Why am I not an Arab?
“But why are you not an Arab?” might you ask!
My answer is simply “because I am Lebanese!" Period! End of story! Bye bye now!
But here's my lame attempt at "intellectualizing" the answer – though it is evidently simple and needn't be tinkered with and cluttered with tedious idiotarianisms...
But I can appreciate the fact that some of you still go to university, and might need some half-academic-sounding evidence to placate your half-witted senile obsolete third-worldist professors. So here goes.
Given that Arabness is an exclusivist concept, one cannot identify with it as an added identity without being impelled to relinquish pre-existing ones. Given that Arabism and Arabness have this fiendish knack for denying peoples their specific cultural and historical references, one is impelled to out-and-out repudiate any hints of this imputed, contrived Arabness.
But who are the “Arabs”, and what is the “Arab World”?
This is a thorny question to which there isn’t one clearly defined or satisfying answer. I can understand that the labels “Arab World” or “Arab” can be soothing to some who believe that Arab nationalism or Arabness are valid identity markers; but the terms themselves are loaded, misleading, ambiguous, abstract, and false, not to mention grotesque oversimplifications of a political ethnic and cultural realm that is anything but uniform and homogeneous, let alone exclusively Arab (to merit a comprehensive “Arab” label)..
Read it all.
My answer is simply “because I am Lebanese!" Period! End of story! Bye bye now!
But here's my lame attempt at "intellectualizing" the answer – though it is evidently simple and needn't be tinkered with and cluttered with tedious idiotarianisms...
But I can appreciate the fact that some of you still go to university, and might need some half-academic-sounding evidence to placate your half-witted senile obsolete third-worldist professors. So here goes.
Given that Arabness is an exclusivist concept, one cannot identify with it as an added identity without being impelled to relinquish pre-existing ones. Given that Arabism and Arabness have this fiendish knack for denying peoples their specific cultural and historical references, one is impelled to out-and-out repudiate any hints of this imputed, contrived Arabness.
But who are the “Arabs”, and what is the “Arab World”?
This is a thorny question to which there isn’t one clearly defined or satisfying answer. I can understand that the labels “Arab World” or “Arab” can be soothing to some who believe that Arab nationalism or Arabness are valid identity markers; but the terms themselves are loaded, misleading, ambiguous, abstract, and false, not to mention grotesque oversimplifications of a political ethnic and cultural realm that is anything but uniform and homogeneous, let alone exclusively Arab (to merit a comprehensive “Arab” label)..
Read it all.
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