Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

The Muslims’ treatment of the Copts gradually soured. No one knows how fast the percentage of Christians in the population fell, but fall it did, especially in the north of the country, so that for some centuries Coptic was stronger in the south. Through the seventh to ninth centuries the Copts were guaranteed freedom of religion and civil autonomy, although like non-Muslims everywhere they were subject to special taxes. But in 829 the Copts revolted against tax collectors, and were severely put down. Thereafter conditions sporadically worsened and occasionally improved under a variety of Muslim dynasties, but the consistent trend was for the Coptic population—and use of the language outside the liturgy—to diminish. Theological works were still being written until 820, and new hymns went on being composed until early in the fourteenth century. The language community was in fact sufficiently lively for the Delta dialect, Bohairic, to supplant Sahidic, the dialect of Upper Egypt, as the standard: it was consecrated for use in liturgy by Patriarch Gabriel II in 1132-45. Although there were cultural revivals after the fourteenth century, the language did not come back into daily life. But it has persisted in liturgy to the present day, and there are signs of serious attempts to revive it.

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. [299] Their paradoxical use of English to protect the use of German is described in Johnson-Weiner (1999). And it is this which since 1865 has preserved Welsh in the Nonconformist chapel community of Argentina, on the wind-swept plains of Patagonia. [300] Described from a Welsh learner’s viewpoint by Pam Petro (Petro 1997: 259-319). 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.

’aẖibbū 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 Muhammad [301] Hadith of disputed authenticity. Al-Tabrizi (1985: 6006).

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. [302] Attempted in Miquel (1968) and Planhol (1968). 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 Muẖammadun 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. [40] This caused some philological problems, since Muhammad’s dialect of Arabic was slightly nonstandard: it lacked the glottal stop ’, known as hamza (the stop heard in place of the tt of the London pronunciation of ‘bitter’), had lost the -n ending of the nominative, and had turned the -t ending of feminine nouns into -h. The scholars wanted to retain the text exactly as written, but recite it according to the rules of standard Arabic. As a result, all these consonants of Arabic had to be inserted in the written text with special accent marks, as if they were vowels. These marks are all now standard in Arabic spelling. 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: