Of Identity and Names

In Lebanon, people's first names tell a lot about the lack of an authentic identity for the people of the country.

The ancestral language of Aramaic has all but disappeared from the streets of villages and cities, to be replaced by Arabic following the Arab-Muslim invasion of the 7th century. Some church texts and prayers remain in Aramaic (also known as Syriac in its latest mutation).

Yet, the names of cities and villages retain a strong Aramaic flavor. For example, the village of Rashmaya contains the Semitic Aramaic root "rash" which means head or top (which incidentally is related to Hindi RAJ, Latin REX, meaning king or lord), and the root "maya" for water. Or Baalshmoon from "Baal" (Lord) and Eshmoon (name of a Phoenician god), thus giving "Lord Eshmoon". See for more, among other sites: [https://medium.com/@AsAbove_SoBelow/lebanese-villages-their-meanings-roots-8863b218a6c9]. Of course, the name of Beirut comes to us straight from Aramaic-Phoenician where the name Birot, coming from "bir" (pronounced "beer") for "well" and the terminal "ot" for the plural. So Beirut means "the wells".

But the Lebanese people, especially the Christians and among those the Maronites specifically, reject their ancestral identity to the benefit of the most current dominating culture. In fact, this rejection of identity goes back to the coerced conversion from Phoenician to Christian (4th-6th century AD) when Rome brutally imposed the Christian religion during the 5th century by destroying Phoenician temples and traditions considered as pagan. That was when the Phoenicians became Lebanese Christians. 

Nowadays, while this rejection of native identity under pressure from an outside dominant culture applies particularly to urban elites, it has now spread to the Lebanese countryside and the highland villages on account of the ease of transportation and access to the Internet. For the generation that was born in the 1920s under the French mandate, names given to boys and girls were mostly French. Names of that generation were Claire, Violette, Arlette, Chantal, Edith, etc... for women, and Paul, Jacques, Claude, Rodolphe, Philippe... for men. With the current supremacy of English and pedestrian American marketing pressures that Hollywood and other American franchises exercise, you increasingly hear names like Rachel, Rebecca, Jessica, Stephanie... and Steve, Joe, Anthony, Bob, etc.

Lest it be forgotten, Aramaic is considered the mother of all Near-Eastern languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. So back in the time of King Sleiman [westernized as Solomon], son of Dawood [westernized as David] who had great relations with the Phoenician King Hiram of Tyre (as related in the biblical account of the construction of the Temple), I imagine that Hebrews and Phoenicians spoke pretty much the same language, with perhaps regional differences in accent, that later evolved into different dialects and eventually different languages. Jesus himself spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew.

In my own grandparents' generation (born circa 1880s), I often heard names like Dawood (David),  Gede3on (Gideon), Gil3aad (Gilead), Shawool (Paul) and many others. All Christian western names whose origins are in the narrative of the Gospels have roots in Aramaic. Names like Joseph, Simon, John, Matthew etc... were westernized from Yosef, Sem3aan, Yohanna, Matta, etc... So when people of the Near East use Western names, they are in fact using their own original names that were bastardized by the West (Roman Empire, Crusades, Western colonialism, etc.) and returned to them. And in their mercantile ignorance of their own culture, the culturally-submissive Lebanese reject their original ancestral names and prefer the bastardized "modern" western names.

There is a village in the Matn District of Lebanon called Himlaya, where a Saint was sanctified by the Vatican a few years ago. The female saint's name is Rafka. In their mentality of strict for-profit neanderthals, the locals do whatever they can to monetize the saint: they invite tourists (despite the village being a chaotic place with bad roads and garbage strewn everywhere, with neither the villagers nor their municipality undertaking any collective action) to come and visit the shrine of the Saint and buy cheap souvenirs and ointments more reminiscent of paganism than authentic religious faith.

 

Here is an example of the cretinized English that the village priest of Himlaya use at the Shrine. 

"Land is Sacred. Please Commit Calme & Decency" says the sign, obviously Google-translated. A better language was offered to the local priest, but he refused to change it. Lucky that Google Translate did not err even more, we could be faced with something like "Land is Scared. Please Commit Murder & Indecency".

Now Rafka is the Aramaic version of Rebecca. In Hebrew it became Rivka. In fact, I have heard southern Lebanese pronounce it Rifka. As often happens, when a Saint is sanctified by Rome, the name becomes very popular and most girls born around the time of the sanctification are named in honor of the Saint. But not among the characterless, identity-less, Maronites. They insist that the girl be named Rebecca, not Rafka, because the Western version of the name is cool and modern (i.e. it's on television and in American movies), while that of the Semitic "Rafka" is antiquated, archaic, and uncool. As I discovered from pressing them on why "Rebecca" and not "Rafka", you get a sense that they are in fact ashamed of using Rafka, which denotes an inferiority complex via-à-vis the West. Rebecca, on the other hand, conjures up images of American movie stars, entertainers, singers that have invaded every household in Lebanon and around the world. But somehow, the Lebanese are much worse than other cultures in relegating their own identity to the background. It may be a deliberate defensive mechanism of a minority desperately trying to oppose the majority Muslim domination. But in their ignorance, the Lebanese think that "Rafka" is Arabic, which is why they reject it, when in fact "Rafka" is not Arabic, it is their own Aramaic. This is really pervasive: Marie or Myryam instead of Maryam; Steve instead of Estfen; Rachel, instead of Rahil; Paul, instead of Shawool (or Saul), etc. 

In some cases, the Aramaic name may have been exchanged long time ago with the West, but has no modern western cognate, and therefore remains intact because it was not bastardized. In these cases, people use the name "as is" because they are stuck with it. The name of another local saint, Charbel, is a case in point: It has no western cognate. According to Internet sources, there was a Saint Charbel of Edessa around 107 AD (also Sarvillos, Zarvilos, Sarbelius, Thiphael, Charbil, Sharbel, Sharbil, Arabic: شربل, Aramaic: ܩܕܝܫܐ ܡܪܝ ܫܪܒܝܠ.

In his book, "The Maronites in History" (1986, Syracuse University Press), Matti Moosa (who at least is not ashamed of his name; he could have used Matthew Moses to be cool) says in his introduction:

"Maronites today suffer from a serious identity problem. They have not been able to decide whether they are descendants of an ancient people called the Marada (Mardaites) or Arabs or of Syriac-Aramaic stock. Unless the Maronites solve this identity problem, their conflicts with other minority religious groups in Lebanon will never be remedied."