Language, Identity, and Syrian Political Activism on Social Media

Francesco L. Sinatora

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429812330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language, Identity, and Syrian Political Activism on Social Media is an empirical contemporary Arabic sociolinguistic investigation informed by theories and notions developed in the fields of Arabic linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology.

Building on the Bakhtinian concept of linguistic hybridity, this book conducts a longitudinal analysis of Syrian dissidents' social media practices between 2009 and 2017. It shows how dissidents have used social media to emerge in the discourse about the Syrian conflict and how language has been used symbolically as a tool of social and political engagement in an increasingly complex sociopolitical context.

This monograph is ideal for students, sociolinguists and researchers interested in Arabic language and identity.

1 Introduction

The aim of this work is to investigate the relationship between language, discourse and identity through the linguistic practices of a group of Syrian dissidents in digital environments, including Facebook, YouTube and radio shows. Drawing from an online ethnography between 2009 and 2017, it shows how the dissidents’ discursive strategies changed in relation with the sociopolitical context and with public discourse and how the notion of hybridity can help make sense of their discursive practices with relation to identity.¹ Specifically it shows how dissidents recurred to hybrid linguistic strategies to rebut the identities of ‘infiltrators’ and ‘terrorists’ assigned to them in dominant public discourses.

Following the success of the Tunisian and the Egyptian revolutions, many Syrians took to the streets in spring 2011 to demand more freedom and dignity. The peaceful demonstrations were encountered by a violent repression and by President Bashar al-Asad’s labelling of the protestors as mundassūn – a word related to the verb indassa (“to infiltrate”) and the noun dasīsa (“plot, conspiracy”) – acting as pawns of a ‘universal conspiracy’ against Syria. Through the term mundassūn, which can be roughly translated as ‘conspirators’ or ‘infiltrators’, Bashar al-Asad delegitimized protestors, implying that they were not ‘real’ Syrians but rather traitors playing the game of foreign powers. Delegitimizing dissidents is a common tactic among rulers in times of crisis. Bassiouney (2014) explained how protestors who gathered in Tahrir square against Mubarak’s regime were labelled as ‘non-real’ Egyptians, with the pretext that they were speaking English, the language of the former colonial power.

Interestingly, the word mundassūn went viral across social media platforms. Dissidents appropriated it to mock and reverse the regime rhetoric, triggering a metalinguistic discussion on language and identity. In an entry of the blog satirically named al-mundassa as-sūriyya (“The Syrian Infiltrator”), published in April 2011, the authors, who described themselves as “a group of Syrians inside and outside of Syria, united by their love for their homeland”, engaged in a metalinguistic discussion of the word mundass, arguing that

[this word] was attributed tyrannically and untruthfully to foreign hands who want to destroy the country. In so doing, they [those who used this word] nullified the power of the “infiltrated” Syrian citizens delegitimizing their demands for freedom and dignity. They made them believe that citizens are just naggers and that everything is already available to them. […] So who’s the real infiltrator? Those who call for freedom and for a piece of bread? Or those who delude the people telling them that freedom and dignity are already available to them […]?²

A few months later, a series of satirical videos on YouTube, entitled after the popular protestors’ slogan ḥurriye u-bass (“freedom, that’s all”), featured a sketch in which two simple young Syrian men ponder the meaning of the word mundass.³ One of them explains ironically that mundass is someone who walks with his head held high with legitimate demands. As he explains the meaning, he uses a conceited tone, as if to voice and ridicule the regime rhetoric. Throughout the sketch, the actors use the Syrian vernacular to enhance the humorous tone and to evoke an idea of simplicity and authenticity, as to suggest that those who demanded dignity and freedom are simple Syrian citizens, not traitors or infiltrators.⁴ Similar linguistic choices were adopted in the satirical puppet YouTube series Top Goon: Diaries of a Dictator (cf. Kraidy 2016), in which the word ğarāṯīm (“germs”) used by Bashar al-Asad in one of his first speeches after the uprising to denigrate protestors, was appropriated humorously. Over the course of the past seven years, the exacerbation of the conflict and the onset of other regional and international actors, including radical Islamic groups, ISIS, Turkey, Russia and the United States, has resulted in an erasure of Syrian dissidents’ identities in mass media discourse and led to a focus on Islamic terrorism.

