History and Development of the Arabic Language

Muhammad al-Sharkawi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138821507
• eBook ISBN: 9781317588634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

History and Development of the Arabic Language is a general introduction for students to the history of the Arabic language. It is divided into two parts; the pre-Islamic language up to the emergence of the first well-known works of Classical Arabic. Secondly, the transition from the pre-Islamic situation to the complex Arabic language forms after the emergence of Islam and the Arab conquests, both in Arabia and in the diaspora. The book focuses on the pre-Islamic linguistic situation, where the linguistic geography and relevant demographic aspects of pre-Islamic Arabia will be introduced. In addition, the book will also discuss the communicative contexts and varieties of Modern Arabic.

The book includes readings, discussion questions and data sets to provide a complete textbook and resource for teachers and students of the history of Arabic.

1
The geography and demography of pre-Islamic Arabia

This Chapter

This rather short chapter is dedicated to setting the stage for understanding the ecology of the Arabian Peninsula in pre-Islamic times. Ecology is the external non-linguistic factors that help us contextualize and navigate through the blurred historical and structural boundaries among varieties and mitigate the acuity of data shortage, as the knowledge of the stars and the four main directions help a lost hiker in the wilderness (Steffensen and Fill 2014: 6). This chapter, therefore, is not a historical narrative of events. It is rather an attempt to isolate relevant aspects of pre-Islamic Arabia to the emergence and development of Arabic and the interaction of its speakers with the speakers of other languages.

Introduction

This is the geographical ecology of pre-Islamic Arabia in late antiquity and early Islam. In this rather descriptive and small chapter, we will present and discuss the home country of the pre-Islamic Arabs. I will briefly discuss the relevant geographical features of the Arabian Peninsula insofar as their influence on communication among Arabs and between Arabs and non-Arabs is concerned. The reader should not expect to read here a full topographical description of the terrain of ǧazīrat al-‘Arab, ‘the Arabian Peninsula,’ in pre-Islamic times. Our main interest is to demonstrate that there was a geographical continuity and lack of natural barriers between the different parts of the Semitic world. But before this rather small section, the chapter will introduce a description of the internal social structure of the Arab tribes as a Semitic group of people, along with their tribal affiliation and distribution among Bedouin and non-Bedouin tribes and clans in their pre-Islamic shape. I will address this issue in two sections: one will be dedicated to the designation of the Arabs (who was an Arab and who was not), while the other discusses the tribes as social institutions. This geo-demographic introduction will be an essential tool for our later discussion of geographical dialectal references and typological Bedouin and urban dialect types. It is also useful for our discussion of the developmental and contact potential of pre-Islamic Arabic.

I will use some secondary sources in the process of this chapter, especially when introducing the physical form and the topography of the Arabian Peninsula. But the main bulk of the discussion of who the Arabs were and what their social structure was in pre-Islamic times will depend primarily on medieval native Arabic genealogical sources. I will also not only use these sources for information and data, but also adopt their logic and the manner in which they present and discuss data, because it represents the Arabs’ view of themselves and their society. In a small concluding section at the end of the chapter, I will discuss the relevance of both demography and geography on the linguistic situation in the Arabian Peninsula immediately before and after the emergence of Islam and the Arab conquests insofar as the geographic or tribal dialect divisions are concerned.

The Arabs in pre-Islamic times

Map 1.1 The distribution of the Arab tribes in pre-Islamic times

As we can see from Map 1.1, the Arabian Peninsula was fully inhabited. Unlike the seventh and eighth centuries, not all the Semitic clans that lived in the Arabian Peninsula were designated as Arabs before Islam. Some of them were given different designations, and not all of them were equal in status. We will talk here about the Arabs as they were pictured in medieval native sources immediately before Islam and immediately thereafter. We will not busy ourselves here with deeper points in late antiquity before 500 CE. As interesting as this deeper history may be, the history of the Arabs before this time is both vague in the minds of the medieval Arab historians themselves and not accurately introduced in their books. In addition, it is not particularly useful for our purpose here. We wish to establish who among the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula were Arabs and who were not, or at least were not considered, real Arabs. When we do that, we will be able to see which groups of people were accepted as legitimate sources for linguistic data to the medieval Arab grammarians. This distinction is also helpful to show degrees of structural affinity between the different varieties of pre-Islamic dialects and the language of pre-Islamic poetry, which came to be the benchmark of ‘correctness’ to the medieval and modern lay Arabs and grammarians. The distinction will also emphasize the assumption we will come across throughout the book that Islam and the conquest were the first to carve out the Arab identity and the Arabic language.

