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The pre-modern period saw a background of inter-ethnic strife among Arabs and non-Arabs, mainly Persians. Starting from the symbolic and cognitive roles of language, Yasir Suleiman shows how discussions about the inimitability and (un)translatability of the Qur’an in this period were, at some deep level, concerned with issues of ethnic election. In this respect, theology and ethnicity emerge as partners in theorising language. Staying within the symbolic role of language, Suleiman goes on to investigate the role of paratexts and literary production in disseminating language ideologies and in cultural contestation. He shows how language symbolism is relevant to ideological debates about hybrid and cross-national literary production in the Arab milieu. In fact, language ideology appears to be everywhere, and a whole chapter is devoted to discussions of the cognitive role of language in linking thought to reality.

This book gathers original research from a range of leading international scholars from the UK, Europe and the USA, throwing new light on a set of topics in medieval Islamic history, Islamic doctrine and practice, and the interaction between Islam and the modern world.

The essay explores Arab(ic) language anxiety in modern discourse on the language. The conceptual starting point is the distinction between the instrumental and symbolic roles of language in society. The essay further distinguishes between language fears and language anxieties, linking the former to the instrumental role of the language and anxiety proper to its symbolic role. These distinctions are further related to corpus planning and status planning in language policy research to create a web of interrelated concepts that, while recognized as conceptually autonomous, are difficult to sharply separate from each other in practice. To do this, the essay identifies a number of domains from which data on language anxiety can be culled and the terms and metaphorics that are employed in discussing these data in a number of domains. The essay makes two further observations. First, language anxiety is a universal phenomenon. To make this point, the essay refers to language anxiety in English and French. Second, recent language-teaching reforms in the Arabic-speaking world have not succeeded partly because they offer instrumental, corpus-based solutions to symbolic and status-linked concerns.

\"This study presents an original look at how 'the nation' is represented in the literature of the Middle East. It includes chapters on Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Israel, drawing on the expertise of literary scholars, historians, political scientists and cultural theorists.\" \"This exploration of the subject of literature and the nation in the Arab world is of interest to anyone studying Middle Eastern literature and nationalism, as well as historians and political scientists.\"--BOOK JACKET.

This essay reflects on the importance of Mahmoud Darwish’s “Immortal Gaza” in outlining the strength of Palestinian solidarity amidst Israeli occupation in 1971. The author contextualizes Darwish’s essay in today’s times, alternating between the points that still resonate and the ones that have been forgotten. Ideas of immortality in the midst occupation are traced in the construction of a hopeful people working towards liberation. The author frames how Darwish sees a unified Palestinian people cannot be defeated by efforts to cause discord among the people. Darwish’s essay about Gaza ends this essay. “Immortal Gaza” personifies Gaza as an active entity focused on liberation, unconcerned with frivolous thanks that won’t lead to ending Israeli occupation. Palestine’s personification shows how Gaza becomes a global call for freedom.

This article explores the relationships between female converts to Islam in Britain and their close friends and family. It pays attention to the perspectives of converts but focuses on the reactions of their intimates to the conversion. We argue that converts become 'intimate strangers' through conversion--estranged on the level of understanding and belief but intimate on the emotional plane. This strangeness is symbolised by the Orientalist stereotypes associated with the converts. At the same time, friends and family shun engagement with the conversion itself, thus keeping alive the stereotypes and precluding understanding. In refusing to engage with matters of belief even within the intimate space of the family, secularism's orthodox private/public divide gets busted where religiosity, instead, becomes an issue between the (individual) private and the (family) public. Lacking reciprocity and with no access to the inner depths of the people they are closest to, the liberal rhetoric of friends and family about personal choice and equal acceptance of all paths amounts to bigotry and turns out to be painful for both the converts and their intimates.

In this chapter we discuss the recent Moroccan language ideological debate about the use of some dialectal/colloquial words (dārija) in the national school curriculum. The Ministry of National Education, Vocational Training, Higher Education and Scientific Research in Morocco issued a statement on its Facebook page on 4 September 2018 to settle a controversy about the inclusion of these words in the new educational curriculum, triggering, in the process, a host of comments in response. The Ministry rationalized the use of dārija words on pedagogical grounds. This chapter has two key objectives: first, to situate the language ideological debate in hand within its social context with a focus on the role of language in education and identity construction. Second, in doing so we invoke folk conceptualizations of the Arabic language situation to understand the structure of this debate. We argue that this debate is permeated with an understanding of Arabic that is very much in line with Ferguson's diglossia framework, first articulated in 1959 and revised in 1991. We further contend that discourses of language anxiety are part of the socio-communicative repertoire of Arabic speakers, and that this anxiety, acquired through socialization, is an integral part of the nexus of language ideology and folk-linguistics. The main source of data for the analysis is the official statement published by the Ministry of National Education on its Facebook page and the corpus of metalinguistic comments it triggered. As discursive acts/events, these time-limited materials were analyzed to specify the main issues they raise which, in turn, guided the selection of the examples referenced in this study for illustrative purposes. This chapter discusses the recent Moroccan language ideological debate about the use of some dialectal/colloquial words in the national school curriculum. The Ministry of National Education, Vocational Training, Higher Education and Scientific Research in Morocco issued a statement on its Facebook page on 4 September 2018 to settle a controversy about the inclusion of these words in the new educational curriculum, triggering, in the process, a host of comments in response. The choice of the medium of instruction in North Africa generally and, particularly, in Morocco, has recently been the subject of debate. Monoglot language ideologies organize symbolic resources into binary choices in terms of status and quality, and thus seek to enforce marked linguistic boundaries systematically as indicated earlier. The diglossic arrangement of socially marked registers into a polarizing hierarchy of \"High vs Low\" is sustained by this monoglot ideology. French is not a neutral ideological player in the Moroccan linguistic scene.