Arabic and its Alternatives Christians and Jews in Muslim Societies Editorial Board Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA) Bernard Heyberger (EHESS, Paris, France) VOLUME 5 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cjms Arabic and its Alternatives Religious Minorities and Their Languages in the Emerging Nation States of the Middle East (1920–1950) Edited by Heleen Murre-van den Berg Karène Sanchez Summerer Tijmen C. Baarda LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Assyrian School of Mosul, 1920s–1930s; courtesy Dr. Robin Beth Shamuel, Iraq. This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Murre-van den Berg, H. L. (Hendrika Lena), 1964– illustrator. | Sanchez-Summerer, Karene, editor. | Baarda, Tijmen C., editor. Title: Arabic and its alternatives : religious minorities and their languages in the emerging nation states of the Middle East (1920–1950) / edited by Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Karène Sanchez, Tijmen C. Baarda. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2020. | Series: Christians and Jews in Muslim societies, 2212–5523 ; vol. 5 | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019058022 (print) | LCCN 2019058023 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004382695 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004423220 (nook edition) Subjects: LCSH: Middle East—Languages. | Linguistic minorities—Middle East—History. | Religious minorities—Middle East—History. | Minorities—Middle East—History. | Multilingualism—Middle East—History. | Languages in contact—Middle East— History. | Language and culture—Middle East—History. Classification: LCC P381.M53 A73 2020 (print) | LCC P381.M53 (ebook) | DDC 306.44/0956—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058022 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058023 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2212-5523 ISBN 978-90-04-38269-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42322-0 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by the Authors. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Preface vii Heleen Murre-van den Berg Note on Transcription x Notes on Contributors xi 1 Arabic and its Alternatives: Language and Religion in the Ottoman Empire and its Successor States 1 Heleen Murre-van den Berg 2 Vernacularization as Governmentalization: the Development of Kurdish in Mandate Iraq 50 Michiel Leezenberg 3 “Yan, Of, Ef, Viç, İç, İs, Dis, Pulos …”: the Surname Reform, the “Non-Muslims,” and the Politics of Uncertainty in Post-genocidal Turkey 77 Emmanuel Szurek 4 “Young Phoenicians” and the Quest for a Lebanese Language: between Lebanonism, Phoenicianism, and Arabism 111 Franck Salameh 5 “Those Who Pronounce the Ḍād”: Language and Ethnicity in the Nationalist Poetry of Fuʾad al-Khatib (1880–1957) 130 Peter Wien 6 Arabic and the Syriac Christians in Iraq: Three Levels of Loyalty to the Arabist Project (1920–1950) 143 Tijmen C. Baarda 7 Awakening, or Watchfulness: Naum Faiq and Syriac Language Poetry at the Fall of the Ottoman Empire 171 Robert Isaf 8 Global Jewish Philanthropy and Linguistic Pragmatism in Baghdad 201 Sasha R. Goldstein-Sabbah vi Contents 9 Past Perfect: Jewish Memories of Language and the Politics of Arabic in Mandate Palestine 228 Liora R. Halperin 10 United by Faith, Divided by Language: the Orthodox in Jerusalem 247 Merav Mack 11 Arabic vs. Greek: the Linguistic Aspect of the Jerusalem Orthodox Church Controversy in Late Ottoman Times and the British Mandate 261 Konstantinos Papastathis 12 Between Local Power and Global Politics: Playing with Languages in the Franciscan Printing Press of Jerusalem 287 Leyla Dakhli 13 Epilogue 303 Cyrus Schayegh Index 311 Preface This publication marks the final stage of a project that originated in many meetings between Dr Karène Sanchez, a socio-linguist and historian from the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Prof dr. Johan Rooryck, a linguist in the same Institute, and myself, then a researcher at the Leiden University Institute for Religious Studies. What brought us together was our shared interest in missions in the Middle East, and especially the effects of these missions on language use and language policies in the intricate linguistic arrangements of the region. Karène Sanchez and myself decided to join forces and set up a research project in which our work on different regions (Palestine, Iraq, Syria), on different groups (Catholics, Syriac and Armenian Christians), and on different periods (Ottoman and Mandate period) was compared with emerging work on the Jews of the region – whose recent history, somewhat surprisingly, often was treated as a case sui generis. The main question in this project concerned the relationship between language, religion and communal identifications. What role did language play in the formative years of the mod- ern Middle East? What languages were preferred in the context of the British and French Mandates? What was the role of Arabic in the emerging Arab states when statehood was fashioned out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire, the heritage of Islam, local and regional identities, and language? Arabic in its newly modernized form became the unifying force of Arab nationalism, but also functioned as the pragmatic choice for those who governed and for those who wanted to join the new states. In turn, it became the model upon which other communal languages fashioned themselves. We decided on three case studies to probe these questions in more detail, each focusing on a specific non-Muslim minority in areas initially governed by the British: the Jews of Baghdad, the Catholics of Palestine and the Syriac Christians of Iraq. These case studies became the foundation upon which a larger comparative project was built which was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and which started in the summer of 2012. Early results of the project were brought together in a volume entitled Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East (2016) in which we compared our work on these three communities with case studies brought in by colleagues from around the world. These additional cases took other cultural practices as a starting point, including city planning, sartorial practices and music – practices that like language were able to create common ground between various communities at the time of nation building viii Preface but at the same time could (and were) put to work to create distinction and dif- ference. Two dissertations, by Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah and by Tijmen Baarda, provide in-depth studies of two of the three case studies, while a monograph on the Catholics of Palestine by Karène Sanchez is on its way. The current volume and its introduction conclude the project, although the material is far from exhausted. We sincerely hope that others will continue to add examples, compare with what is here, criticize our conclusions and con- tinue the discussion about how to understand the complicated and sometimes violent interactions between majorities and minorities, between Muslims and non-Muslims, and between Arab speakers and non-Arab speakers in the Middle East. Finally, the fact that many of the encounters and conflicts that we discuss in this volume assume significant Western influence – through mis- sionaries, colonialists and others – should remind us that we are not speaking about an isolated episode of Middle Eastern history, but about a history that should be part of European and American historic consciousness as much as it is of those who are born and raised in the Middle East. We hope that our thinking, reading and writing about it will contribute to an increased sense of shared history. This creation of a shared history includes the analysis of painful episodes in which Western and Middle Eastern majorities were quick to side- line and sometimes erase the voices of minorities in order to advance particu- lar rather than common interests. We hope that this volume, to which authors from many different countries and many different academic, linguistic and cultural contexts have contributed, may serve to re-read and re-appropriate this shared history, not to offer a final conclusion, but to stimulate discussion and ongoing reflection on how different kinds of people may live together, in the Middle East as much as in Europe or anywhere else in this world. At this time and place, I would like to thank all those who contributed to the project over the past years. The most important of these has been Karène Sanchez who contributed in innumerable ways: she was vital in conceptualiz- ing and developing the project, in writing the research proposal and contribute her own post-doc research. She also took a big share in supervising our two PhD candidates, especially after I took on a position at Nijmegen’s Radboud University in the summer of 2015 and thus no longer was available for day to day supervision in Leiden.