The best way to understand what the word ‘arab stands for is the genealogical sources written in the Arabic language by medieval Arab scholars, which is a vast variety of texts. While navigating through this ocean of texts and details, two issues stand out as worthy of caution. First, a modern reader must be aware that a political divide colors the definitions and descriptions provided by medieval lexical and genealogical sources in the eighth and ninth centuries CE. Society was polarized between Arabs and non-Arabs, the Arabs being prestigious. It was also torn between the northern and southern Arabs, and between supporters and adversaries of the Umayyad dynasty. Second, these sources record the history of the Arabs only as early as around the year 500 CE. Although we now know quite a lot of information about the function of the term ‘arab, studying it was not always an easy task. Among the difficulties of studying the term is that very few Arabic sources up until the end of the Umayyad period in the eighth century have survived in full original text. The original manuscript of Ibn Isḥāq’s (d. 767 CE) history is lost, except in some quotations and a lengthy summary in the works of his later colleagues. The fate of the history of Ibn Isḥāq’s teacher Wahb Ibn Munabbih (d. 720 CE) was no better than his student’s; it was completely lost without trace.

Let us now determine the sources that can yield information about the Arabs during the period in question. In fact, there is no native Arab recorded definition or historiography of the Arabs before the advent of Islam or immediately thereafter that is written in Arabic, beyond a corpus of poetic texts that are not forthcoming with ethnic or demographic information about the period between the years 500 and 632 CE. There is, however, one post-Islamic source about the Arabs in Yemen before Islam. ‘Ubayd Ibn Šāriya is said to have written a book about pre-Islamic Arabs before the year 680 CE. The original text of this book is also lost like the other and later two books. Also like them, the material in the book is problematic. It is more like folk tales than a history of the pre-Islamic times. The history of Arabia to the north of Yemen before Islam is recorded by the ninth century CE scholars Hišām al-Kalbiyy (d. 819 CE) and Abū ‘Ubayda (d. 824 CE). Apart from these vague, broad and largely lost histories, works of technical religious nature can also be helpful for our purpose in this chapter. There are several traditions from the prophet Muḥammad, ḥadīṯ, in the main trusted collections of the prophetic traditions commonly known as ṣaḥīḥ. Abū ‘Ubayd (d. 838 CE) in his book Kitāb al-’Mwāl, Book of Property, brings together some very useful pieces of information about who the Arabs were in early Islam and how their society was structured and organized.

Information about Arabs can also be found scattered in two types of Arabic writings in the Classical period: encyclopedic works and dictionaries. The ninth century CE adab writer al-Ǧāḥiẓ (d. 868 CE) spreads out through his lengthy and difficult-to-navigate book indicative stories and valuable clues about the pre-Islamic Arabs. The dictionary entry of ‘-r-b in Lisān al-‘Arab of Ibn Manẓūr (d. 710–1311 CE) is a compilation of all lexical information about the topic from the beginning of the Arabic lexicographical tradition in the eighth century to the end of his days. It also contains a summary of information and stories of pre-Islamic Arabia in the encyclopedia works. The information in Lisān al-‘Arab is useful because it is not filtered through the lenses of the politically divided society of the earlier eighth and ninth centuries CE. All these sources from different fields are summaries, paraphrases and compilations from earlier works (Retsö 2003: 14). Lexical information is, therefore, often repetitive and sometimes contradictory. In addition, another problem of the sources has to do with dates: even the earliest of these sources has been written after the middle of the eighth century, and the data were filtered through the eyes of the authors who have not witnessed the events they recorded first hand.

Let us now see how the Arabs saw themselves as members of the same nation or people. Arab historians and scholars of ’ansāb, ‘tribal genealogy,’ usually start their accounts of the Arab tribes before Islam from the destruction of the dam in Ma’rib in Yemen. After the fall of the Himyaritic Empire in 525 CE, a kingdom that dominated Arabia, constant wars emerged in which tribal chiefs tried to dominate each other’s territories and sources of wealth. These wars are recorded in the Arab mentality and pre-Islamic poetry collectively as ’ayām al-‘Arab, ‘days of the Arabs.’ From these wars and the attitudes of the Arab tribal chiefs towards one another, we can make the assumption that the different tribes that lived in the peninsula up to the days of the emergence of the Islamic state in 622 did not see themselves as compatriots of one nation or living in one inclusive region as a single people. The main social and political unit was the tribe. This lack of unified socio-political identity extended from the earliest of times to the early days of Islam. After the Arab conquests, elements of nation building helped to mold a new Arab identity. Among such elements are the existence of different tribesmen in the same armies for the same conquests, the constant comparisons between them as tribes-men and the inhabitants of conquered territories and mawālī, ‘clients,’ and the fact that they all speak the same language in which the Qur’ān was revealed.

