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 Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** (Re: zoul"ibn"zoul)
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Dear Zool-ibin Zool
To begin from the beginning, regarding the point of Québec I thought I was stating the known that is why I didn’t wait to expand on the example of Quebec but it seems things were not the way I thought. First you are absolutely right that constitutionally speaking Québec is a Francised province taking into consideration the number of the Franco-phones who make up the majority of the area. Yet, it would be completely unfair to lose sight of the fact that the Franco-phones in Canada generally constitute a minority in a majority Anglo-phonic country. In fact the linguistic needs of the Franco-phones living in Canada are constitutionally protected in other Canadian provinces such as New Brunswick. Thus the Canadian federal constitution illustrates the utopian linguistic justice based on liberal democratic principles (for more in-depth information you can read: Language Rights and Political Theory edited by Kymlicka and Patten 2003). Therefore, Québec and New Brunswick are cases of a majority protecting a minority’s interests. Now the question that immediately gets raised is: what about the Anglo-phones who live in Québec, do they have their needs catered for such as the educational need? The answer is yes, where numbers warrant. This is a territorialised type of language planning which gives a particular territory within a feral system the right to choose its main language and to provide linguistic accommodation rights to other speakers depending on the circumstances (e.g the number of students, number of qualified teachers,...etc). And I think I hinted at this piece of information by my use of the expression “the Canadian constitution itself has safeguarded the lingo-cultural ecology of the region”. The point then is that the Anglo-phones constitute a minority in Québec and have their linguistic rights protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and which forms part of the Canadian Constitution. The Charter draws on the United Nation Human Rights and the universal Declaration of Human Rights. The language-in-education related article stipulates:
minority language education rights: generally, French and English minorities in every province and territory have the right to be educated in their own language (for the complete charter see: Quebec\Canadia_Charter-of-Rights-and –Freedoms.htm, or any google search will show you the charter.
Now I have to move to the theme of your reasoning and the quality value behind using the example of Québec. You put a claim that multiculturalism leads to separatism, and you used Québec as an example to prove the case. First it seems that you lost sight for the second time that the region refused self independece from the fedral state when they voted twice (1980 and 1982) by means of a referedom. The expectation, according to your claim, should be that once the Quebecers are lingusitically variant, they were expected to vote a landslide ‘Yes’. But your putative opinionated conviction has gone awry, and has muted your argument that multilingualism will be accompanied by corresponding separatism. Hence, the inextricable correlation you have drawn between multiculturalism and separatism using the example of Québec and Belgium has rendered your argument a load of old cobblers. You’ve got to know that Europe itself is moving towards multiculturalism, and some African countries have already taken this route such as South Africa which has already constitutionalised eleven languages as official working languages and has become more united than ever. To your surprise, the language policy proposed in the Naivasha Peace Protocols replicates the Canadian example in very much the same vein and even adds more language and cultural rights, for example: Part of clause 2.8 stipulates (I do not need to reproduce the whole language policy here, you can see the whole policy at the SPLM’S official website: www.splm.com, the protocol of power sharing, 2. :
2.8.1 Arabic, as a major language at the national level, and English shall be the official working languages of the National Government business and languages of instruction for higher education.
2.8.2 In addition to Arabic and English, the legislature of any sub-national level of government may adopt any other national language(s) as additional official working language(s) at its level.
| Quote: I speak of behalf of nobody but myself and call on people who share my similar views. I did not appoint my self to speak on behalf of the masses nor you is also here to speak on behalf of anybody. We both speak our opinions. |
The claim that any identification of a particular social situation is a little more than a personal view pointing is a mesmerizing positivism which dominates other ways of possible thinking, and which makes the possibility of the critical engagement with questions of social and linguistic injustices impossible because of your absolute subjectivism that we are all terribly opinionating people. Accordingly we have to free ourselves from the culture of guilt and do not have to show a shred of remorse over the mass murdering of cultures and human beings because demarcations between the right and wrong would be interpreted as a reflection of our personal sense-experience which itself lacks a modicum of truth. Needless to say, this attitude is a paralyzing folly since it turns the world into a mess and disorders the natural order such as the inescapable reality in Sudan. Of course you are entitled to put your own thinking stamp on any social matter provided that it does not constitute a menace to the very livelihood of other sectors of the society, and does not violate their fundamental human rights including their cultural and language rights. Now I guess the conundrum that has to be faced is how we can protect particular rights of a particular minority from the tyranny of the other minority or even a majority? The simple reply that appeals to the common sense of the labouring people and to the sense of a fair play is that minority rights can be preserved and protected by giving the people a life chance to decide on the language they speak, the God they worship, the leaders they elect and …etc. It is clear that the most appropriate political structural system is a form of ‘federal democracy’ such as the one practiced in Belgium, India, Nigeria, Canada, the USA and others. The simple point is that indigenous polities should have a say on their fate, and the authoritarian power brokers should keep their noses out, and should take their hands off the business of the people’s local life styles. This not a demand of the absolute political libertarianism, it is a natural right and the peoples should fully exercise it, and it should not be curtailed or affected in any way. Only in that way can we say that peoples are making and writing their historical biographies. It is sad that any attempt to give the local people what has been taken from them is considered by the ruling-elites as a compromisation of national principles.
