Mediterranean Contaminations: Middle East, North Africa, and Europe in Contact

289 Pages·2018·6.812 MB·English

by  Giuliano Mion (editor)

Giuliano Mion (ed.)
Mediterranean Contaminations
Studien zum Modernen Orient
herausgegeben
von Gerd Winkelhane
Studien zum Modernen Orient 31
Giuliano Mion (ed.)
Mediterranean Contaminations
Middle East, North Africa, and Europe
in Contact
Bibliographic Information of Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek registers this publication in the
Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographical data
can be accessed at http://dnb.ddb.de
This book has been published thanks to a financial support of the
“G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara – Dipartimento di Lingue,
Letterature e Culture Moderne.
All the contributions included in this book have been subjected
to a process of blind peer review before their acceptance.
Cover-pic: Ottoman fortress (end of 16th C.) of Mahdia/Tunisia,
by Ghido/Fotolia
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Table of Contents
Introduction ...............................................................................................7
P L
ERSPECTIVES ON INGUISTICS
1. Philippe Cassuto
La route de la grammaire hébraïque de Tibériade à Venise
(9e-16e siècles) ......................................................................................13
2. Luca D’Anna
Extraterritorial Varieties of Tunisian Arabic.
The Dialect of Chebba Spoken in Mazara del Vallo (Sicily) ...............47
3. Daniela Rodica Firanescu
Mixed Arabic Encounters: Online and Live Syrian for Egyptians .......73
4. Giuliano Mion
Pré-hilalien, hilalien, zones de transition.
Relire quelques classiques aujourd’hui .............................................102
5. Gabriel M. Rosenbaum
Components of Romance Languages in the Arabic
Spoken by Jews in Modern Egypt ......................................................126
P L
ERSPECTIVES ON ITERATURE
6. Lucia Avallone
Westernization, Colonialism, and Cosmopolitanism:
Literary Voices from the Pre-Revolutionary Egypt ..........................137
7. Bohdan Horvat
Arabic/Egyptian/Alexandrian: Identity
and the Mediterranean Colorito in Modern Alexandrian Poetry ....179
8. Paolo La Spisa
Scrittura come riparazione in ‘Azāzīl.
Storia e psicoanalisi nel diario intimo di un monaco egiziano .......195
P M
ERSPECTIVES ON USIC
9. Emanuela De Blasio
Rap in the Arab World: Between Innovation and Tradition ............219
10. Najla Kalach
Folk Songs in Homs’ Weddings: a Sociolinguistic Perspective ........232
P P
ERSPECTIVES ON AREMIOLOGY
11. Jihène Jerbi Mansour
Le proverbe à la confluence des cultures méditerranéennes ...........244
12. Ahmed-Salem Ould Mohamed Baba
Les proverbes commençant par « si » dans le premier tome
de l’ouvrage inédit d’Azzajjālī .........................................................261
The Authors ............................................................................................275
General Index by Annamaria Ventura
Places, Names, Languages, Subjects .....................................................280
Introduction
There is a concept which should be very clear but unfortunately is never
quite clear enough: no single culture nor civilisation can be considered
compartmentalized. Contact with other cultures has always occurred in
the past, it continues to occur in the present, and will no doubt continue
in the future. Contact assumes dynamics through which elements be-
longing to a given culture or society “contaminate” other cultures and
societies. Sometimes, these elements leave one given point to arrive at
the other and contaminate it, and later they return to their original
starting point. While other times, such elements contaminate the other
and later evolve into new realities that include both the old and the new
by generating what Homi Bhabha, for example, in his book The Location
of culture (1994), considered a “third space”.
These kinds of dynamics can be found all over the world in practic-
ally every culture and civilisation, and the Mediterranean is an area that
has experienced extraordinary conflicts, encounters and exchanges
through the centuries. A scholar whose masterly work of analysis on
the complexity of the Mediterranean remains unforgettable is Fernand
Braudel, the author of the masterpiece La Méditerranée et le monde médi-
terranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949).
Of course, one could look at this great complexity in numerous ways,
such as analysing the periods and the era that characterised the Medi-
terranean macrocosm, or one could attempt to read facts through a par-
ticular specialisation, for example a linguistic or a literary one.
This book intends to present some proposals of interpretation of this
complexity through the eyes of a number of scholars who, although spe-
cialised in different scientific disciplines, share an interest in the Arab
world and, broadly speaking, Semitic cultures and civilisations.
The twelve contributions included in the following pages cross differ-
ent historical periods, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era,
and cover different geographical areas, both the Northern and Southern
coasts of the Mediterranean as well as the East and West of the so-called
Mare Nostrum.
This variety of contributions is organised into four parts which aim
7
INTRODUCTION
to show some possible perspectives on linguistics, literature, music and
paremiology, i.e. four of the many possible approaches to interpret this
1
tremendous complexity.
The linguistic section contains four contributions ranging from He-
brew to Arabic and from East to West.
Tiberias and Venice, and the 9th and 16th century, are the geographical
and chronological limits that Philippe Cassuto selected in his contribu-
tion for the reconstruction of the socio-cultural relationships that can be
found in the development of Hebrew grammar. The study of this intric-
ate history is a demonstration of how strong cultural contact occurred
between the two sides of the Mediterranean through the centuries and
how different confessional communities have influenced each other
through the circulation of knowledge and ideas.
