Conclusion

Abstract

I began this book with the aim of analyzing the role of language in the nexus of state, nation and religion in Egypt. I would like to end it by revisiting three of the themes that have run through the preceding chapters: the relations between language, modernity and vernacularization; the struggles to breathe contemporaneity into Classical Arabic; and some of the results of those struggles, in particular the persistent ambiguity in the status of what we have called contemporary Classical Arabic.

Egyptian Arabic was created by our fathers and grand-parents and we suckled it like the milk of our mothers. We learned it while we were still young and pronounced in it the first words that left our mouths. We remained speaking it throughout our lives, at home, in the field, at the factory and in offices, at the market and the university until it mixed with our blood and satiated us and we began to love it just like we love our fathers and mothers. We add something new to it everyday, and in doing so we feel that we are perfecting it—we educate it and bring it up as if it were our daughter and we grow to love it like we love our children. Our love for it is twofold: the love for our parents and the love for our children.

—Osman Sabri, 1967