Ahmed, aka Saudi Jeans has a very interesting article where he explores the divide between the two camps of Arab bloggers, ones that choose to write in English, and the other camp that prefers to write in Arabic and how they almost consiously refuse to cross-link.
The great divide can be shown clearly by the variation of the qualities in every group. For example, most members of group A (bloggers in English) are liberals who look to West with admire, and tend to criticize the situation in their countries harshly. They have little or no HTML knowledge, and they like to start blogging using a free service such as Blogger.
In the other hand, most members of group B (bloggers in Arabic) are expert programmers who look to West in suspicious, and write their blogs with Islamic sense. Of course, there are some exceptions in both sides, but I can’t study every individual case in this article.
While I have never shied from adding links to any Arab or Arabic blog as evidenced both on this site and of course Arablogger, I can understand where Ahmed is going with this. Refusing to link (and even use the trackback tool which is a necessity for growth I think) because some feel that they are in camp A or B exclusively is silly.
Blogs to me are the zeitgeist of a community, so bloggers should actively encourage cross-linking and popularising the activity as much as possible.
Unfortunately I’ve been attacked several times within the comments and trackbacks by spammers, so I’ve switched trackback off for now, but every blogger should install trackback as a matter of course so that the conversation can actually go the complete circle and aid in the discovery of other bloggers so the Arab blogging scene can explode and consume the traditional news sources which are nothing more than government propaganda/mouth-pieces.
Ahmed also has a nice review of some blogs he frequents. Thank you for your kind words Ahmed!
Comments
The Great Divide
I understand Ahmed’s point of view too, although I too link to Arab blogs and don’t really differentiate between bloggers who write in English, Arabic or even French.
I think it’s great that a lot of Arab blogs are popping up everywhere, but I think that one of the essential things for them to succeed is to have a lot of crosslinking between them, no matter the language.
The Great Divide
nice article… although it seems that ahmad is missing a whole group of blogs written in arabic and are liberals or seculars….
Mohammed
http://digressing.blogspot.com
The Great Divide
I am sorry but Mr. Ahmed, said with all the due respect, is truly off of track with his conclusions, and in a way that is not so harmless – that’s the problem with it.
He writes:
================
I have noticed that English-writing Arab bloggers are living in their own world, and the Arabic-writing Arab bloggers are living in another world.
================
There is only one reason a non native english speaker who publishes online may decide to write in english: so TO REACH THE WIDER POSSIBLE AUDIENCE AMONG THE POSSIBLE ONES.
All the other considerations seem out of -excuse me, can’t find a better term- sort of a malignant paranoia (no longer referring to Mr. Ahmed specifically with the last sentence).
Yet, not that I want to be gratuitously polemic, but why Mr. Ahmed draws a political conclusion even in a choice that, clearly, has NOTHING political in it, or economical, or racist?
One writes a site: this ALREADY means he / she wants to be read. Otherwise one would write a personal diary.
Therefore, one who has an acceptable grasping of english may decide to write in english. This has, simply, NOTHING to do with hating this or that or the “west” or the “east” and other comeback cold war like mindsets that sound so much like “us against them”.
It is a FACT that english is spoken in all North America, Uk, All Australia, and that it is infinitely more likely that a person NOT born in any of those country may be able to read and understand some ENGLISH rather than, for instance, some italian, or german, or russian, or arabic, or indian, or chinise, or japanese.
If I write in german, I write for germans and for a happy few else. If I write in arabic, I am writing for arabs only. If I write in chinese, I am writing for chinese only.
So there is not a world here and another there, but only persons (writing in english) who try to live in the world as a WHOLE, and reach all its ramifications AS FAR AS POSSIBLE for in babylon we lack an universal language, and then there are persons who want to live in the world of their own: so it is not a small world versus another small world: it is the whole of the world versus one small world alone, if we should (which I DOUBT) insist into seeing a fence (the big “divide”) in this. Writing in english is PRECISELY an attempt to TRESPASS the divide, NOT an attempt to ENTRENCH in it!
