The Emergence of the Arabic and Aramaic Languages

Scholars have so far been unable to determine the time at which these two great peoples separated from the ancient Semitic stock, and it has therefore also been difficult for them to fix precisely the period in which their languages arose. Be that as it may, we hold that the two languages emerged at approximately the same time, and the most important proofs of this are the following:

First — the closeness of the period in which the two sister peoples arose, namely around the twentieth century before Christ. We accept that Laban the Haranite, who is called "the Aramean" in the Torah, descended from the clan of Abraham the Friend of God, who migrated from Ur of the Chaldeans (in southern Iraq). Abraham himself spoke Aramaic by virtue of his original homeland, whose people spoke that language. Abraham was accompanied by peoples in the northern and central parts of the Peninsula who were unquestionably Arabs, and these "Arabs," who were in constant movement across the length and breadth of the Peninsula, spoke a language of their own that was the mother of the Arabic dialects in history. The two languages, then, must have arisen in a closely related period and must have been close to one another; otherwise Abraham could not have communicated with the men of those tribes, with whom, as we have seen, he had many dealings according to the Torah itself.

For further confirmation we return to the written remains that have recently appeared in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula and in the two ancient Arabian kingdoms of Maʿin and Sabaʾ. We have seen that the successive states in these two lands, deeply rooted in antiquity, were in contact with the ancient states in the lands of Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria. The date of the Minaean inscriptions and others goes back to the beginning of the tenth century before Christ. These inscriptions point to Arab civilizations that flourished in this region and that go back to the beginning of the twentieth century BC, which [?] supports the existence of the Arabic language in this part of the ancient world contemporaneously with the Aramaic language in the upper portion of the Peninsula, in the basins of the Tigris and Euphrates, and in the city of Harran and its environs — even if the Arabic language of Maʿin differed from the other Arabic dialects spread across the north of the Peninsula, which were influenced by the Aramaic and Hebrew dialects in later ages as a result of the intermingling of certain Aramean and Hebrew tribes in the west of this region.

Second — the closeness of the two languages, a closeness that almost surpasses the closeness of either of them to the rest of the Semitic languages, as we shall discuss later.

Third — because the two languages, at the outset of their history, were written with a single alphabet, the ancient Aramaic alphabet.

Fourth — the cooperation of the two languages in mutual completion and vitality, and the influence of each upon the other throughout the various ages of history, and especially at the beginning of their history, from the time when each took from the other many styles, materials, and words, both in the south of the Peninsula and in its north, as we shall see.

"..Anis Mansour in the Marketplaces of Politics.."

Tamim Mansour

Not everyone who is cultured is capable of mastering the game of politics, and not every man of letters is able to turn his literature into oars with which to sail through the world of politics; yet many Arab writers and poets refuse to acknowledge these truths, especially when they reach the brink of bankruptcy in their output and creativity. Foremost among these is the Egyptian writer Anis Mansour, who insists on hovering from time to time in the sphere of politics in order to draw people's attention to himself, so that the tongue of his pen and his political tongue may declare that he is still present.

But the majority of those who know Mr. Anis Mansour and follow his writings are saddened by his condition and by his selfish, capricious style of writing, especially when he shuts the doors of literature and tumbles into the doors of politics.

What all those interested in and following Anis Mansour the politician know is that, when he hovers and tries to swim in this sphere, he does so by means of hands and wings whose source of energy is windmills of an Israeli make. These windmills constantly charge him with a political energy hostile to Nasserism, to the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance, hostile to Syria, and hostile to all the forces opposed to the imperialist projects in the region.

Anis Mansour is present in Cairo, but all his senses, feelings, and spirit are present inside Israel — this he has confessed more than once during his secret and public visits to the Zionist entity. He adores Israel, as everyone knows, and is one of those dazzled by it. The Israeli newspapers admitted that he was seized by wildness and a loss of psychological balance when he saw and spoke with the young women he met in the cooperative villages (the kibbutzim). This made him lose his memory, and he forgot that these villages were built upon the ruins of the Arab villages that were destroyed in 1948, that their Jewish inhabitants are strangers and intruders upon this land, and that the majority of the pilots in the Israeli army who bombed with their planes the Bahr al-Baqar school and Abu Zaabal, and who destroyed the cities of the Suez Canal, are the sons of these villages, which Anis Mansour considered ideal and exemplary.

