The opinion of an old Kabyle on the imagined world called Arab, Hmiducc
By Hamiducc.
When a child, growing in my native Kabylia, I used to sing song… one that still sticks in my mind: When comes Spring in Kentucky… I didn’t know where Kentucky was… so I substituted the word Kabylia… in the song… and what a beautiful song it was then… and I still find myself humming it occasionally..
And this brings me to the idea of the arab world: I remember vaguely that I was told some folks in Algiers and surrounding area spoke a strange language, a mixture of berber and Arabic… Although theses people were berbers, I know this since many of them happened to be my cousins; one would call them arabs… Why? Don’t ask me.. Because the answer is simple.
When the first French settlers came to what they named Algeria, they assumed the country’s people were arabs. As simple as that.
For us Kabyle, we never asked ourselves the question as to what we were, it would have been absurd. But today, we realize the History had failed us.
When Algeria was busy fighting to recover its independence, some dark forces were at work, in the shadows of foreign lands. Somewhere in the middle east, some Algerians had the idea that if they aligned them selves with the so called arab world, they would get badly needed help.
How wrong they were!
They discovered a world that did not correspond to what men thought… and still today, the average western man is unaware that the arab world exist only in the mind of some with a hidden agenda. Hidden agenda, mind you, because there were some gains along with keeping that myth alive. You know, there is oil out there and specially a docile group of diverse people….. If we consider the Moslem world, western countries refer to them as the arab world! Egypt has long been one that trumpeted its ideology… in the name of “arabs”…. Needless to say that it took them more then 20 years to slide into a forgotten state. Iraq? Syria? … Where did the Assyrians, the kurds, druses Armenians… and all those ancient people go? Did they just fade away with the time? No they are still there, by acquired the arab language and culture. But does that make them arabs? In case you answered YES, then you should also consider all the descendants of slaves in the USA as being white… since the acquired the white ways, language and culture… Then we have the whole of North Africa…. True, some regions have developed a new language… from berber and Arabic… and yet the common man does not know that the morrocan peasant can not understand an Egyptian or a jordanian…
Where is the arab world?
There is not any…Only a myth…
More over, when we talk about the arab unity, the arab league….Where has it been .. or where is it ? I submit to you, it is a joke!
Islam is probably the only common link between these people and yet, for a person who has gone through these countries, the Islam one practices in one region is totally different from one in another region… It amuses me to read in Internet some lost characters who pretend in some unity… Just imagine the Christians pretending that across the globe everyone is in tune to the Vatican…
The World today, and mainly the Western World, must awake: The idea of a Greater Middle East… is a fancied world that must be dropped… for the good of all concerned.
I crisscross North America…and mainly USA… a Country with One Constitution, one Federal Government… and yet we have a diverse peoples from coast to coats… Don’t tell me that people of New Mexico Maine, Alabama… or Montana are alike!
I would laugh in my beard and dare say you know not the United States peoples..!
It’s the same with the so called arab world: I’ll tell you something about my native Algeria: Peoples from different region are so different… you could swear you are in different countries In this is quite normal: If the nation of the USA was born in 1776 … Algeria as we know it was born in 1830….. and before that it amount to a series of mini states that formed confederations as the time required alliances…
Only when settled by the French did these territories acquire a sort of state hood before independence in 1962… The French Revolution is still incomplete… and yet it started almost fifty years earlier… then how do you see Algeria? The same applies to the whole of North Africa…
So please, let forget the terms used to name theses countries: We have names… so why do some people insist on telling us we live in the Magrheb, In the Great Middle East..
Please, leave us alone: We live in North Africa just as you live in North America or South East Asia…
Please let ban the word Maghreb because it has no meaning. Maghreb means literally WEST…. I beg to ask: West of WHAT ? Why not East of the Atlantic for that matter! As for arab countries? There may exist one or two… if theses folks who inhabit them recognize themselves as arabs….
The United States refused to call itself an English Country although initially… Englishmen seceded from Great Britain… then why name us arabs since everyone know we are not arabs…
Unless… unless the western world is ignorant of the facts.
In which case, I invite all and everyone to get educated in the subject…. And I am sure that if you inquired… you will find out… that there maybe some connection with some middle eastern people… but the mainstream of peoples are anything… but arab… in the very countries you so wrongly call “arab countries”!