Blind Imitation Corrupting Arab Literature and Culture
I had scarcely finished reading
what I was able to read on this day, and before it, when my thoughts returned
to the roots of what I had read from the words of writers and poets. I stood
reflecting within myself on the many currents that surge in their souls beneath
the surface of wording, expression, meaning, and purpose.
When I first accepted the task of
writing this section, I assumed that my passion for writing and long practice
with its material would be enough to calm my restless soul. But I was mistaken.
Most of what I forced myself to read seemed only to kindle the fire whenever it
dimmed, rekindling it whenever it died down, driving me into a blaze of pain,
regret, and anger that Arabic literature should end up in such weakness, corruption, and ugliness.
The Decline of Arabs Through Ignorance and Weakness
The people of this Arabic tongue, those who speak it, were struck in successive ages by
calamities of ignorance, heedlessness, and weakness. Thrones of power crumbled
in all their lands. Predatory nations attacked them, subdued them, took them
captive, slaughtered them, and crushed their limbs, sometimes through violence
and tyranny, other times through deception, flattery, and manipulative
politics.
Then came days when embers were
stirred beneath the night: first scattered, then gathered, then sparks flew.
Each dying ember was given some life again. Likewise, the dreams of the
sleeping nation arose with all their embellishments and diversions, pushing
people to demand that the light of their nights shine in the darkness of their
days. Yet they rose without system, without planning, without preparation.
Their new forces scattered, weakened, and failed. Nothing of them yielded the
hoped-for victory, triumph, or leadership. Weakness remained the pillar of
these Arab nations and of all their deeds, in an age when European power, arrogant and overwhelming, expanded across the earth,
unstoppable and unwearied.
The Curse of Blind Imitation of the Powerful
One of the calamities of weak nations is that their drive to imitation, imitating the strong, is
greater than their drive to renew their own history with the causes of strength
that infuse vitality into their veins. Weakness makes imitation the foundation
of all action. When the leadership of thinkers in these weakened nations became
corrupt, and yet the awakened had to act, their individual actions scattered
upon two bases: a weakness inherited from the collapse of their political
identity, and another weakness imposed on them by disunity of leadership and
divergence of aims. Thus, every action bore the mark of weakness that revealed
the weakness of its doer. And the greatest of our works became nothing more
than imitations of
others, guided by whim, ignorance, and amazement, without reason.
This is everything before our
eyes and within our hands: our homes, our schools, our sons and daughters, our
men and women, our knowledge, our literature, our art, our morals. Every part,
in detail and in general, has been stamped with weakness, disunity, and the
absence of harmony between its elements—the very elements that together form
the meaning of “nation.” All of it is imitation, pieced together from the
scattered whims of its adopters.
Imitation Produces Only Surfaces, Not Substance
Imitation, by its nature, takes
only from appearances. Thus, all our borrowings are nothing but surfaces. This
woman, who is life’s art, always yearning to create, even in harm, you can
scarcely see her among us except as a patched-up doll stitched together from
the fads of other civilizations. Her clothes, her adornments, her jewelry, her
makeup, her hair, her manicured nails, her walk, her speech, all of it is
foreign, artificial, snatched from the appearances of Parisian courtesans and Hollywood flirts.
It bears no resemblance to her essence or origin. Most shameful of all, it is a
patchwork that lacks the consistency of the original source from which it was
imitated.
And this writer, and this poet, who
are supposed to be life’s art, constantly renewing its meanings through
influence and expression—you find in most of what they write nothing but dead
meanings. These are meanings ripped from their proper place by force,
transplanted into an alien environment, where they suffocate. What life they
once held perishes, cut off from the soil in which they first grew.
A Society of False Claims and Imported Imitations
And so it is with everything our
eyes fall upon or our minds grasp: patched-up claims, imported imitations,
calamities upon calamities. We will remain imitators until the free men—though
they are few, scattered, and lost—are able to extend their influence over the
whole of social life. They must restore to the living some of that fierce
spiritual unrest which drives a soul to independence, to take pride in its own
identity, to cherish the renewal of its inherited legacies, and to engage
modern civilization with the spirit of a reformer, not the weakness of a mere
imitator.
Only then will we extract from
civilization those causes by which civilizations are born, instead of standing
before it in the position of a miserable beggar cast away from the banquet
table… waiting, hunger in his eyes, to snatch at its crumbs.
For Further Reading:
- Practical Strategies to Preserve Our Arabic Language
- Minting and Arabizing Islamic currency
- The Impact of Language on Personality Formation
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