Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
Page 13
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’.
(§16) Two days’ sail beyond there lies the very last market-town of the continent of Azania [East Africa], which is called Rhapta; which has its name from the sewed boats [rháptōn ploiaríōn] already mentioned; in which there is ivory in great quantity, and tortoise-shell. Along this coast live men of piratical habits, very tall, and under separate chiefs for each place. The Mapharitic chief governs it under some ancient right that subjects it to the sovereignty of the state that is become first in Arabia. And the people of Muza now hold it under his authority, and send thither many large ships; using Arab captains and agents, who are familiar with the natives and intermarry with them, and who know the whole coast and understand the language …
(§21) Beyond these places in a bay at the foot of the left side of the gulf, there is a place by the shore called Muza, a market-town established by law, distant altogether from Berenice [Ras Banas] for those sailing southward, about 12,000 stadia. And the whole place is crowded with Arab shipowners and seafaring men, and is busy with affairs of commerce; for they carry on a trade with the far-side coast and with Barygaza [Broach, in western India], sending their own ships there.77
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 sawāil, ‘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].
Nevertheless, it remains in many ways characteristically Bantu, with lots of nasals before stops (-nd-, -ng-, -mb-, -nt-, -nk-, -mp-), a variety of special prefixes that show what type of concept is designated by a noun, and heavy agglutinative prefixing on its verbs, doing most of the work that would be done by pronouns, verb inflexions and auxiliaries in languages like English, or indeed Arabic: for example,
wa-zee ha-wa-ju-i a-li-ko-kwenda
people-oldster not-they-know-not he-past-there-go
The old men don’t know where he has gone.
The reckoning is that the spread of Bantu languages from the Great Lakes region would have reached the Zanzibar* area early in this millennium, so that an early version of the language may well have been learnt by the Arab visitors mentioned in the Períplous. When Europeans first arrived on the scene (the Portuguese in 1498), Swahili was spoken in a thin strip all along the coast from Mogadishu in Somalia to Beira in Mozambique. The oldest surviving Arabic inscription in the region is from a mosque built in 1107, and it is clear that Arabic was much used as a trade language here, often in mixtures with other languages that have since died out. There may also have been influence in the opposite direction: it is said that some coastal dialects of Arabic in Arabia and Iraq show signs of Swahili influence.79
Be this as it may, Swahili is now the official language in the states of Tanzania and Kenya, and widely used in the neighbouring countries of Uganda, Mozambique, Rwanda, Burundi, the Congos, Madagascar and the Comoros. Since the advent of European colonists, it has played a major role as a lingua franca of empires, as well as a less honourable one as the argot of slave-traders and their victims. Despite the vast numbers who use it (estimated at 40 million), Swahili is learnt as a native language only on the islands and coast close to Zanzibar. Perhaps as always, the vast majority of its speakers (some 90 per cent) pick it up later in life. Without Arab trade there would have been no Swahili as we know it, but Arabic influence on it ceased long ago.
THIRD INTERLUDE:
TURKIC AND PERSIAN, OUTRIDERS OF ISLAM
Kalkip ta yerimden doğrulayim, derdim,
Yelesi-kara Kaz
ihk atima bineyim, derdim,
Kalabalik Oğuz içine gireyim, derdim,
Ala-gözlü gelin alayim, derdim,
Kara yere ak otaklar dikeyim, derdim,
Yürüyüp oğulu ak gerdeğe göçüreyim, derdim,
Muradina, maksuduna eri$sLtireyim, derdim,
Murada erdirmedin beni!
Kara ba$sLim ilenci tutsun, Kazan, seni!*
I said to myself, let me get up from my seat and stand,
I said to myself, let me ride my black-maned Kazilik horse,
I said to myself, let me go among the throngs of Oghuz,
I said to myself, let me find a chestnut-eyed daughter-in-law,
I said to myself, let me pitch white tents on the black earth,
I said to myself, let me walk the boy to his bridal chamber,
I said to myself, let me bring him to his wish, to his desire,
You did not let me attain my wish,
May the dark head’s curse seize you, Kazan!
