Colonial Legacy & Cultural, Linguistic Penetration, Op-ed

The history of many Arab countries has produced cultures that have been the fruit of a multi-lateral interaction, races, and components.

But the colonialist tried with his utmost to undermine them, obliterate their features, influence their languages, as well as erasing their cultural and linguistic personality, depending on them not only linguistically, but also politically and economically and in the field of elite formation. This is evidenced through the fact that England and France are still until now, having the final word in many countries, and dominate their education system from childhood to adulthood.

A country like Morocco was keen more than its neighbors in the Maghreb region to institute sublime laws which allow the protection of linguistic and cultural constants without neglecting the rules of openness to the world, to build a unified family and a joint community.

Whatever the analyzes which talk about the internal factors and capabilities in enabling the empowerment of penetration and external disintegration operations, introduced by colonial policies after the First World War, there is no escape from consensus on the external role in achieving pision and fragmentation and its multiple woes, including cultural penetration. This interpretation, of course, is due to the internal fragility of social structures, the weakness of the integrative fabric in their structures, and other multiple and overlapping factors.

Arab culture is still living today in the throes of tensions between several opposing options and within conflicting dichotomies that make it sometimes fabricated cultures, without unity and coherence, incapable of belonging to their era, hesitant between the conflict of values.

Some have called these dichotomies a (duality) when they said: The problem that confronts us and our culture is the duality which characterizes all the facilities of our material and intellectual life, no, but the problem in fact is the duplication of our stance towards this same duality.

In this perspective, some of them summarized the reasons for the Arab cultural penetration in four reasons, which can be summarized as follows:

1-Our societal reality and its perceptions, trends, and accumulations.

2-The audiovisual media penetration through mass media threaten values and morals and invade emotion and imagination.

3-The failure of Arabs in adopting change has led to a failure in action and plan at all scientific, cultural, economic levels at the national level, and this is an indication of our lack of understanding to contemporary civilization’s foundations and what should be adopted and planned.

4-Projecting the present to the future and providing inconsistent solutions for the present with all its shortcomings and reproducing the old at the economic, social, intellectual, and cultural level, etc.

Everyone knows that the goals of cultural penetration or cultural hegemony aim at the cultural appropriation of the other party, spreading the culture of the dominant party, undermining the foundations of local or national cultures for the sake of a single model of thinking, and spreading certain human values. This is the apparent goal of cultural hegemony, but its deep goal is to disable the minds in a certain culture from creativity.

I still keep the text of an email sent to me by the late Moroccan minister and thinker Mohamed El-Arabi El-Massari summarizing all the problems that we are discussing in this article, through which he confided to me that French, just as Spanish has been for two hundred years with regard to our diplomatic and commercial dealings, is a language of openness and communication that cannot be neglected, and now It has become a fixed capital for Moroccans, although it was imposed by the negative effect of colonialism.

What annoys us and has become a provocation factor is not the presence of French or English, but rather their tyranny, which prompted some to impose monopolistic hegemony. The lack of insight into the empowerment of French or English at the expense of Arabic is what has become for some an unbearable issue….