Anis Mansour's constant wish is to serve Israel, because for him the Israeli is a model to be emulated. One of the methods he employs in service of Israel's racism is his attempt to smear all those who oppose his positions, foremost among them those who cling to their Arab identity and the Nasserite constants — for these constants are nothing but the blood cells that are renewed every day in the bodies of those who believe in the progressive Arab thought and consensus that Gamal Abdel Nasser planted in their minds.

We know that Anis Mansour and the ruling clique by whose sword he strikes in Egypt all suffer from a Nasserism complex. He never misses an opportunity to try to stab and belittle the era that restored Egypt to itself and to self-rule in the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He does not cease to weave threads of lies, slander, and distortion against the achievements [?] of the Nasserite revolution.

This is what Zionism and imperialism want, and what is awaited by the court of the submissive, domesticated Arab regimes, the allies of Zionism and imperialism.

During the recent aggression against the Gaza Strip, Anis Mansour remained silent as the grave, waiting, along with others who blessed this aggression in Nazif's government. They waited for the resistance to surrender and raise the white flag, just as Anis Mansour surrendered when he pledged allegiance to Sadat in the ill-fated Camp David accords. He had prepared special articles in which he gloated over the defeat [?] he had anticipated; but the patch of gloating he had prepared did not match the tear in his expectations, for the resistance emerged victorious and unharmed, to the point that Israel admitted that everything had returned to the beginning.

The victory of the resistance returned Anis Mansour to a state of unbalanced political wildness, so he detonated his stored-up rancor against the immortal President Gamal Abdel Nasser and against everyone who is Palestinian; he directed words of foulness and defamation at all Palestinians in service of his allies in Tel Aviv and in many Arab capitals. He was not pained by the crimes Israel committed against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; rather, he went back to biting his fingers and his lips out of rancor and rage, just as he bit them when the Lebanese resistance triumphed. This came through his wretched, servile, lying article published in one of the newspapers of Mubarak's court — the newspaper Al-Ahram, on the third of this past February. Everything a reader of this article can gather makes it clear that it no longer matters to Anis Mansour that this number of victims fell as martyrs, nor the destruction caused by the barbarians of the age. We do not exaggerate if we say that he was seized by intoxication and reeling as he heard the moaning and wailing of the children, women, and elders of Gaza; so we would not be surprised if he wanted more.

What does he mean when he stated in his article that the Palestinians deserve everything that happened to them? When he says they deserve everything that happened to them, he is approving of what befell them at the hands of his friend Olmert, who described Anis Mansour as the best at expressing Tel Aviv's views and the best at defending it. As for Ehud Barak, he showered him with praise while his hands drip with blood, when he said that Anis Mansour is fit to be Israel's ambassador in Cairo.

In the aforementioned article, Anis Mansour considered all Palestinians to be spies and agents. But the truth is that those who support this deviant position against the Palestinians — especially the resistance factions — are all those who go along with Mubarak's corrupt, crumbling regime. He does not want the resistance to disturb the ease of his Israeli friends in Beersheba, Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Sderot, because Israel, from his point of view, is a fortress of democracy and freedom, despite the fact that it occupies the land of another people. This is what he said in one of his encounters at the University of Haifa, when the Palestinian students from the Arabs of '48 confronted him and pelted him with scraps of paper on which was written "traitor," with banana peels, and with whatever came to hand, so that he fled, crying out that the ghost of Abdel Nasser was pursuing him there — but the media in Israel imposed a blackout on this incident.

The poverty of Anis Mansour's thought, the shallowness of his understanding and his culture, and his following of the Palestinian people's struggle drove him to this delusion, to the point that he accused [?] the Palestinians of espionage — even though those among the Palestinians who squandered the revolutionary, patriotic Palestinian decision are the allies of the Egyptian regime who make truces with Israel and live on the illusions of American solutions: they are the princes of the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of Abu Mazen, Fayyad, Qurei, and others. The Palestinian people are innocent of these men and of their path, for they cling to the legitimate government that the people chose after the recent elections, whether Anis Mansour is pleased or refuses.