Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon

Since the West's very early flirtations with the modern Near East, and especially in the past 100 years of East-West relations, there has been considerable difficulty in understanding and defining the Middle East, the Arab world, pan-Arabism, Arab nationalism, and Middle Eastern identities in general. The Western impulse of conflating national identity with language, state, and ethnicity—often subsuming Arabic language into Arab ethnicity—has contributed to this misunderstanding and misread...