rebirth and the promotion of
the Syriac language
We attend a will l.on conceives more and more the will to defend the minority languages, French in Canada, the Catalan in Cata. Foreword qu.il is necessary written!
The importance and the role of the Syriac culture
The Syriac culture has, from a historical point of view, played a capital role in the formation of the Arab culture like other pre-Arabic cultures of the Middle East, the Phoenician culture, for example.
The Syriac language has, without any doubt, a vocation of universalism which comes from its ethnic and religious origins. Let’s not forget that this language was the one spoken by Jesus-Christ and that Christianity is intended for all humanity. The Syriac language was a paramount and shining culture in the Levant at the time of its splendor, think of King Abjar of Edessa. This vitality came from the specific characters of the Syriac nation: plunging its roots at the beginning of mankind history in Mesopotamia and in the Fertile Crescent.
It has preserved a particular aspect, which reflects the world conception it has, until the moment when the Arab culture, by the force of the things, completely integrated it in its cultural orbit. Let us not forget that until the first half of the nineteenth century, the Syriac language was still the common language among the Maronites in the Lebanese mountains. This being stated, we are all very conscious, whether we like it or dislike it , that the Arabic language and culture became part of us and that its promotion, its use and the feeling of belonging toward Arabism - as the feeling of belonging to any culture - can and should be regarded as an additional cultural richness.
The obliteration of the Syriac culture
It seems that the Syriac culture does not exist any more as a cultural reality that’s preserved in all its ways of expression. Except in some isolated villages in the center of Syria, the most known of them is, of course, Mallula.
The Syriacs, whom remains with a strong vivacity and have an undeniable originality, seems in their overwhelming majority to have been resigned to lay on the Arab cultural model, and in the case of Syriacs living abroad - in the diaspora - they lay on English, French, Swedish, or any other language to express themselves.
However, there still remains of the permanent and characteristic Syriac features in fields as varied as the ecclesiastical liturgy, the literary oeuvres or arts.
It should however be recognized that the current expressions of the Syriac culture are no more than a vestige, and in most cases, that can not be recited by our youth. Worse, its even perceived by them like a off the beaten path (track) heritage of by gone days. A culture is alive and maintained only if it is renewed and spread. However how a culture can be renewed if it is not taught to our children and if we bent to erase it from our liturgy in order to replace it by English liturgical prayers, which some say can be done by preserving a certain syriac rhythm and all that is made in the name of cultural integration or cultural accessibility. The Syriac culture could not be the sign of a wish of binding ourselves; it is a resolute and firm defense, while being a very considerate action, of our collective conscience. It is not an unfruitful will to defend so-called "good old days" that are over and done, nor it is a will to defend cultural values that are narrow "isolationists" or "ghetto style" like some may have described it during the council meeting.
For us it does not make sense to have great or minor cultures, a cuture is only the particular expression of a people. And in our case it is all what constitutes the common ground and the proper good of any person who identify himself as a Syriac and which is conscious that our Syriac culture had known, in its glorious time, to carry out an extraordinary and exhaustive synthesis of Christian spirituality.
The Syriac culture is thus not the use of the crumbs of one oneself-saying Syriac culture, which would only be a foreign culture. It is the return to a spirit which has been ours for several millennium and which is denatured and threatened today as it had never yet been it during all ages.
This is why we estimate that we risk to go towards the apocalypse.
It should be well understood, whatever social considerations we make, that the Syriac culture will be, if the liturgy were to be recited in foreign language, no more the Syriac culture we know.
It will be a Syriac ‘’neo-culture’’ which actually is completely renegade of itself. We restate that an opposition to adopt a foreign language is not an opposition to our full and real integration, our opposition to exclusively adopt to French or Arab in the liturgy is not an opposition to the other (nonsyriac) cultures.
For those reasons we make the following assertions:
1° - the current Syriac culture is not any more in a position to resist the danger it faces the cultural imperialism of the environnement we are living in.
2° - the Syriac culture can resist and reappear, in its originality and its dynamism, only by creating Syriac learning schools.
3° - this true "self-reconquest" is possible only by taking into account the ethnic bases and the undeniable cultural realities, which liturgy is one of the most obvious expressions.
4° - such a project is possible only by placing at our service the most qualified people and the most modern equipment and means of networking and diffusion.
Such a program requires a political good-will at the same time hierarchy connected with the church but also a significant support of each one of us to carry out this struggle. That is called for us "Arameism". It is thus advisable to define it and to give the place returns to it. Such a project can and must fall under the framework of a Charter of defense and promotion of the Syriac language and Culture (CDIS).
