Search results
. Most important, a common Arabic language – the critical ingredient of nationhood – existed. The ‘awakening’ of Arab identity was a product of the spread of mass education and literacy, especially in the 1950s and often by the Egyptian teachers recruited across the Arab world who helped form the educated middle class. The spread of a standardised Arabic in newspapers and radio made the language more homogeneous, stunting the evolution of national dialects as the linguistic basis of separate nations. The recent advent of Arab satellite TV has sharply reinforced cross
process as based on mutual acceptance in terms of each ‘acknowledging the other’s nationhood’, as Herbert Kelman of Harvard, a mediator in the peace process, has put it ( 1992 : 18–38). In this regard we need to ask whether, and in a commitment to peace, the Islamists acknowledge the place of Israel in the Middle East 18 and the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty over the grounds of
. 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (New York: Verso, 1991). 6 As Brubaker argues, ‘[W]e should focus on nation as a category of practice, nationhood as an institutionalized cultural and political form, and nationness as a contingent event or happening, and refrain from using the analytically dubious notion of “nations” as substantial, enduring collectivities.’ Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press