Is Colonialism the Only Reason Behind the Lack of Understanding Between the Arab 'Middle Easterns' and the Maghrebis?

For a large number of its inhabitants, the borders of the Arab world lie with Egypt. Is it a break with the people living from Libya to Morocco? People of Maghreb understand the Arabs in the "Middle East" and you may find them speaking Syrian and Egyptian dialects, while the opposite is not possible. Some Maghrebis find it surprising because they believe that their dialect is closest to the Arabic language and that the Arabs in the "Middle East" do not make any effort to understand them.

Did colonialism affect the language of the Maghreb and make it closer to French and Spanish? Did the geographical proximity to Europe make them closer to it than the Arabs? Many think that the launch of the Great Arab Revolt from the East made it the center. Others attribute this "rupture" to the "superiority complex" of the Arab ‘Middle Easterns'.

 

Language Barrier?

Television, cinematographic, lyrical works, and other art of speech contributed to the extension of Egyptian Arabic, to become the standard. This is while the rest of the other Arabic dialects are difficult because they are not promoted through the Arab media.

The Moroccan writer and researcher in linguistics, Abdel Majid Jahfa, attributed the reason for the Maghrebi’s fluency in other dialects to the media, which played a role in focusing on the Arabs of the ‘Middle East’, more than the rest of the Arab countries.

Returning to “the Standard Arabic” Some people believe that the name Standard is the origin of the Arabic dialects and that these dialects deviate from the Standard. This is not true, according to Jahfa, the dialects have always coexisted with a sublime linguistic form that appears in literature. Duality existed before the revelation of the Qur’an. It is this duality that has given the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the language of the Qur’an after its transcendence compared to others.

When we compare, then, between standard Arabic and Arabic dialects, we do not compare between an origin and a branch, between a completely authentic language and a form that has deviated from this origin with the passage of time and the change of context. We do not compare a religious language, a language that is the best of languages, a universal, eternal and sacred language, as the authors of the transcendent “religious” discourses claim, and an inferior “worldly” language that has no load other than that of “lower” communication.

About the closest to the Arabic language, Jahfa said in an interview with Al-Estiklal, that when we talk about dialects, we always compare them to standard Arabic (or classical). When we compare it, we look for the degree of proximity of Darija to the Standard; We may conclude that this dialect is important because it is the closest, and the other is not because it is the furthest.

The Moroccan historian and thinker Abdullah Laroui, in his book “The Social and Cultural Origins of Moroccan Patriotism,” came with the opinions of some nineteenth-century travelers, “There are those who say that the Arabic of the people of Morocco is not much different from the classical spoken in the East. There are those who say that a tenth of the words used in the colloquial Moroccan do not exist in the dictionaries of the Arabic language.

There are those who admit that the Arabic of the people of Fez is the closest to the Standard. The traveler Charles de Foucault confirms that the proportion of foreign words in Moroccan Arabic is much more than their Algerian counterpart, and de Foucault does not disclose Arabic, which he considers to be a reference or normative. This "proximity theory" is old and contains judgments based on unscientific observation.

Jahfa wondered what is the purpose of building such connections, connections based on the "proximity theory"? If the purpose of this is to raise the problem of the development of the characteristics of the Arabic language, this seems acceptable. However, if what is meant is a differential scale, the purpose of which is to pave the way for propagation, then this is troublesome, says Jahfa.

 

Is Colonialism the Main Reason?

“The Arabs are less stable than the Turks, and if they are properly treated, they remain in a state of political mosaic. We have eliminated the danger of Islam by dividing it.” The speech here is for the Director of British Military Intelligence in Cairo in 1916. This was Britain’s strategy during the Great Arab Revolt, according to published British documents.

The same strategy was followed by Spain and France in the Maghreb countries and North Africa. According to colonial studies received by many colonial travelers and explorers in their description of the linguistic situation in the Maghreb countries.

It must be borne in mind that Arabic itself is an immigrant, and came to Morocco through two stages, with the establishment of the Idrisi’s state, and with the massive eastern migrations in the era of the Almowahidins in particular. When it came, it was subjected to the Amazigh influence, in particular.

