Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (19 page)

In all these regions where Arabic became the dominant language, a characteristic state of what is called ‘diglossia’ has set in, with a single classical form of Arabic used as an elite dialect, but different local varieties, no more mutually understandable than the Romance languages of Europe, established in everyday speech. Classical Arabic is close to, but not quite identical with, the language of the Qur’ān.

The explanation for the limit on the spread of Arabic must be sociolinguistic rather than political, religious or cultural, since the situations in which it applied were extremely various.

Iran, for over a thousand years under Achaemenids, Macedonians, Parthians and Sassanians, had been the proud fortress of Zoroastrianism. Nevertheless, it was totally subdued militarily by the Arabs in twenty years from 634. Gradually thereafter, the faith of Islam spread within it, although religious-inspired revolts were still happening well into the ninth century. It then became a heartland of Islam, in fact the stronghold of its Shia tradition, and has remained Muslim ever since.

By the mid-eighth century the official language of the government all over Iran had become Arabic, replacing the Parthians’ languages of Pahlavi in the west, and Sogdian in the far east.
⁶⁶
In the early period, Arabic-Persian bilingualism was widespread even at the court of the caliph, notably in the days of Harūn al-Rashid (786-809), who was made into a figure of legend by his appearances in
The 1001 Nights.
Al-Jahiz, who died
c.
869, tells of one Persian sage who used to read out the Qur’ān, explaining it in Arabic to those on his right, and in Persian to those on his left. Poets from Persia, such as Abu Nawas and Basshar bin Burd, were key figures in Arabic literary history.
⁶⁷
There were Persian colonies settled in Arabia and Syria, and the Arab geographer al-Muqaddasi claimed at the end of the ninth century that the purest Arabic of his time was spoken in Khurasan, in north-eastern Iran, because the Iranian scholars there made such efforts to learn it correctly.
⁶⁸
At the elite level, Arabic must have achieved almost universal coverage within Iran.

Yet Arabic never penetrated any part of Iran as a language of daily life. In a sense, the insistence on the excellence of the Arabic spoken in Iran gives this away, for it implies that Arabic was not taking root, and taking on its own character as a local dialect, as it did everywhere in the Arabic-speaking world. Geographers describing the major towns of the west in the ninth century say they were Persian-speaking. Ibn Hauqal states that the entire population of Qum was Shiite, and mostly Arab; nevertheless they all spoke Persian.
⁶⁹
Ironically, the march of Islam seems to have supported the spread of Persian out to the east: the Arab conquests in what had been Buddhist central Asia in the eighth century spread Persian, at the expense of the local languages, especially Sogdian. Presumably most of the troops were from the east of Iran, where Persian was still the lingua franca.
⁷⁰
That is why Tajikistan, and the north-western half of Afghanistan, is Persian-speaking to this day. And when five hundred years later an Islamic army penetrated into India beyond, and set up the Delhi Sultanate, it brought Persian rather than Arabic in its wake.

Some 6000 kilometres away at the other end of Islam’s domains, in the Iberian peninsula, Islam had been spread at the point of a sword by an army made up mostly of converted Berbers. Under their leader, Tāriq bin Ziyād, they had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (
Jibl al-Tāriq
, ‘the mountain of Tariq’) in 711, and after defeating the Visigothic king Roderik found themselves masters of the country. (They did attempt a major sortie north of the Pyrenees twenty years later, but were thrown back in 732, having got as far as Poitiers in central France.) Seven hundred and fifty years of Muslim presence in Spain and Portugal lay ahead; the country knew itself as
el-Andalüs
, its history was the story of different emirs contending for control, and the city of Cordoba especially became one of the cultural jewels of all Islam, especially as a home of Arabic poetry. Indeed, the emir ’ Abd al-Rahman III considered himself strong and magnificent enough in 929 to declare himself
Amir al-mu ‘minîn
, ‘Commander of the Faithful’, and so a pretending caliph of all Islam. Nevertheless, later the area of Muslim control began very gradually to be rolled back, as Christian kings grew stronger in Leon and Navarre, and later Castile and Aragon. Toledo fell in 1085, causing a new incursion of Berbers, the Almoravids, called in to redress the balance between Christian and Muslim. But after a respite, the tide continued to run against Islam: Cordoba fell in 1236 and Seville in 1248. The
’reconquista’
culminated in the capture of Granada in 1492.

During this long period Iberia must have been a bilingual zone—probably trilingual as long as waves of invading Berbers retained their own language. Some have claimed that Spanish, or its Romance forebear, had almost died out in the Islamic region by the twelfth century, replaced not by classical but by
Andalusī
Arabic, its dialectal nature showing that the language had been taken up in earnest by the people. Certainly, more than a century after the return of Christian power to Toledo, there were still large numbers of documents being written and notarised in Andalusi.
⁷¹
Federico Corriente, an expert on Andalusi, has written: ‘Bilingualism evolves rapidly into monolingualism, a process that was complete in the 13th century, which must not make us forget that in the 11th and 12th centuries, the pockets of bilingualism were already residual.’
⁷²

Executive and legislative action was taken by the new power to eliminate Arabic speech for at least three generations after 1492. In 1501 and 1511 laws were passed against the possession of most Arabic books, and in 1511 it was decreed (apparently without effect) that contracts in Arabic would no longer be valid. In 1526 it was still necessary for Charles V to order in council that only Castilian Spanish would be spoken, used for contracts and in the marketplace. Even in 1566 Philip II was decreeing that within three years all Moors (
’moriscos’
) would be allowed to speak only Castilian and not Arabic.