In May 2017, during the month of Ramadan, the Kuwaiti telecommunications company Zain, famous for its progressive and politically engaged advertising campaigns, released a commercial on its YouTube channel that caused social media backlash. The commercial uses a plethora of linguistic and multimodal resources, such as Quranic Arabic, pop music and images, to exhort Muslims to reject terrorism and embrace a modern version of Islam.⁵ This call echoes a Western dominant discourse, according to which Muslims around the world have not yet done enough to distance themselves from terrorism, as well as the Syrian government’s long-held narrative that equates dissidents with radical Islamic extremists and has portrayed former Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad and his son and current president Bashar al-Asad as the only viable alternative to sectarian strife. Moreover, the ad’s message reinforces a stance that has gained international currency and sees the Syrian government’s threat subordinate to that of radical Islamic terrorism. Social media backlash revolved around the use in the commercial of the image of Omran, the young boy from Aleppo whose photo of him sitting in an ambulance covered in dust and blood went viral immediately after an alleged airstrike conducted by the Syrian regime. The hashtag zain tušawwih al-ḥaqīqa (“Zain distorts the truth”) was created on Twitter, and a campaign was launched through the global activist networked Avaaz to raise awareness about an alleged collaboration between the Syrian government and Zain, accused of neglecting the government’s involvement in the war and corroborating the regime’s equation of political dissent with terrorism.

Bashar al-Asad’s delegitimization of protestors as ‘non-real’ Syrians and as terrorists through the use of the word mundass, the Syrian dissidents’ appropriation of this word on social media, the Zain commercial and the backlash it triggered on social media constitute examples of how linguistic and multimodal resources are used to discuss matters that pertain to group identity and society. The relation between language and group identity has interested sociolinguists for a long time. In this book, I subscribe to an understanding of identity as an intrinsically dialogic and collective process. As noted by Blommaert (2005: 205), “in order for an identity to be established, it has to be recognised by others. That means that a lot of what happens in the field of identity is done by others, not by oneself […] regardless of whether one wants to belong to particular groups or not, one is often grouped by others in processes of – often institutionalised – social categorisation called othering”. In his seminal study on the Arabic language and national identity, Suleiman (2003) investigated the role of standard Arabic in the construction of national identity in the Arabic-speaking world. Additionally, he made the case for a focus on the symbolic use of language, marking a distinction with previous Arabic sociolinguistic studies, which, he posited, had hitherto approached the link between language and identity from a predominantly functional and quantitative perspective. According to Suleiman (2011, 2013a), the “symbolic function of language” is particularly evident in situations of conflict and social unrest, as, he contends, it is in such situations that particular language forms, which up to that point had been perceived as neutral means of communication, acquire a special status in society and are consciously deployed and contested to promote radical and irreversible social change.⁶

The relevance of focusing on the symbolic use of language was reiterated by Edwards (2009), who also claimed that collective and individual identities intersect, inasmuch as “the elements of individual identity are not unique, but rather, are drawn from some common social pool” (2). Building on this insight, in her study of language and identity in modern Egypt, Bassiouney (2014) argued that, even though stereotypical, the analysis of collective identities in public discourse is an essential endeavor to understand individual identities, as the collective identity emerging from public discourse serves as a frame of reference toward which individual identities orient. In addition, Bassiouney (2010, 2012, 2014, 2017) explained the link between language and identity through the sociolinguistic theories of code choice, stance and indexicality, showing how linguistic codes are associated with different symbolic or metaphorical meanings. Analyzing linguistic codes as resources, she showed how the access to these resources and their symbolic function is a fundamental ingredient in the formation of public identities. So far, much of what we have learned about language and identity in the Arab world derives from an analysis of identities as imagined through state-controlled mass media, including the printed press, television, political speeches and literature. A very recent strand of studies has addressed the link between language, identity and social change in digital environments in the Arab world (Al Zidjaly 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017; 2019b; Brustad 2017; Hachimi 2017; Johnson 2015; Mejdell and Høigilt 2017; Nordenson 2017; Sinatora 2019).

Building on this strand, in this book I adopt a bottom-up perspective, investigating the link between language and identity as it emerged from the discursive practices of Syrian dissidents on social media within the context of the 2011 Syrian uprising. The examples of the term mundass and the backlash generated by the Zain commercial show that the shaping of language, discourses and identities is no longer an exclusive prerogative of mass media. Social media are known to have played a significant role in the Arab uprisings, providing new “affordances” – a term coined by Gibson (1979) and defined by Hutchby (2001) as “the possibilities for action” chartered by technologies (449) – for civic engagement and a new dimension for the Habermasian public sphere (KhosraviNik 2018) – explained by Hauser (1998: 86) as “a discursive space in which individuals and groups associate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment”. Through their discursive practices, dissidents capitalized on social media affordances to reimagine their collective identity as Syrians differently from the homogenizing Syrian and Arab national identity propagated by the Ba‘ath Party, which has ruled Syria since 1963, as well as to reject other identities assigned to them after the uprising, such as those of infiltrators and terrorists.