Dede Korkut, The Lineage of Uzun the Prisoner, son of Kazan Bey
(A mother berates her husband for losing their son on a raid)
Two other major languages, Turkic (spoken in a variety of forms, but all fairly close to modern Turkish) and Persian, are now best known as the auxiliary languages of Islamic civilisation. We have had to give them walk-on roles in the history of Arabic, but unjustly: both have interesting histories which go back for a thousand years before their speakers’ fateful conversions to Islam, and have contributed equally to their characters today and in the past.
The Turkic languages spread out over a vast area from western Mongolia to the Aegean Sea. As Xiongnu and Tabgatch, their speakers had harried and overrun the Chinese in the third and fourth centuries AD; in the fifth they were terrorising northern India as the Hūa, and eastern Europe as Hunni. In 451 they even briefly rode to France with Attila. Khazars ruled the south of Russia from the Black Sea to the Caspian from the sixth century to the eleventh. Turkic-speaking recruits made up the majority of the armies of Genghis Khan the Mongol in the early thirteenth century, and as members of the Golden Horde it was they who sacked Kiev in 1240, permanently shifting the centre of Russian power. (See Chapter 11, ‘The origins of Russian’, p. 426.) Other Turks, the Seljuks and later the Ottomans, brought down the Byzantine Greeks, and settled all over Anatolia, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century, the Turkic-speaking Tatars in Kazan’ and Astrakhan were still seen by the Russians as the major obstacle to their expansion, one that now needed to be dislodged; and in the eighteenth century it was the Tatars in the Crimea who were very much in the Russians’ way.
In the eighth and ninth centuries, Turks were writing funeral inscriptions in the Orkhon valley in Outer Mongolia in a runic alphabet of their own devising. Then they took up Sogdian writing, converting it into the vertical Uighur script of central Asia. In the eleventh century they encountered the Persians, and adopted Arabic script from them, even writing a dictionary of their language and a long didactic poem, the Kutadğū Bilig, ‘The Knowledge of Auspiciousness’. In fourteenth-century Persia and Samarkand, the form of Turkic known as Chagatay—after the second son of Genghis Khan—was the language of culture in courts of the Mongolian khans,80 and when Babur, the first of the Mughals, swept down from Afghanistan to conquer India in 1505, this was the language he spoke to his men, even if he preferred to write in Persian.81
It would almost be fair to take Babur’s approach as the spirit of Ottoman Turkish up to the twentieth century. Official Turkish was always heavily infused with literary Persian finery until Atatürk’s attempts to reform it in the 1930s.82
If Turkish deserves its own treatment, So does its cultural big sister, Persian, or Farsī, a highly literate language since the sixth century BC. TO this day, untutored Westerners tend to see Persia as rather an indistinct eastern part of the Arab world: yet Persian—as a language—has far more in common with languages of Europe or northern India than it does with Arabic or Turkish. Despite 1200 years of practice, the phonetic distinctions in Arabic which Westerners find hard to master, s, z, t, d versus , , , , and ’(alif) versus ’ (’ayn), are difficult for Persian speakers too. The Persian word for ‘is’ is still ast, like Latin est, German ist, Russian yesty and Sanskrit asti.
Although it is has never ceased to be spoken in Iran over the last two thousand years, culturally it has been unfortunate, overlaid and disadvantaged by a series of political setbacks. First, in the sixth century BC Darius decided to make Aramaic the official language of the Persian empire; in the fourth century BC, when the empire was conquered, the Seleucids tried to impose Greek. Parthians and Sassanids reasserted its self-esteem for eight centuries from 140 BC, but then came the phenomenal spread of Islamic forces in the seventh century AD, elevating Arabic into a privileged position in religion, scholarship and government for three centuries. ‘No assistance should be sought from pagans in office work,’ scribes were enjoined.83
A resurgence of Persian began in the tenth century, but it was overlaid almost at once by the Turkic-speaking (nominally Mongol) incursions in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Nevertheless, Persian remained a prestige language; and thanks to Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals who followed, Persian also became the principal official language of Indian administration, from the thirteenth century until it yielded to English in the nineteenth.