As for crosslinking, it is OBVIOUS that a site whose purpose is to reach out to as many reader as possible with a somewhat universally intellegible language and with a prevalent alphabet (it is true that in, say, russian schools they teach the latin alphabet, but it is not that in UK schools they teach the cyrillic, is it?!) links sites that are in english: what would be the point with presenting a product geared to address as many persons as possible, if then you say to them: and now go read this integration, though you won’t understand one word of it.
How a political conclusion (quote: “For example, most members of group A are liberals who look to West with admire, and tend to criticize the situation in their countries harshly.”) can be drawn also from such an obvious thing that had nothing to do with politics but only with the desire to reach out towards the wider possible audience, is simply a sad proof that those who want to radicalize the world are doing an excellent work at it: it is becoming a filter through which we read and see also the most trivial things with a NATURALITY that is as much IMPRESSIVE by now as much as it goes as a self evident gait: we ascribe it to all by now!
What next, a political conclusion about why the sands in arab countries are so white, cause they are casting innuendos at white suprematists?
Alberto
http://www.unitedscripters.com/
The Great Divide
easy on Ahmad Alberto 🙂
I guess what he meant is that people who think of reaching out to the “big world” by writing in English have certain charectaristsics he noted… and those who like to stay in the “small world” – like myself- by writing in Arabic have other certain charectaristics he also noted…
not that I agree with his conclusion, but I doubt it has something to do with the people who want to radicalize the world..
Mohammed
http://digressing.blogspot.com
Re: The Great Divide
You might have a point or two Alberto, in a different circumstance though. While Ahmed’s conclusions are not based on scientific research, generally I have noticed the trend he alludes to as well. However I take his conclusion as general rather than specific. Maybe an over-simplification of the wide scene…
The Great Divide
well of course since Ahmed is the author of the proposed thoughts, he also becomes a more impersonal “entity” towards whom observations are addressed, or flung, but they are not meant as personal actually: one says “Ahmed” meaning by this a way to recapitulate in one word a more impersonal “metaphor”; sort of: “Ahmed as the trail of possible implications that, proposing the topic, he unwillingly comes to personify”. Sort of, you see.
Yet, without focusing on Mr. Ahmed any longer who as you rightly stress carries no particular responsibility, it is still true the pattern that I highlight, once it is DISENGAGED from Mr. Ahmed: for if it would haven’t be true at all, I would have not even proposed it.
Writing in english is indeed the most logical way to make onself read by the widest possible audience, and thus this goal may not be deemed as something that plays a marginal role: if english is indeed, as it is, the most widely (and likely!) understood language, it is then syllogystic that those who elect it as the language for their sites, do so because they have in mind precisely that attached consequence: access and address AS MANY readers AS possible.
That’s the obvious goal.
Now, when we have reached the point where this natural conclusion is completely taken over and bypassed by an infinitely less obvious one, namely the political interpretation, we have definitely touched a shore where we must wonder if the radicalization of these years we live is really making us live an hallucination, where all is interpreted via the filter “west-est”, as if it were what it is not: the natural interpretation of facts.
It is true vice versa.
Since I love Mahmood’s blog, and I am a person who enjoys thinking about things, let me elaborate. I too run a website where I write aboutthe things I like, and I chose to write it in english.
Now, it could be argued: you yourself prove our point (I say “our” in the impersonal sense of “folks who think that way”), you’re writing in english cause you live in the “west” and you have reached intellectual conclusions in your life accordingly to which the USA is not at all that incarnation of evil that the vulgata of our days ascribe to it: thence, “our point is proved once more, not once less”.
Let me say this is a false conclusion. It is like, if you may like the “allegory”, the so called “false positives” in medicine.
In fact I have a propensity to regard the Usa as a basically (basically may mean in the eventual run of course: it is obvious that in the Usa there has been also bad things like for instance slavery; but it is also obvious that the Usa was the first country where a civil war was fought exactly to eliminate slavery: in soviet russia, or in fascist europe, no one ever thought that one could fight a civil war in order to set slaves FREE, on the contrary they all agreed to fight in order to make even MORE slaves!) positive force in history is not what induced me to write in english: it is PRECISELY this conclusion that I challenge and I say: it is quite WRONG!
