The plot to destroy Egyptian identity
Submitted by infojunkie on Fri, 2009-05-01 09:13.
Try a little experiment: stand in the middle of any Cairene street and loudly call for Mohamed, in a tone that indicates familiarity and slight irritation. Chances are, a large portion of the male population will look to respond to you.
Now a harder experiment: obtain the student roster of Cairo University and in a randomly chosen class, count the number of names made up of combinations of Ahmed and Mohamed: a large percentage again. Look at the rest: mostly made up of combinations of first names. Only a small majority will have names ending with a proper surname, identifying a family.
Logistically, that has always been an annoyance and a source of errors. Name collision is so high that some organizations, including the government, are asking for quadruple names in order to lessen the chances of collision.
How do names evolve in modern Egyptian society? Children append to their names that of their fathers and grandfathers. Some choose a great-grandfather's name. Siblings end up with different trailing names. Moreover, the social census bureau makes endless mistakes and arbitrary decisions while recording the names.
At the social level, and that's the point here, I think that the disuse of surnames and the ensuing naming chaos is leading to complete dissolution of the family concept. The inability to call a relative, even a sibling, with the same name as ourselves immediately diminishes the natural bond between us. And more importantly, by cutting us off our roots and our lineage, it wipes our personal and social histories, our collective experiences and our pride.
Is this a further indication of the decay of Egyptian society, or is it the result of a concerted effort to keep a whole people subjected to helplessness and abuse? The former is certain, but the latter is an important question.
If we agree that ultimately, not having surnames is detrimental to progress (both self and social) then we should think of how to restore them. This would unfortunately require a top-down decision because very few people are aware of this handicap. And there's no guarantee the government would be interested or ready to undertake an 80-million-fold modification of their documents. However, since we're dreaming, requiring 3 names whose last is a surname would be a very good step, forcing people to invent names, even if disconnected from the past, that future generations can start rallying behind.
Mixed
I have thought about this subject before, and I have mixed opinions about it.
On one hand, I find the idea of preserving oneself's family history and heritage very romantic and could be regarded as aiding the preserving a *shape* of society, as you wrote, specially a traditional one.
On other hand, diminishing the importance of family names is in fact one way of increasing the degree of social mix-up and forgoing tribal, class and heridatry esatblished positions, which, many a time, are causes of social set-back. In modern, young societies like the United States of America names mostly have no meaning whatsoever, personal and family. That's why they turned their description to "first" and "last" instead.
As you also noticed, the way the Egyptian bereaucratic system works and the less-than-functional mentality of most public servants lead to a situation where names are chopped from the end after a certain count regardless of significance. I'm sure you can design relatively simple algorithms that are smarter than this. Also, the content of many people with simply knowing their names themselves and putting little weight on formal documents, are all factors leading to the situation you describe. I borrow here what some Americans - who are proud of their family names, this time - sarcastically call "cocktail waitresses" society.
My paternal family have a surname which we are raised to cherish and preserve. In many situations members of my family have to be very patient and persistent, for example when registering new-borns, to have it recorded our way, not the clerk's.
There's also a natural phenomena known as the extinction of family names which may have a hand in this. See Galton-Watson_process article on Wikipedia. (For some reason I'm unable to add a hyperlink here as my comment is then regarded as spam. I've tried both HTML and MediaWiki markup.)
No OpenID for loggin in yet?
Thanks for the fascinating
Thanks for the fascinating Wikipedia reference. Here's the link to the Galton-Watson process article, and I am investigating the spam comment issue.
I am not sure I agree about the meaninglessness of first and last names in the USA as an example. I was unable to find references to "cocktail waitresses" as related to family names, so I can't comment on this point - save that it sounds like the comment I am making, except in sarcastic form. However, looking at the more general picture, we certainly find *continuity* in last names, even if the name itself is merely Jackson, Jefferson, or the son of any other father. The point I was trying to make is not in the meaning of the surname but rather in the fact that the surname survives in each new generation. For some stats, see here.
The larger point was that the disappearance of surnames is causing:
interesting indeed
Well, actually the reference to "a generation of cocktail waitresses was" is a quote by a character played by Meg Rayyan in a film, in which she was mocking the same phenomena you refer to, but more precisely about young women's tendency to omit present themselves using only first [nick]names. I should have been more precise.
As for the meaningfulness of lastnames in the US, it seems to me that people change them at will more often. There are also lastnames that are totally madeup, with no continuity past a couple of generations. Aslo children don't always keep their parents last names. Many of them, there as well as here, are so generic to be usful as a bounding heritage. I don't say this is always the case, of course.
On a side note, I've been also fascinated by the naming systems of different cultures, and bedazzled by some of the asian, not because of the - for us - reversed order, but becuase of the sum of information recorded in them and how they describe one's relation to his relatives! See the Chinese names, for examples.
Returning to our main subject; aren't many lastnames too generic anyway to serve as bounding Including the originally nordic *son ones, and as such suffering collisions as well?
Surnames based on geographical places for example are shared by many, and can change within a generation. Their mere nature means that they come about as with a change of residnce and regardless of prior names one might have had.
Another class, crafts surnames, are also not clan-bounding; and similar to them are archaic bearucratic and militray inspired surnames.
In a way, last names are descriptive constructs rather than *static final* ones. For exampole, women would have their last names formed in the feminine form sometimes.