Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  Coptic, then, is another example of a language of the Near East which has been sustained through a period of growing adversity through its association with a distinctive faith. It can be contrasted with a survival a little farther south: Ge’ez, the language of the Ethiopian Church. This is a classical language (related to the ancient languages of South Arabia, and owes its position ultimately to a prehistoric invasion across the Red Sea). Although it survived, like Coptic, through its role in Christian liturgy, its fate is much more like that of Latin or Sanskrit than Coptic. Ethiopia continues to be a Christian country, and Ge’ez is surrounded by daughter and niece languages, Tigrinya, Tigre and Amharic. Ge’ez has been preserved by sentiment and linguistic conservatism, but the linguistic tradition it represents is alive and under no external threat, linguistic, social or religious.

  By contrast, what we may call the ‘Shield of Faith’ strategy for language survival has indeed been used quite often in the last couple of hundred years, and far away from the Near East, or Afro-Asiatic languages. It is this, after all, which has preserved ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’, i.e. German, among the separate community of the Amish in the USA.59 And it is this which since 1865 has preserved Welsh in the Nonconformist chapel community of Argentina, on the wind-swept plains of Patagonia.60 It could even be claimed that it is being reapplied, with a vengeance, to rebuild the Hebrew language in the new state of Israel.

  But we must now turn, as the last part of our review of this area, to another language that has exploited its confessional associations mercilessly, not simply to survive but to expand, and to expand faster and more lastingly than any other language known.

  Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission’

  ’aibbū al ‘araba liθin: li ‘anī ‘arabiyyun, wa al-qur ’ānu ’ arabiyyun, wa kalāmu ’ahli al-jinnati ’arabiyyun.

  Love the Arabs for three reasons: because I am an Arab, because the Qur’ān is in Arabic and because the inhabitants of Paradise speak Arabic.

  Saying attributed to Muhammad61

  Arabic is another Semitic language closely related to the Aramaic and Akkadian that preceded it in the Near East. Its records actually go back to North Arabian inscriptions of the fourth century BC. But its speakers, mainly desert Bedouin and pastoralists, had remained outside the effective control (and perhaps interest) of all the previous empires in the region.

  When they showed their mettle, the results were truly astounding. Within twenty-five years of the prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, they had conquered all of the Fertile Crescent and Persia, and thrust into Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their lightning advance was even more penetrating towards the west: Egypt fell in 641 and the rest of North Africa as far as Tunisia in the next decade. Two generations later, by 712, the Arabic language had become the medium of worship and government in a continuous band of conquered territories from Toledo and Tangier in the west to Samarkand and Sind in the east. No one has ever explained clearly how or why the Arabs could do this.62 An appeal is usually made to a power vacuum in the east (where the Roman/Byzantine empire and the Sassanian empire of Iran were just recovering from their exhausting war), and the absence of any power to organise resistance in the west.

  Whatever caused the feebleness of the defences, a series of successful raids became harmonised into a wave of invasion that rolled on with the momentum of a tsunami. It originated in a small new state, based on the cities of Medina and Mecca in Arabia, which had recently been energised by divine revelation, embracing a new, and startlingly abstract, creed.

  Lā ’lāha ill’ Allāhu, wa Muammadun rasūlu ‘llāhi

  There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the apostle of God

  This šahādah, the declaration of Muslim faith, and respected as the first of its ‘pillars’, was elemental in its power; it was a faith turned from shield into sword. Yet its name, Islām, is usually translated as ‘submission’ (to God); and its Semitic root slm (also seen in the agent form muslim) is also the basis of words for peace (as in Arabic’s own greeting salām ‘aleykum, ‘peace with you’). Doubly ironic, then, that this religion, whose name means peaceful acceptance, burst upon the world so mightily by storm.

  But the importance of language in Islam went far beyond the production of a telling slogan. Eloquence, the sheer power of the word, as dictated by God and declaimed to all who would listen, played the first role in winning converts for Islam, leaving hearers no explanation for the beauty of Muhammad’s words but divine inspiration. The classic example is ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, a contemporary of Muhammad and acknowledged authority on oral poetry, determined to oppose, perhaps even to assassinate, him. Exposed directly to the prophet’s words, he could only cry out: ‘How fine and noble is this speech!’ And he was converted.

