Phoenicism In Lebanon

The discourse concerning Arab nationalism is that it is generally a united idea that holds a prestigious outlook and role in the region of the Middle East (Suleiman 2003, 7). However, when one looks at the history of Arab nationalism from the particular rather the general, a different view emerges. This view opens up the spectrum of the numerous nationalist subtypes that were held in many countries in the Middle East, such as Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. In these countries, a type of nationalism surfaced that aimed to distance itself from the dominant Arabism and to create a separate nation based national identity (Kaufman 2004, 182). The nationalist entity examined in this essay, will be the case of Phoenicianism and Lebanonism in Lebanon in

Yara, which consists of poem written in this proposed Lebanese alphabet, along with the paper, Lebnaan, were the “political organs of Akl’s revolution”, argues Fida Bizri in her article on linguistic lines in Lebanon (2013, 446). Further, he based his project on the premise that language was the framework of thought, claiming that Arabic was a deserted language which therefore held back development and led to an “intellectual crisis” in Lebanon (447) (Harp 1998, 13). His reasoning can simply be compared to the way of Musa’s reasoning in Egypt in 1926. Secondly, like his predecessors, he maintained the belief of the mythical origin of the Lebanese nation from the Phoenicians. Nonetheless, Akl’s view of the Lebanese nation differed from his predecessors in the way that he stood for a single Lebanese language while his predecessors celebrated the “Phoenician polyglotism”, visible in the multilingual Lebanese society. In short Akl connected cultural identity to a distant, historical and a greater past associated to a unifying language in a rather essentialist way, yet it is one way of viewing and creating a cultural identity (Hall 1989,

The proposal of a distinctive is today as utopian (Bizri 2013, 448). Hence, in a sense, Akl’s ideology of a distinctive Lebanon is still held at least by some members of the Lebanese society. Critics of Said have though questioned his true hostility towards Arabic language by pointing out that most of his is works were written and published in Arabic (Salameh 2010, 125). As noted earlier, he did recognize, later on, the relationship between the national dialects that are described as Arabic, while remaining steadfast on his argument these dialects were so different from each other that interaction between members of different dialects would be impractical. Ergo, the approach and categorization of these dialects as simply “Arabic” was inaccurate and improper, according to Akl (Salameh 2004, 30). In way, that argument holds some ground if one considers the difference between Moroccan Arabic dialect and Arabic dialects of the southern Arabian Peninsula. Akl remained consistent on the aim to move the Lebanese dialect to a prestigious national as language, as to him a national language was the cornerstone of a nation. This notion correlates to Benedict Anderson’s argument in his book, Imagined