The prominent Saudi intellectual and journalist, Suleiman Al-Hattlan, has written several articles over the last three weeks, most notably in Asharq Al-Awsat and Al-Watan, dismissing most commentary in the Arab print media today as being essentially worthless.

The public debate there, he says, is dominated not by "professional journalists" but by "unrestrained poets" who, much in the manner of rap musicians, are more into rhyming than reasoning. Al-Hattlan, one of the dozen or so winners at Harvard, in the year 2000, of the much-coveted Nieman fellowship in journalism, bemoans what he calls the sloppy standards of the craft where editors do not hold reporters’ or commentators’ feet to the fire when they subvert language. I join his lament.

It all has to do with language, you see, and our facile abuse of it. An axiom among linguists is that language and culture are one and the same. The speech act, in other words, does not have a purely communicative motive, as if it were a mere static medium of rational exchange. Rather, it has an organic, reciprocal relationship to a community’s values, identity and felt reality.

We suborn words at peril of suborning those humanizing forces in social life that define our landscape of experience, along with its fields of idiomatic, symbolic and communal reference — in short, who we are.

My conviction is that we shall not move forward in our generation so long as we refuse to recognize that expository discourse has guidelines, and when those guidelines are lax or nonexistent, then cheapness and chaos rule in society.

An example of that is one article that I have before me at this moment by an Egyptian writer in Al-Ahram newspaper, identified as a noted thinker ("mufakker") and an academic ("ductor"), who tells his readers that when President Bush Sr. visited Kuwait in the wake of the Gulf War, "the Kuwaiti authorities gave him a ton and a half of gold" to take with him. Neither proof nor sourcing was offered by the author, nor demanded by the editors, or the fact checkers, of the newspaper in which the article appeared.

Take yet another example that validates Al-Hattlan’s thesis about the irresponsible manner in which debate is conducted in the Arab media. I am now perusing the transcript of an interview on Al-Jazeera’s talk show, known as The Opposite Direction (shouldn’t that, incidentally, be translated as "The Other Perspective"?) during which Christopher Ross, former US ambassador to Syria, locks horns in fluent Arabic with one Ibrahim Allush, introduced by the host as a "mass communications scholar" and editor-in-chief of an "Arab think tank’s website."

In the course of the debate, Alloush claims that "all the media conglomerates" in the US are controlled by "Jews with Zionist leanings," and that the three largest newspapers there, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, along with the three national networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, are owned by Jews. "Is that a coincidence?" Alloush challenges Ross. (I "hear" an indignant tone here, don’t you?)

I will not belabor the point with more quotes, especially from articles espousing conspiracy theories, which are ubiquitous in the Arab press. (Having a weakness for camp, I’m an enthusiastic collector of these.)

No doubt, however, you get the picture — how our public discourse has become embodied in the work of chattering, ranting, gossiping journalists or commentators who employ words with lunatic prodigality, disregarding the notion that debate is a cultivated art with well-defined guidelines where observations are expected to be compellingly matched with facts, and facts with stringently backed sources.

At no time in our history has the debilitation of genuine literacy gone further than it has in our modern age. For what other manifestation is this phenomenon expressive of?

This is particularly distressing when you consider that, at its prime, Arab civilization pioneered the primacy of logic in discourse, when respect for the sanctity of the spoken, remembered and written word was the backbone of culture and consciousness. For remember, the first word in our holy book is the injunction of God to the Prophet to "Read," from which flowed the classical Arabs’ intellectual inquisitiveness and love of knowledge.

And also remember, it was Ali bin Abi Taleb who said: "If God were to humiliate a human being, He would deny him knowledge." And while we’re still at it, let’s remember as well the saying that urges Arabs to "seek knowledge, though located as far away as China." (I find the popular translation into English of this, "Seek knowledge though it is in China," to be somewhat offensive to the Chinese.)

What the likes of Suleiman Al-Hattlan, along with other innovative, not to mention adversarial, voices are saying is that we should distance ourselves from that side in our world of discourse, dominated by charlatans, that has reduced itself to an antiquated fraud. We should not bandy words with it. For, accept, even momentarily, its conventions of statement, its lopsided view of the world, and its illiteracies, and you are caught in a net where logic is pulverized into gibberish, and language into opaque babble.

The long and short of it, you see, is that argument devoid of the poise that logic gives it is argument that inflicts violence (no other word will do here) on those primary ties between identity and social cohesion. That is so because culture is close-woven with language, inseparable from its generative — or in this case its degenerative — powers.

The words we use are, so to speak, energy quanta that insinuate themselves into our lives at numerous shaping levels. Turn language on its head and use it as jargon, evincing no respect for the objective realities around you, and you subvert, hyperbole aside, what is human in man and restore in him what is of beast. It is language, that defining mystery of our human being, after all, that severs man from the inarticulateness of the animal kingdom.

Thus when the noted "thinker" and "academic" in Al-Ahram tells us about "the one-and-half tons of gold" given to President Bush in Kuwait, it is time to say, "Thanks, Prof, but we’ll take it from here."

I say this: Just as there are laws governing our behavior in social life, there should be rules governing our use of language on the printed page.

(22 August 2002)