Prove of it is that if rather than english the most commonly accepted language would have been german, there we go: I would have written my site in GERMAN, and YET I would still have retained my ideas about the issues of our times.
Drawing POLITICAL conclusions by the fact some blogs are written in english sounds like an obsession, rather than a statistical assessment or a refined analytical interpretation.
I hope I have made myself understood better, and that my points make plausible sense, for I do think there is a worrysome side in that interpretation I contest, given our radicalist times – aside from the fact that probably, if the accepted language would have been German, it would have meant that Hitler won, and none of us would be here writing anything at all I guess.
ciao
Alberto
The Great Divide
sorry for the mispelling “Ahmed”, was meant to be Ahmad. Well, one involuntary evidence that he as a person was never considered the “adversary”: when one has a personified adversary, one would remember very well the name 🙂
Alberto
Re: The Great Divide
Yes Alberto I see your point and what you’re trying to convey, and I agree with you. Ascribing a blog’s political inclinations because of the language it is written in is a patently false assumption.
However, having visited the majority of Arab blogs which happen to be written in English, I can tell you that Ahmed’s assumption here is correct! That assumption is possibly happenstance, but in this particular case it is mostly true.
I agree however that this particular case is more of an exception to the rule rather than the rule itself, maybe because the majority of Arab bloggers writing in English have at some point in their lives been influenced by less dictatorial/liberal societies as in Europe/North America due to studies or other reasons of extended stay and intermingling, or maybe even just because of TV!
no trackbacks for the moment
they were quick the bastards.. their bot just unloaded about 20 spam trackbacks, so in order not to fill up the database with junk, I’ve had to remove the trackback once again… sorry.
The Great Divide
Mahmood:
You took off TrackBacks? I was getting error reports when I tried to use a manual TB to you.
Cited your discussion here on my entry called:
M.E. BLOG ROAMING
–button
Re: The Great Divide
thanks for that… I had to switch it off due to plenty of spam activity, it’s on again (cringe!) I’ll be traveling for the next week starting tonight and won’t have access to email/web much, so I hope the spammers behave until I come back!
Re(1): The Great Divide
Mtv Scapegoat of the Moment?
The Great Divide
It seems that what Alberto is describing is the network effect when he says you can reach a wider audience in English than Arabic or German or French, et cetera.
When the railroads first came to America, each railroad used a different gauge of track (ie the width the rails were set apart) so that only their own trains could run on their track. They sought to monopolize their territory by closing their system off to competitors. However, they found that they benefitted from synchronizing their gauge with adjacent railroads so that they could run on each other’s tracks. Each station became more valuable because it could dispatch goods to more stations on the total combined rail network. As one standard became common, it made great sense for small railroads to change their guage to the standard to tap into the common rail network that spread across the country. So, in the end, the closed systems joined the open systems because cooperation empowered them more than enforcing local monopolies.
The same thing happenned with other technology. VHS took over the video market from Betamax. Now DVD is taking it over from VHS. For a while, record albums were the standard and then CDs and now it is changing to something else. Microsoft Windows is the standard operating system for small computers. History shows that any technology will naturally adopt a standard which will dominate about 85% of the market.
English is the standard language of the world, much like French was in an earlier age or Latin before that. Part of it is due to the legacy of colonialism which spread English around the world. Arabic, on the other hand, is not a world standard largely because for much of the last millenium it rejected contact with the outside world. It thought it would benefit from a closed system, maintaining a local monopoly. The real power of English is that it represents an open system that freely accepts ideas from everywhere.
You can’t help but think that there is a political dimension to picking the language in which you chose to publish a website. The first task of writing is to determine your audience. Publishing in Arabic constrains your audience and is an indirect vote for a closed system. Publishing in English reaches a great part of the world and so supports an open system.
Steve
Re(2): The Great Divide
damn that’s quick I was going to post that in about an hour!