Dissidence in Syria is not a new phenomenon. Wedeen (1999) and Cooke (2007) showed how public discourse also served as an instrument to co-opt and control dissent. Through the notion of tanfīs (lit. “letting breathe”), Wedeen explained that co-opted dissident work, or “commissioned criticism” (Cooke 2007), functioned as a form of safety valve under Hafiz al-Asad’s rule and had the purpose of quelling dissent. In her extensive research on Syrian television drama production, Della Ratta (2015) showed how this type of publicly displayed social criticism has changed guise under Bashar al-Asad. Instead of being “commissioned criticism” (Cooke 2007), Della Ratta argued that the social message of Syrian television dramas is the result of shared intents between a president who portrays himself as a reformist and an elite of television drama producers, who adhered to the “enlightenment project” of a society they perceive as backwards (Della Ratta 2015). An intense dissident activity was present in Syria between 2000 and 2011 during Bashar al-Asad’s presidency (Ghadbian 2015). In this book, I focus on the grassroots spinoff of this activity, which was particularly intense and visible on Facebook. The overarching question is: How is language used to articulate political identities on social media? Whereas, as I will show, much work in Arabic linguistics has analyzed fuṣḥā and vernaculars as separate varieties, I propose an approach that looks at language and identity on social media through the lens of hybridity (Eid 2002, 2007; Rubdy and Alsagoff 2014).

1 Identity and hybridity

In my analysis, I subscribe to an understanding of identity as emergent, dialogic and performative (Blommaert 2005; Bucholtz and Hall 2005; Davies and Harré 1990; De Fina et al. 2006). Rather than being an abstract, essential trait of human beings, socioconstructionist approaches (De Fina et al. 2006) see identity as a process that involves visibility. Identity is emergent in the sense that we arewhat other people see us. It is dialogic in the sense that what we are is determined by our behavior, as well as by the way others name that behavior based on other behaviors they observed in the past. It is performative because, in order to emerge, individuals make unconscious and conscious linguistic and extralinguistic choices. As recent scholarship brought to bear, the “phatic” aspect of social interaction is particularly evident in social media performance (Bauman 2010; De Fina 2016; Miller 2008).

I will argue that hybridity is central to comprehend how identities emerge on social media in a context of political unrest. The concept of linguistic hybridity is attributed to Bakhtin (1981), who defined it as:

a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one other by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.

(358)

Although the interplay between different language varieties and registers had been studied extensively across linguistic contexts, including Arabic, through the theory of code-switching (Blom and Gumperz 1972) and later developments of it, the notion of hybridity was revitalized in the 1990s by scholars of bilingual communication and linguistic anthropology (Hall and Nilep 2015). A focus on hybridity, operationalized as code alternation (Auer 1995) and translingual simultaneity (Woolard 1999) was urged by these scholars to avoid the pitfall of a purely descriptive consideration of code-switching as the exceptional encounter of bounded varieties and to emphasize the historical and political value of language, erstwhile theorized by Bakhtin (1981). In Arabic, hybridity has been conceptualized as the individuals’ choice to mix fuṣḥā and the vernaculars in spoken and written contexts, in reaction to a politics of diglossic separation (Al Batal 2002; Brustad 2017; Eid 2002, 2007; Mejdell 2006, 2014, 2017).

An interest in hybridity has surged among scholars of language, identity, bilingualism and social media (Blommaert 2017; Hall and Nilep 2015). Several terms have been proposed to capture individuals’ multilingual practices, such as crossing (Rampton 1995), heteroglossia (Bailey 2007), polylingualism (Jørgenson 2008; Møller 2008), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010, 2014) and translanguaging (Williams 1994, cited in García and Lin 2016), defined by García (2009) as “the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximise communicative potential” (140).⁷ The increased focus on hybrid practices has raised concerns among scholars about the explicative power of hybridity (Rubdy and Alsagoff 2014). These concerns, as observed by Rubdy and Alsagoff, are mainly due to an analysis of hybridity as a synchronic, rather than a social, historical and political phenomenon, as it was theorized by Bakhtin (1981) and envisaged by Woolard (1999). The political aspect of translingual practices, grounded in a study of language as a social and historical phenomenon (Blommaert 2005; Makoni and Pennycook 2007), was also raised by Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) in terms of “fixity” and “fluidity”. Citing Auer (2005), they argued that hybrid practices cannot be fully understood without considering the ideological and political tensions that engendered them. These sociopolitical conditions have become increasingly “complex” in a time of globalization, and such complexity has had significant repercussions on how identities emerge through language (Al Zidjaly 2019a; Blommaert 2016, 2017, 2019; Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Blommaert and Varis 2011; Blommaert et al. 2015).

The historical dimension in which translingual practices are imbued is what informs my analysis of Syrian dissidents’ hybrid practices in this book. Hybridity implies going beyond a deductive ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Transcription, glosses and transliteration
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media
• 3 Hybridity and cosmopolitan identities
• 4 Hybridity and dissident identities
• 5 Hybridity and participation
• 6 Hybridity, secular identities and radical Islamic discourse
• 7 Hybridity and erasure
• 8 Conclusions
• Appendix
• References
• Index