Before the arrival of Islam, the prevalent language in the region was Tamazight, next to it we find Afrikaans Romani (originating from Late Latin) that was spoken in some urban centers, especially coastal ones, and it continued as an administration language. 

The most important effects of Moroccan Arabic come from Berber, according to Abdel Majid Jahfa's statement to Al-Estiklal newspaper, although scholars do not agree on the nature of these effects, and sometimes we find different opinions in this regard. As for foreign languages, they have certainly influenced the past two centuries; It is a French influence in the center and south, and Spanish in the north and northeast, and in part of the south. 

Morocco was not subject to Ottoman rule, and therefore Turkish borrowings in Moroccan Arabic are rare compared to Egyptian Arabic, for example, but Moroccan Arabic has reached few Turkish borrowings.

France exerted a great influence to encourage the Moroccan state to adopt French language. Which caused the phenomenon of code-switching: the sentences come with a mixture of words from Moroccan Arabic and French. Recently, the phenomenon of borrowing the verb from French and conjugating it according to the Moroccan Arabic conjugation system has emerged.

The Moroccan linguist believed that we should not trust the media and advertisements that encourage French, and encourage mixed Arabic. He explained that the language policy followed in his country is to empower the French language, even though it is neither an official nor a national language. 

 

Supremacy Complex

In the mid-1970s, the Moroccan philosopher, Muhammad Abed Al-Jabri, set out to formulate a thesis aimed at consolidating the contrast and difference principle. The Arabs in the "Middle East" dominated by the thought of Al-Ghazali and Avicenna, and a Maghreb dominated by Averroistic rationality and Khaldunian realism give a particularity that raises its symbolic position in the history of Islamic thought in our medieval times.

The relationship was not equal between the East and the Maghreb, according to the thinker and writer Bensalem Himmich, who was a guest on the “Al-Masha’” program on “Al Jazeera” channel to talk about the subject. The history glorifies many Moroccan intellectuals, such as the great Sheikh Ibn Arabi, Ibn Khaldun and Abdullah Kannoun.

 The thinker said that the supremacy complex was practiced by Al-Mashareqah over these names, "claiming that they were proactive in many things, while this is not true", according to Hamish, the former Minister of Culture in Morocco. Moroccans in the field of philosophy have the most important and biggest names, providing an example of Maghreb translation European philosophy and its delivery to the East. As well as in poetry and prose, and they had a more comprehensive vision of writing in the Arabic language.

 

Exclusion or Discrimination?

It is not secret that Moroccans have influenced the Arabs in the "Middle East"by Salafism and nationalism, for example, but some Maghreb countries have begun to separate from the Orient, renew their discourse, and focus on their cultural specificity. The Moroccan historian Hassan Aoured sees this separation in the ideological orientation as well as the political decision as a bridge to continuity and stability.

In the Maghreb, there is a major pole of modernization in the Arab world after Istanbul and Cairo, which is Tunisia, which was the initiative in the process of reform and modernization, and had a great role in influencing its Maghreb surroundings. Especially Morocco and Algeria, according to the book “Reform Movements and Reform of State Systems in Maghreb Countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

The Egyptian historian and thinker Mahmoud Ismail had a different opinion, as he considered that the Islamic world was mired in a unified historical process that did not exclude the countries of the Maghreb. Therefore, it did not enjoy an alleged privacy except in the imagination of the orientalists and those who follow them from the modern Moroccans, who put forward the concept of (break) as an alternative to communication between the East and Morocco.

The thinker specializing in Islamic history and civilization described this claim as "false". It emerged from the imagination of French historians who were originally men of the colonial administration during the occupation period, including Gauthier, Henri Terras and Charles André Julien as a reaction to the efforts of the Eastern Arabs.

Fairness requires praising and noting the vast majority of those Maghreb elites present in the Maghreb Arab-Islamic identity as a realistic historical fact that plays an important role in confronting the claimant (the boycott) on the cognitive level. Our duty is to work hard to consolidate intellectual (communication) with the Arab ‘Middle Easterns’, especially after the expulsion of colonialism and the Arabization of Education, systems and administration, according to Mahmoud Ismail.