Persian’s relatives have also been highly significant in central Asia. Scythian had been spoken across most of the Eurasian steppes in the first millennium BC. (It survives as Ossetic, a language of the Caucasus.) In the first millennium AD, Śaka-Khotanese was an important cultural language of early Buddhism; and Bactrian, spoken farther west, was taken by the Kushāna kings across northern India in the first and second centuries AD. Sogdian, centred on Samarkand, was the lingua franca of the Silk Road to China in the eighth to the tenth centuries. (It survives as Yaghnobi, still spoken in the Pamir mountains.)
For all its ups and downs, Persian is still spoken beyond the borders of Iran in the northern half of Afghanistan (as Darī, ‘courtly’), and beyond that in Tajikistan (as Tajik). And despite its speakers’ frequent lack of political dominance even in their own lands, wherever it is known it has always remained a language of high cultural prestige, famed particularly for its poetry.
Three things have modelled themselves on three of yours –
Rose on cheek, grape on lip, beauty on face.
Three things each year are taken from three of mine –
Grief from heart, tears from cheek, fancy from eye.
Abul Qasim ‘Unsuri (b. c.968 in Balkh, central Asia; d. c.1040 AD)
A Middle Eastern inheritance:
The glamour of the desert nomad
The present-day globalised world is full of Arabic. It is the language that would-be Islamist revolutionaries in Europe and the USA feel they have to learn to give authenticity to their struggle; and its ironic similarity to Hebrew, newly revived in the land of Canaan, is a standing reminder of how the bitterest conflicts set long-lost cousins at each other’s throats: salām contends against šəlōm, but the common meaning, ‘peace’, continues to elude them. Meanwhile the classical language is still intoned every day in Muslim prayer, and broadcast to an audience of well over 200 million souls, all of whom think when they converse, in their very different ways, that they are talking Arabic, ’arabīya.
The language tradition of large-scale, unitary Semitic languages to which they are all heirs goes back demonstrably for five thousand years. In that time, there has been opportunity for a lot of innovations; the world has seen in their tradition the first adoption of a foreign language as a classic model for literature, the first system of writing with multilingual application, the first lingua franca of international diplomacy, the first archival libraries, the first alphabetic scripts, the first spread of language through trading colonies, the first substitution of one language for another without breakdown of a single literate tradition, the first
use of a language as the talisman of a minority religious sect, the first designation of the written record of a particular language as the unchangeable word of God.
That is a fair record of firsts for a single tradition, even if its dominant language has twice been replaced, or, to put it perhaps better, renewed. We shall consider elsewhere the significance of all these examples in the general pattern of the development of human language systems.
An appropriate final reflection here might be to consider whether there is any distinctive continuity of character in this ancient tradition. Is there something about Arabic which it shares with Aramaic and Akkadian? Or have so many innovations, on the way through remote antiquity and the Middle Ages into the modern world, in effect revised away any common core?
Fernand Braudel saw in the total success of Muslim advance, so sudden and apparently so inexplicable, the natural reassertion of the Near Eastern tradition, after a Greek and Roman interruption of a thousand years.84 He did see the Arabic language as the surest proof that countries are truly part of Muslim civilisation,85 yet the examples he gives of continuity in Near Eastern civilisation—dress, food, domestic architecture, even monotheistic faith—have nothing to do with language.86
At the most obvious level, the values promoted in Islam are the polar opposite of what their great imperialist predecessors the Assyrians embraced. The Muslims put forward their unique conception of God as a reason to accept their rule, emphasising all the while His infinite compassion. The Assyrian armies rolled over their neighbours to prove the greater might of their kings, and demonstrated their power through orgies of ruthlessness. Their gods followed, and if many chose to worship them, this was purely an acknowledgement of the greater power of all they stood for, an act of prudence and diplomacy, not the acceptance of a revelation or an act of sincere submission.