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It is very easy to attribute racism to an seperation movement. Would you do the same for vast majority of the bases of the SPLM, IRA or PQ, I doubt!
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Apart from discussing whether separatist movements are motivated by racial motivations, I see that you have put incompatible eggs in one basket: Firstly, you are passing an implication that the SPLM is a separatist movement. I am saying it is an implication because you referred to the movement with its official name ‘SPLM’ which is an abbreviation of the ‘Sudan People’s Liberation Movement’. It literally holds the name of the whole of the country ‘Sudan’ as part of its emblematic name, which can suffice to say that the name itself provides a stoning counterargument that it is not a separatist movement, let alone the ideology which governs the workings of the movement. It has become like a statement of the known that the SPLM makes use of a variant of socialism as its theoretical base (for more details about the ideological orientation of the SPLM see Hurreiz and AbdelSalam (eds). 1989. Ethnicity, Conflict and National Integration in the Sudan, the Institute of African and Asian Studied, published by Khartoum University Press), and I do not think you are unaware of the basic tenets of theories of the Socialism and the Marxism that are oriented massively towards opposing the social stratification and racial hierarchisation resulting from the colonial ideology of the building of nations using a particular ethnic and linguistic stereotype as the norm. Hence, it is an unpardonable blunder that you pass a moral judgement that is not implied nor explicitly stated by the SPLM. In fact employing the SLPM in this context reminds us of some dark points in our decisive history when a claim for self-determination or self-adminsteration was equated with secessionism by the independence icons and their successive cubs. I need not expound this point since you can refer to any of the countless print sources.
It is also remarkable that your patriotic vision operates on the basis of ‘black or white distinction’ and ‘all or nothing’ since those who do not want to accept the police state of linguistic injustice (i.e., only Arabic language) have to show their back and leave their home land to master-class, whose innate competence in Arabic and spiritual induction in the Northern culture, grant them the divine right to own the country. In fact your open self-confession that you are exclusively and utterly pro-Arabic speaking Sudan reflects a kind of fundamental racial narcissism and cynicism at its extreme. Your Hitlerite perception of language is quite cringe-making. In fact it returns us fully circle back to the post-world war era when human language was seen as a medium of expression of nationalist ideologies and a vehicle of the creation of the Aryan state: “the mother tongue is the symbol of the fatherland”. Thus I suspect history keeps reminding us that the 21st century is still pregnant with a bunch of cloned Hitlers. The top-down imposition and the perpetuation of a unilateral monolingual policy in an inherently pluralistic country is an impulsive act of betrayal of the very African superstructural (i.e. cultural) system of the Sudan.
More importantly, debating the issue of local cultures and languages should not deflect our attention from facing the status of the disparate Arabic-speaking groups at the internal and the external levels. In fact a complex web of questions cannot go unnoticed: If we were to agree in principle that any human language is destined by the dynamism of history to exhibit a kind of internal variation and to be in a constant flux of change, then we would be in a confident position to say that Arabic language is no different, and if this premise holds true then the vanguard of the Arabic language Academy in Khartoum (i.e., Mujamaa Al-Luga Al-Arabia) will not be able to protect the purity of the language. To simplify things, we can not talk about the Arabic language as a single building block, rather we talk about Arabic as a language that exists in a form of varieties and dialects (e.g Khartoum Arabic, Juba Arabic, Shaigia Arabic, etc…). Now the questions that immediately spring into one’s mind are: Are all the speakers of the Sudanese Arabic language recognised, respected and treated equally? Could an Arabic speaking peasant from Al-Jazira get stigmatized, prejudiced and looked down on on the basis of his pronunciation of the Arabic language words? What about Juba Arabic? Is it a language that deserves developing for the use as a means of learning and teaching purposes, or is it considered a baby-talk form of the master Khartoum Arabic language? What about the distinguishing stylistic production of the ruling-elites, does it not make whoever comes in contact with them feel insecure and worry about their future wants? What about the relationship between the Sudanese Arabic speakers and the other speakers of Arabic dialects in the Middle East, a political body which Northern politicians chose to align the country with? Are our people granted a pride of place and not lowered at the bottom of the social and racial ladder depending on the way they talk and the way they genealogically look? Any confrontation with the reality will make the answers to these questions be in the affirmative. The Arabic language, as Adil Osman congently confirmed in his comments, possesses no power per se, but it is the political power of the ruling-elites supported by the machinery of the state that made it a killer language in Sudan. Thus what is rejected wholesale is not Arabic language itself, but the racial supremacy and the social privilege that is attached to it.