Ibn Xaldūn (1332–1406), the most well-known pre-modern Arab sociologist, defines the Arabs as a group of people according to a combination of criteria, none of which is the linguistic unity that came to be known about them after Islam. He understands from these sources that al-‘Arab are a subcategory of the badw, who stand in opposition to the ḥaḍar, ‘city people.’ The badw, ‘Bedouin,’ are defined as everybody who is living outside the walled and gated cities in tents and/or in villages, who can be nomads or farmers or even cattle breeders. Among the badw, al-‘Arab are the most primitive in their manner of life and pure in lineage due to their harsh lifestyle. In addition to the lineage criterion, the Arabs are among the cattle breeding badw, those who breed camels (Retsö 2003: 20–21). A few centuries before Ibn Xaldūn, al-Ǧāḥiẓ, in one of his prose treatises, namely Risāla ‘an faḍā’il al-Turk, ‘a treatise on the advantages of the Turks,’ reduces the importance of the purity of lineage and stressed the lifestyle aspect of the definition. He describes the community of al-‘Arab as one that was not originally descending from one single ancestor father. It is rather the product of a process of cross-breeding and intermarriages among different groups that lived in close territorial positions and similar styles of life. The result of this process is a new breed of people who claim an identity based on kinship (al-Ǧāḥiẓ, Rasā’il, pp. 10–12).

There is another distinction in the traditional sources that is also based on lifestyle, namely that between al-‘Arab and al-’a‘rāb. This distinction is important for the Arabian Peninsula before Islam. Both terms are derived from the same lexical root ‘-r-b. The latter term is not only distinct from the earlier based on the style of life, but it is also epistemologically and affectively more complex than the earlier. In later lexicographical sources, the ’a‘rāb is a subcategory of the al-‘Arab. But we have to stress here that this classification is not prevalent in earlier sources. They are, according to the late medieval lexical sources, the people who settled in the bādiya, ‘desert,’ or joined those who live in it moving with them and living like them (Lisān, ‘-r-b). This meaning puts the ’a‘rāb in the category of nomads. One can then, according to the definition just given from the thirteenth century, make the claim that the ’a‘rāb merely are the nomadic Arabs. It seems that the term carries a derogatory sense in addition to its classificatory one. In the same entry, Lisān al-‘Arab makes the claim that the ’a‘rāb would rejoice if they were called ‘arab, indicating a prestigious status for the latter. The opposite is also true; al-‘Arab would feel insulted if they were called ’a‘rāb, indicating a less prestigious status for the latter. This differential attitude is probably the result of a difference in acquired prestige, with the tribesman being superior to the nomad due to particular historical events and/or social stigma in early Islamic times. The difference in prestige does not only come from the status of the tribes, but also from early Islamic religious attitudes.

The word ‘arab is mentioned few times and vaguely in the sources contemporary to the career of the prophet. However, it can be harvested easily from antique and late antique sources (Retsö 2010: 285). Through these texts we know that the Arabs did not drink wine, did not live in stone houses, shaved their foreheads and worshipped or venerated two deities that were merely a medium to God Almighty of the Abrahamic tradition (Retsö 2010: 286). The testimony of Q41:44 indicates clearly that the divine message was sent to those people who have been exposed to the belief before in some form. To them, it is healing and guidance. Revelation does not come to others because they are not receptive.

Supporting evidence abounds for the notion that the ’a‘rāb are the nomads among the people who live outside gated cities in general and are not an exclusive group of nomads living around Madīna or just a religiously condemned group of deviant people. Al-Zamaxšariyy (Kaššāf, Vol. II, p. 300) lists the names of some places in Hijaz and away from Madīna in which ’a‘rāb can be found. In fact, we can find in Mecca a demographic situation similar to that in Madīna, where the tribesmen lived inside and the ’a‘rāb occupied the outside unplanned open areas (Lisān, ḍ-ḥ-y). The same demographic arrangements of ’a‘rāb around settled communities are recorded outside the Western region of the Arab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of maps
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The geography and demography of pre-Islamic Arabia
• PART 1 Sources of the study of Arabic
• PART 2 Pre-Islamic Arabic
• PART 3 Arabic after Islam and diaspora
• PART 4 Classical Arabic
• Conclusion
• Tables
• References
• General Index
• Index of the pre-Islamic tribes
• Index of medieval Arab scholars