However, as is well known, dotted all over the Mediterranean, Jewish
communities adopted the language of the country they live in. The con-
tribution of Gabriel M. Rosenbaum shows that Egyptian Jews speak a
distinctive Arabic dialect or, more correctly, a form of what is tradition-
ally known as Judeo-Arabic. This variety, which is basically Arabic, con-
tains a large quantity of lexical components borrowed from many Ro-
mance languages spoken around the Mediterranean such as, French,
Italian and Judezmo.
A completely different reading of interlinguistic contact, which is
limited to the domain of Arabic, is given by Daniela Rodica Firanescu. In
fact, before the start of the civil war in Syria, the success of TV Syrian
soap operas all over the Arab-speaking world increased the (passive) ac-
quisition of Syrian Colloquial Arabic. In social networking sites this
phenomenon was often discussed by Arabs of different origins and the
contribution included here offers an example which analyses the specific
situation of “writing the spoken”, i.e. the impressions of Egyptians about
Syrian dialect in online communication written with Arabic characters
and interfered with by Modern Standard Arabic.
Maghreb is the object of two different, although related, contributi-
ons where the role played by Tunisia is quite central.
1 This is the principal reason for which the authors of the twelve contributions
have been left free to use the system of linguistic transcription they preferred.
8
INTRODUCTION
Luca D’Anna explores the case of Tunisians living in Mazaro del Val-
lo (Sicily), a community that settled in the coastal Italian town in the
late 1960s and early 1970s where they found jobs in the fishing industry.
The Arabic dialect spoken by this Arab community seems to be linked to
that of Chebba, a small town located in the Mahdia governorate in Cen-
tral Tunisia.
However, in the interpretation of an Arabic variety belonging to
North Africa, contemporary Arabic dialectology keeps using a number
of categories individuated mainly by European dialectologists working
in this region during the colonial period. The French orientalist and lin-
guist William Marçais is one of these extraordinary scholars who gave
the basis to this discipline. Giuliano Mion wonders how Marçais’s per-
sonal life experience could be considered the starting point for the cre-
ation of such linguistic categories and proposes a discussion about their
validity in the context of the 21st century.
The literary section of this book includes three contributions which
testify to the crucial role played by Egypt.
Lucia Avallone’s work focuses on the composite relationships be-
tween Europe and Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th century. Two dif-
ferent types of movements are found: on the one hand, cultural and dip-
lomatic missions from Egypt to European countries put Egyptian elites
in contact with modern European ideas and developments; while on the
other hand, migration in the opposite direction to the main Egyptian cit-
ies saw foreign communities grow. Contact between these two different
components of a new cosmopolitan Egyptian society is the object of a
study that investigates this unique situation from a literary point of view.
When considering Egypt, one usually sees Cairo as the country’s
centre of cultural production. This assumption is undoubtedly correct,
but Bohdan Horvat’s study intends to shed light on the role of another
important city, a purely Mediterranean one, such as Alexandria. In par-
ticular, poetry is the subject selected by the author who analyses poets
connected to the group of the so-called Arbi‘ā’iyyūn, a highbrow Alex-
andrian gathering organised by ‘Abd al-‘Aẓīm Nāǧī in the mid-1980s.
Egyptian is also the novel ‘Azāzīl published in 2008 by Yūsuf Zaydān
which is of interest to Paolo La Spisa, who uses psychoanalysis as a
9
INTRODUCTION
means of interpretation. With this novel the reader is catapulted into the
mid-5th century between Alexandria, Jerusalem and Northern Syria,
while a complex history is built around the translation from Syriac into
Arabic of a series of scrolls, found near Alep in the 20th century, which
enclose the autobiography of the monk Hypa.
Besides literature, music is another artistic field in which contact and
contamination between different origins are often found. Two contribu-
tions are included in the section related to this fascinating topic.
Emanuela De Blasio’s paper investigates the origins of rap in the
Arab world, a contemporary music genre that spread from America and
Europe and reached the Southern side of the Mediterranean in the late
1980s. Rap is nowadays more and more used by the Arab youth to ex-
press rage against controversial political conflicts they live under and
the difficult social situations that characterise the region at different le-
vels.
If in this section innovation is primarily represented by rap, tradition
is exemplified instead by the contribution of Najla Kalach. The author
offers another perspective on Arab music and focuses on a particular
genre from Syria: folk songs used during marriage ceremonies in the
city of Homs. The short collection of songs provided by her study,
whose lyrics in colloquial Arabic are transcribed according to a dialecto-
logical methodology, is analysed linguistically and represents a valuable
resource for knowledge of the realm of Syrian popular traditions.
Music is a part of the shared experiences of peoples and communities
who have settled in different places, but another field of the “traditional”
production of the human being is important to understand how we ex-
press feelings and perceptions: this field is represented by proverbs
which, in their similarities from one culture to another, are undeniably a
manifestation of the circulation of common views of life.
This subject is studied scientifically by paremiology, the object of the
last section which includes two contributions.
Ahmed-Salem Ould Mohamed Baba leads the reader into the society
of al-Andalus, in the 13th century, when an encounter between different
confessional components created a new cosmopolitan society. His study
presents the edition of a chapter of a paremiological book by the An-
10