The nation-building process in the Arab world or Arabic-speaking world is of a recent history. Many modern Arab, Muslim and Western thinkers today think that nationalism in the Middle East is contingent on the Arabic language. In this paper, I will examine the works of thinkers who explored the role of language, standard/ local, in building the nation that they aspired to. I will consider two cases, that of Lebanon, and that of Egypt. Within the Lebanese context, I will examine the project of Antun Saade who realized the importance of language as a nation-building tool, explore his delimitation of the scope of language territory, and the reason he called for a Greater-Syrian Nation rather than a wider Arab Nationalism, or a more local Lebanese one. Comparatively, I will inspect the role of language in the project of the Lebanese poet/philosopher Said Aql who called for the use of a modified Latin alphabet, based on the Phoenician alphabet, to write the Lebanese dialect. Egypt could not go as far in calling for the use of Pharaonic language or hieratic signs. The Coptic language was under revival attempts, but was limited by its liturgical scope. Egyptian thinkers adopted other measures and features that are specific to "Egyptian Arabic". In this respect, the point of view of Taha Hussein as to the use of language to build the nation is notable, his own language, and his call for "Pharaonism" will be weighed against the "Phoenicianism" call.

In 1946, thousands of Armenians boarded cargo ships from various ports in the Middle East, including Beirut and Alexandria, to "repatriate" to the homeland, the Soviet Republic of Armenia. Organized by both the USSR and local Armenian communist and nationalist parties, this was an attempt to collect the Armenian diaspora under the authority of both the Soviet Republic and the Soviet Union. Coordinators distributed romantic imagery via the Armenian press that depicted the republic as the genuine, fertile, and natural home for Armenians, distancing them from the local populations of Egyptians and Lebanese. In their quest to organize and gather the nation, however, these press outlets and organizers did not acknowledge that these "repatriates" did not hail from the geographic space of the Soviet Union, but rather, were from Southeastern Anatolia, part of Turkey. Just over fifty years later, hundreds of Armenians board a different type of ship, an Italian-owned Costa(R) cruise ship that departs from Ft. Lauderdale to sail around the Caribbean for seven days in January. Organized by the Armenian Dashnak political party, which also supported the repatriation efforts fifty years prior, "for the promotion of Armenian fellowship and awareness among the Armenian communities," these participants hail from over ten countries, including the now independent state of Armenia. There is an almost constant stream of "Armenian" activities, including language courses, dance classes, lectures, church services, and concerts. "Cruise ambassadors" are selected from different cities throughout the world that have Armenian populations, encouraging Armenians to further the "Armenian Cause" by boarding the ship. Armenian lobbying groups, in conjunction with the Dashnak party also utilize the nation on board to extend their national mission and "educate thousands." This paper juxtaposes these two floating experiences. In 1946, there was a concerted effort to create the nation through the Soviet Union. In 1998 (and every year since then), citizens of various countries, construct a "nation" that is only in existence for seven days every January, which moves about the Caribbean. Instead of the infrastructure of the Soviet Union to service the nation, hundreds of crewmembers, mostly from Southeast Asia, serve this transient one. How does this cruise-liner, which travels through international waters, docking at various international ports of call, served by hundreds of nationals from a multitude of nation-states, and whose residents aboard are temporary, and change yearly, act as space beyond the perimeters of the nationn

In what ways did the promise of Pan-Arabism provide possibilities for moving beyond the limits of the nation-state? What are the ways in which different understandings of spatial configurations can challenge the inequalities and shortcomings of the nation-state? Is this a failed dream to be buried and forgotten or a possibility to be resurrected and resuscitated once again? This paper explores these questions through a reading of Baha' Taher's novel al-Hubb fil-manfa (Love in Exile, 1995), exploring the ways in which the literary form of the novel continues to be one of the foremost genres for the articulation of such questions. Taher sets up a world where his characters, the multiple exiles of the novel, come together in a space that is not specified nationally. In this world there seems to be a moment where alternative forms of community are possible, where dreams of different collectivities exist, and where the rigidity of the category of the national is temporarily unsettled. This paper will also explore the ways in which a writer like Taher is able to manipulate the form of what was once regarded as the national genre par excellencee How does Taher play on the idea of the social realist novel as a way of questioning the national entity with which it was so intimately tiedt In merging the fictive and the real, the novel and journalistic production, Taher raises questions not only about the possibility of representation but also about the role of the writer in the contemporary context.

Waguih Ghali's Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), is a novel-length reflection on the processes at work behind our understanding ourselves as possessing a particular, nation-state based identity. The novel is set in the 1950s Cairo, the speaker is Ram (a nickname for Ramos) a twenty-something Egyptian living in Cairo in the time of Nasser's Egypt, "a young and 'poor' aristocrat turned communist through a liberal education, disillusionment with his own class, and a realisation of its moral bankruptcy and social injustice." A critical and dissatisfied citizen of the regime; his voyage to England occupies a crucial section of the novel and firmly places it in the ranks of novels that depict the experiences and repercussions of travel, displacement and estrangement. Displacement in this novel is legible not only in the characters' geographical shift from Egypt to England, but also in large measure as the ways in which the protagonists are "out of place" in space of a new, Egyptian nation. The characters' multiple displacements from their native Egypt and their social classes form the narrative scaffolding for the exploration of issues surrounding identity, sincerity vs. authenticity, class, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, leftist politics and Marxism. The poetics of displacement lead to the exploration of an "authentic" - a polyvalent concept that includes the notion of authentic self-expression and an authentic Egyptian identity. While Beer in the Snooker Club has a number of commonalities with Arabic novels of the twentieth century, it is not only the fact that it is written in English that makes it stand out: its dual orientation toward both Europe and Egypt is fundamental to our understanding Ghali's complex attitude. Rather than the putative novelistic setting in which the trajectory of the characters' movement is a one-way movement from East to West for the purpose of education (e.g., Haqqr's Umm Heshim's Lamp, Al-Hakqm's A Bird from the East) or as economic migrants (Kanaf nh's Men in the Sun or cAbd Al-Maj(d's The Other Place) Ghali limns a scene in which West is always and already bound up with - even constitutive of - the East, and complicates the culture gap between the two from the outset. These characters carry with them certain notions and expectations of England that are exploded upon their encounter with England as an experience, as the unitary image of a national, Egyptian identity is rendered problematic from the outset.