In Persia, then, Arabic, despite its religious prestige, had been unable to overwhelm cultural inertia; in Spain, though much more successful at first, it had finally succumbed to political, military and religious suppression. In the intermediate zone of North Africa, the picture was rather simpler. Arabic established itself first in the towns, where its main immediate competitor in the early days was Latin—and to an extent, as we have seen, Punic. For the Berbers, who accepted Islam quite readily, Arabic was at first taken only as the language of the faith. This had quite an impact, given the role of Arabic in Muslim education, and more when members of the elite began to send their sons to the east to study theology and law. Berber kingdoms of the hinterland maintained their independence as best they could, but there is no evidence of any attempt to throw off Islam as such.

It seems that Arabic only really made progress in the tenth century, after the devastation of Berber society at the hands of the Banu Hilal, a savage band of nomads.
⁷³
These seem to have been set on Maghreb society like so many wild dogs in the course of a dispute between emirates, the Fatimids in Egypt hoping that they would settle the hash of their erstwhile vassals the Zirids, a Berber clan who ruled from Tunis. Ibn Khaldün, a historian of Berber stock (with roots in El Andalus), writing two hundred years later, in Arabic, likened them to ‘a swarm of locusts’: ‘The very earth seems to have changed its nature. All the lands that the Arabs have conquered in the last few centuries, civilization and population have departed from them …’
⁷⁴

However, this put the Arabic-speaking cities in a position to provide form to this new world in North Africa: ‘… when there is an entire alteration of conditions, it is as if the whole creation had been changed and all the world transformed, as if there were a new creation, a rebirth, a world brought into existence anew’.
⁷⁵

The Berbers, once the dominant speech community all over North Africa, now became associated with distant regions, and a life unsettled. Their language lives on, though, strongest in the western area of the Maghreb, where the Banu Hilal never penetrated, and among the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara, although there are substantial pockets still along the Mediterranean.

Finally, consider the Turks, nomad forces who came into contact with Arabic, not through being conquered by its speakers, or proselytised by them, but through taking the initiative and conquering them. Coming from the north-east, they first dominated the eastern areas of Muslim power, moved to take the centre in Baghdad, and later expanded to be in effective control of the whole
Dār-al-islām.
Once they had conquered, there were none to match the Turks in their adherence to the Muslim faith. Nevertheless, they held on to their language even as they accepted the religion.

And they had one other linguistic effect: they also slackened the grip of Arabic on Persia as a whole. The Turks had first encountered the world of Islam through the Persian-speaking area of central Asia. In a sense, they saw it only through a veil of Persian gauze. And so, when the Turks began to exercise influence, Persian returned as official administrative language to Iran, with Arabic restricted more and more to religious functions.

The advent of full Turkish control under the Seljuks
^*
in the eleventh century makes clear for the first time the emerging division of function between the spiritual responsibilities of the caliph and the temporal power of the sultan, his notional protector; the sultan relied on a Turkish army, but made full use of the Persian-speaking expertise of administrators.
⁷⁶
Arabic was not going to spread across the expanse of Turkish-speaking peoples stretching out into the heart of Asia, even as they embraced Islam. They already had a lingua franca to use with their new subjects, and it was Persian. ‘After all, they all speak Persian, don’t they?’ Arabic was needed only to address God.
^†

And this indeed was to be the pattern with all the further spreads of Islam that occurred in the second millennium, notably from North Africa south of the Sahara, from Egypt and Arabia down the coast to East Africa and Madagascar, from Baghdad and Bokhara into Siberia and central Asia, from Afghanistan into India, from India into South-East Asia: Arabic was accepted as a sacred language, but had no tendency to spread as a vernacular, or even as a lingua franca for contacts among the new Muslim populations. Except for the Hausa speakers of West Africa, none of the converted communities spoke Afro-Asiatic languages; so this conforms to the linguistic constraint.
^*

Before leaving the subject of the spread of Arabic and its limits, it is right to consider one other way in which Arabic might have been expected to spread, but in fact did not. At least from the beginning of the first century AD to the advent of European adventurers in the fifteenth, it is known that Arab sailors, with perhaps some Persian competition, undertook most of the marine trade between the Near East and the coasts of Africa and India.

The first testimony dates from the first century AD, in the Greek guide for sailors
Períplous Thalássēs Eruthraías
, ‘Voyage Round the Indian Ocean’.

Wherever Rhapta (Dar es Salaam?), Muza (al Mukha?) and Mapharitis (Ma’afir?) were, it is clear from this that Arab trade involvement with both sides of the Indian Ocean goes back for well over six hundred years before Muhammad. It is also a known feature of Arab ships, up until 1500, that their hulls were stitched together, not nailed or pegged.
⁷⁸
The
1001 Nights’
stories of Sindbad the Sailor (in fact, more a maritime merchant than a sailor) had a strong basis in Arab fact.
^*

This means that Arabic would have been heard in all the ports along the shores of the Indian Ocean from Mozambique to Malabar and Coromandel in southern India. Surely this might have had a linguistic effect, at least in the creation of a trade jargon? There is, after all, ample precedent, both, as we have seen, in the way that Phoenician was spread round the Mediterranean, and in more recent centuries as European powers have brought their languages to the parts of the world where they went to trade. Trade is usually accounted the first factor that set English on the road to becoming a world language.
^*

In fact, the only vestige of such influence from Arabic is found in East Africa, where Swahili, the major Bantu language, shows heavy signs of Arabic influence. Its very name is derived from Arabic
sawā
il
, ‘coasts’. Counting up to ten, the numbers 6,7 and 9 are all borrowed from Arabic: Swahili
sita, saba
and
tisa
versus Arabic
sitta, sab ’a
and
tis ’a.
Unlike almost every other Bantu language, it has no distinctive tones, but it uses certain sounds from Arabic which are unknown in other Bantu languages, notably distinguishing between r and 1, and using the consonants th [
θ
], kh [
x
] and their voiced analogues dh [δ] and gh [γ].