in the pre-Islamic era exemplified the importance of considering Arabic in multiple linguistic contexts, criticizing scholars who pointed to loanwords in Arabic from the Greek or spoke of Arabo-Greek connections while ignoring the major contribution of Syriac to Arabic
Summary
What Seligman did not know, is that during the same period, Arab writers, thinkers, and novelists endeavored to write the history of their ethnicity and race They relied less on physical anthropology and more on philological and literary studies, as they explored the features of “the great Arab stock”. Arabic-speaking intellectuals of various religions and ethnicities, reclaimed elements from Western Orientalism, such as Semitic philology, and engaged in the production of encyclopedias, historical novels, and literary journals that undid European systems of classification and categorization The first parliament in the Ottoman Empire was established, a step that inspired new debates on the rights of ethnic communities with respect to political representation From this year until World War I, the Arabic print media popularized narratives concerning the cultural, historical, and racial features of the Arabs and their categorization as Semites. These writers constructed their self-image as men seeking innovative ways to assure that the Arabic language and Arab culture were awakened anew from years of long slumber into new beginnings (Patel 2013)
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