“Those Who Pronounce the Ḍād”: Language and Ethnicity in the Nationalist Poetry of Fuʾad al-Khatib (1880–1957)

The Ḍād is a letter of the Arabic alphabet that represents a sound which Arabs claim that only they pronounce. The epithet lughat al-Ḍād, the language of the Ḍād, therefore singles out the Arabic language as, supposedly, distinctive and exclusive to the Arab ethnic community, or, in other words: for al-nāṭiqūn bi-l-Ḍād, or those who pronounce the Ḍād. The veracity of the notion that the Ḍād may be unique to the Arabic language is not what is at stake here. However, the notion of distinctiveness that it represents goes back to the times of the early Islamic conquests, when Arabs asserted their dominance, ridiculing nonArabs’ inability to pronounce the language correctly. The epithet was still used at the turn of the twentieth century to challenge Ottoman hegemony.1 The letter Ḍād became a trope for the Arabic language as a whole, and, as this chapter illustrates, a marker of an ethnical boundary to speakers of other languages, illustrating the processes of vernacularization and nationalization of the classical Arabic language. As lughat al-Ḍād, classical Arabic was no longer a religious and literary idiom shared by Muslims across a range of ethnicities and a lingua franca in a region shared by various Arab and non-Arab religious communities, but a standardized language that members of a specific ethnicity claimed for themselves. The poetry of Fuʾad al-Khatib (1880–1957) is exemplary for the cultural labour that went into this process of deliberate demarcation. For al-Khatib the language was not only what distinguished the true adherents to the Arab nation from others, but it was also under threat of being encroached upon by Western languages via imperialist dominance. As we shall see, for al-Khatib reciting a poem meant discharging a weapon in order to control linguistic shape and semantic heritage, and thus to preserve distinction and dignity.