  Language was used in a unique way in the spread of this religion too. The authentic utterances of the prophet, himself illiterate, were soon, in some undocumented way, reduced to writing. The text so arrived at was immediately holy and absolutely authoritative; it could not be changed, although it was permissible (as in the Hebrew scriptures) to annotate it with some dots and dashes to mark the vowel sounds, for the benefit of those whose Arabic was not native, and who consequently might need some help in reading the bare consonants.* It was known as the Qur ‘ān, ‘recitation’, based on qr’, the common Semitic root for reading aloud, and famously begun when the Angel Gabriel commanded Muhammad:

  iqra ’ bismi rabbika allaī xalaqa, xalaqa l’’insāna min ‘alaqin

  Recite, in the name of your Lord who created, created man from embryo.63

  These distinctive scriptures, a totally closed set, are the great treasure of Islam, constantly pondered and declaimed by the faithful. Their existence seems to have been taken by Muslims as the badge of properly revealed religion, for in their domains holders of other revealed monotheistic faiths, Jews with their TaNaK, Christians with their Testaments, Zoroastrians in Iran with their Avesta, were called likewise ahl al-kitāb, ‘people of the book’, and thereby exempt from forcible conversion.

  The linguistic effects of the Arab blitzkrieg can only be compared with those of Greek’s wild ride throughout Persia’s domains nine centuries before. They were ultimately to be much more durable than the extension of Greek had been, but like the spread of Greek across the east, the take-up of Arabic did not quite measure up to the spread of temporal power that had caused its advance.

  Politically, the Arab campaigns destroyed the hold of the Roman, now Byzantine, empire on the whole of the eastern Mediterranean—excepting only Anatolia. Despite their efforts to take Constantinople, this centre of Roman power survived, and lived on in Christian defiance for another eight centuries. Farther east, the Arabs overran Armenia but did not convert it. More significant was the Arabs’ termination of Sassanian power in Iran and the mountains of Afghanistan. This was the beginning of the end for Zoroastrianism, gradually replaced in popular worship by Islam. Nowadays it survives only in the tiny minority of Parsees who were to flee to India three hundred years later.

  Linguistically, the immediate effects were comparable to the political ones: Arabic established itself as the language of religion, wherever Islam was accepted, or imposed. In the sphere of the holy, there was never any contest, since Islam unlike Christianity did not look for vernacular understanding, or seek translation into other languages. The revelation was simple, and expressed only in Arabic. Furthermore, Islam was a religion that insisted on public rituals of prayer in the language, and where the muezzin’s call of the faithful to prayer, in Arabic, has always punctuated everyone’s day. Allāh akbar, ‘God is greater.’

  In 700, the caliph in Damascus, ‘Abd el Malik, summoned his Greek adviser, Joannes Damascenus, to tell him that he had decided henceforth to ban the Greek language from all public administration. The adviser told his colleagues: ‘You had better seek another profession to earn your living: your present employment has been withdrawn by God.’ He then spent the rest of his long life (655-749) as a
monk.64

  This was the aspiration. In practice, for the first few generations administration lingered in the predecessor languages, Greek and Persian, to some extent Aramaic and Coptic, not least because the conquerors were unable to operate the elaborate bureaucratic systems they had seized, and because the methods of recruitment were mostly nepotistic. The same families continued to provide the scribal classes, but by the second century of the Muslim era they were reading and writing in Arabic. The process can be followed in the papyrus trail of Egypt. All documents remain in Greek for a good century after the Muslim conquest; then bilingualism sets in, but Arabic totally replaces Greek only in the late eighth century, after 150 years of Islam.65

  But Arabic is now spoken only in an inner zone within the Dār-al-islām, ‘House of Islam’, as a whole. What happened to roll it back? In the long term there was a subtle linguistic limit on Arab success, or rather on the success of Arabic. Arabic progressed from the language of the mosque to establish itself permanently as the common vernacular of the people only in countries that had previously spoken some related language, one that belonged to the Afro-Asiatic (or Hamito-Semitic) family.*

  This Afro-Asiatic zone included the Fertile Crescent, where Arabic replaced Aramaic; Egypt, where it overwhelmed Coptic; Libya and Tunisia, where it finally supplanted Berber and erased—or merged into—Punic; and the Maghreb (the north of modern Algeria and Morocco), where it also pushed Berber back into a set of smaller pockets. The tiny island of Malta, too, which had a Punic background from its origins in the Carthaginian empire, became Arabic-speaking after Arab conquest in 870 AD, belying its millennium of control from Rome since 218 BC. The area of permanent Arabic advance also included at the margin, and rather later, a more southerly zone in Africa, Mauritania in the west, and Chad and Sudan in the east; here Arabic spread later through trade contacts, and would have replaced some Chadic and Cushitic languages.

  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 establi
shed 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