It goes without saying that it was a leap in the dark trying to achieve the project of the construction of a Sudanese national identity using the tool of Arabic as the sole national language without an arranged linguistic accommodation to the non-Arabic speaking communities. The heavy-handed use of the tool of the Arabic language as a means of social control has cultivated a sense of disintegration rather than vertical integration. Time is telling of war stories: yesterday was the South, today is the West, and the narration is looming over the East. Not a single day passes without war and battle cries of the hegemonic forces galvanizing their crooks in the West part of the country, despite of the global voices of protest against them. The inhumane physical Abuses and the mental seduction continue to be committed in the name of the enigmatic national unification which is characterised by the intermarriage between the Arabic tongue, the politicisation of the Islamic word of God and the Northern modernisation. The present dramatic and volatile scenario in the West Sudan was an anticipated product of Northern policies fraught with evil ethicalities and controlled by a network of power holders along those who swore allegiance to their ideological flag, and even those who support the ruling class unwittingly and knowingly. Yet, the linguicism that gives no room to the ‘other’, which is triumphalised in your discourse, is a spooky proof that the message of the current disastrous stasis is not getting through, the message to be drawn is that crimes on the basis of language, race and privileges will not pay permanently because the offspring of the currently long-suffering poacher will one day turn gamekeeper and will ask for a double repayment.
I conclude by mourning with pain the terrible luck that we are living in a world of guided missiles in which individual liberties are made into scapegoats for the sake of national security. It is a terrible world since deals are made between global powers and governments whose legitimacy are in constant questioning, and it’s the weakened indigenous groups that have to pay the price: the price is an innocent human life, once it is gone, it is gone for ever. I do heartfelt invite you to cast a passing glance at the pictures of the toothless, dispossessed and disempowered starving non-Arabic speaking Sudanese polities who have marked the genesis of the revolutionary discord that has emerged as a tragic repercussion of the totalitarian mercenary practices of the self-interested elites and power seekers (including the hegemonic practice of the Arabicisation policy), because I hope the moving scenes may inspire you to think of adopting the holly ethic of penitential self-flagellation for preaching performatively self-destructive gospel.
Ashraf
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| العنوان |
الكاتب |
Date |
| *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | Foolish beat | 08-30-04, 07:40 AM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | Adil Osman | 08-30-04, 12:01 PM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | zoul"ibn"zoul | 08-30-04, 03:27 PM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | noha_g | 09-01-04, 04:46 PM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | zoul"ibn"zoul | 09-01-04, 04:55 PM |
 Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | Ashraf Kamal | 09-01-04, 09:11 PM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | zoul"ibn"zoul | 09-03-04, 07:53 PM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | Ashraf Kamal | 09-06-04, 03:20 AM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | Ashraf Kamal | 09-06-04, 03:55 AM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | zoul"ibn"zoul | 09-06-04, 07:18 PM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | Ashraf Kamal | 09-07-04, 01:33 AM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | noha_g | 09-07-04, 02:45 AM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | Ashraf Kamal | 09-13-04, 01:32 AM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | zoul"ibn"zoul | 09-07-04, 06:06 PM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | Deng | 09-07-04, 06:36 PM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | noha_g | 09-08-04, 09:49 PM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | zoul"ibn"zoul | 09-09-04, 06:32 PM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | noha_g | 09-16-04, 03:01 AM |
| Re: *** The Imperialism of Sudan Northern Arabic Language and Culture *** | zoul"ibn"zoul | 09-12-04, 06:32 AM |
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