At a time when Arabic language training lags at many universities, the Arabic summer school at Middlebury College in Vermont retains its reputation for quality language instruction. Indeed, it could be said to define the gold standard of Arabic language training programs. But even as students leave Middlebury with better Arabic, they also leave indoctrinated with a tendentious Arab nationalist reading of Middle Eastern history. Permeating lectures and carefully-designed grammatical drills, Middlebury instructors push the idea that Arab identity trumps local identities and that respect for minority ethnic and sectarian communities betrays Arabism.

Conflating Language and Identity

Historically, defining who was an Arab was easy: until the early twentieth century, scholars from both the Middle East and the West considered an Arab to be a person whose ancestry was in the Arabian Peninsula or the Fertile Crescent. Someone from Jeddah was an Arab, a Cairene was not. Indeed, historian Bernard Lewis has shown that the Middle East was a mix of cultures, particularisms, nationalities, and self-perceptions that never enjoyed a single uniform collective identity, let alone an exclusively Arab one.[1] This began to change in the early twentieth century when Arab nationalist elites began superimposing a new overarching national identity on preexisting group affiliations. In the 1930s, the idea that one is an Arab if one speaks Arabic came into vogue.[2] However, this definition of identity in linguistic terms was a borrowed European concept reflecting uniquely European circumstances with no parallel in the Near East. Indeed, this new linguistic parameter of identity, so favored by the Arab nationalists, was the result of the post-World War I concept of "self-determination" of European communities, all of which had languages with long literary traditions, which could be billed as the emblem of specific national identities.[3]

The Middle East had no such "tribal" languages possessing the requisite literary and cultural tradition upon which to base a specific identity. Rather, the Middle East was, and remains to this day, a paradox of multiple identities based on religion, sect, town, village, family, and other group associations and interests, the majority of which, until the emergence of Arab nationalism, did not involve the Arabic language. When the modern Egyptian poet Luwis 'Awad wrote about his homeland, he did so in colloquial Egyptian, not modern standard literary Arabic. When the Lebanese-American thinker Gibran Khalil Gibran yearned for his native Mount Lebanon, he did so more comfortably in English than in Arabic.[4] When the fifteenth century Maronite bishop of Cyprus, Gabriel Alkilai, wrote his history of Lebanon, he did so in Karshuni, his local Lebanese dialect written in Syriac characters.[5] Even some Bedouin poetry is, likewise, recited in a number of colloquial variants.[6]

The Arab nationalist-inspired shift in ethnic identity was easier said than done. In a sense, Arab nationalists assigned identity to an arbitrary language that, like Medieval Latin, might have been the language of officialdom but was not used colloquially. Even today, modern standard Arabic remains the domain of newspapers, not conversations. Arabs themselves speak a multiplicity of languages "which are downgraded to dialects" but which, in the words of Harvard linguist Wheeler Thackston, "resemble [modern standard Arabic] as much as Latin resembles English."[7]

Ideology became an important component in this shift. Arab nationalists used linguistic definition of Arabism to deny the cultural claims of ethnic or sectarian minorities. Sati' al-Husri (1880-1967), a Syrian writer who played an important role in the crystallization of Arab nationalism, maintained that "under no circumstances should we say: 'as long as [a user of the Arabic language] does not wish to be an Arab, and as long as he is disdainful of his Arabness, then he is not an Arab. He is an Arab whether he wishes to be so or not. Whether ignorant, indifferent, undutiful, or disloyal, he is an Arab, but an Arab without feelings, or consciousness, and perhaps even without conscience."[8] Michel Aflaq, an apostle of Husri's and founder of the Baath Party, promoted violence and cruelty against those users of the Arabic language who refused to conform to an overarching Arab identity.[9]

Later Arab nationalist figures like Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser or Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein found the linguistic definition of Arabism convenient in order to neglect, if not completely reject, the reality of ethnic and cultural diversity in the Middle East. This view--also adopted by a number of social scientists and post-Edward Said Middle East scholars--holds that the Middle East is populated by a breed of culturally and linguistically homogeneous Arabs. Assyrians, Berbers, Copts, Chaldaeans, Kurds, Maronites and many other millions of Middle Eastern peoples who possess their own distinct cultural and historical heritage and who disapprove of their ascribed latter-day Arabness, are nevertheless anointed as Arabs. If they do not embrace their Arabness, they are dismissed as traitors or isolationists.

Robert Kaplan expressed this negative slant against Middle Eastern minorities in the conclusion of his remarkable book The Arabists, which examined the history of State Department experts on the Arab world. These experts, the so-called Arabists, he argued, quoting a U.S. Foreign Service official, "[h]ave not liked Middle Eastern minorities. Arabists have been guilty in the past of loving the majority and the idea of Uruba, which roughly translates as 'Arabism.' I remember once going to a Foreign Service party and hearing people refer to the Maronite Christians in Lebanon as 'fascists.'"[10] Lebanese commentator Michael Young adds, "What pro-Arab Americans couldn't stomach was that the [Middle East's] Christians were often estranged from [