Throughout the classical period of Islam, Arabic remained the language of prestige that was used for all religious, cultural, administrative and scholarly purposes. In none of these functions was it ever seriously threatened in the first centuries of Islam. In their attitude towards other languages, the speakers of Arabic took it for granted that there could be no alternative to the Arabic language. This explains the disappearance of all other cultural languages in the Islamic empire, such as Coptic, Greek, Syriac and even Persian. With very few exceptions, the Arab grammarians showed no inclination to study other languages, and speakers of these languages only very seldom found anything to boast of in their own language, preferring to speak and write in Arabic instead. During the first centuries of the Hijra, speakers of Persian tended to regard their own language as inferior to Arabic. We have already seen that the author of the first linguistic description of Arabic, Seebawayhi, was himself a speaker of Persian, but there are absolutely no traces in his Kitaab of any interest in the Persian language. Another famous grammarian, al-Faarisee (d. 377/987), on being asked by his pupil Ibn Jinnee about his mother tongue, Persian, stated unequivocally that there could be no comparison between the two languages, since Arabic was far superior to Persian ( Kha Saa’i S I, 243). Eventually, a countermovement of Persian ethnic feeling ( shu’oobiyya ) arose which opposed the monopoly of the Arabs but did not challenge the position of Arabic.

From the ninth century onwards, however, Persian became increasingly used as a literary language, first of all in Eastern Iran, where Arabic culture had never gained a foothold. At the court of the more or less independent dynasties in the East, New Persian or Farsee was used in poetry. Under the dynasty of the Samaanids (tenth century), it replaced Arabic as the language of culture. After the fall of Baghdad (657/1258) during the Mongol invasion, Arabic lost its position as the prestigious language in the entire Islamic East to Persian, except in matters of religion. In Iran itself, the Safavid dynasty under Shah ‘Ismaa’eel (906/1501) adopted Farsee and the Shi’ite form of Islam as the national language and religion.

In all other regions, Arabic kept its position for a long time. A case in point is Mamluk Egypt. The Arabs had always looked down on the Turks, whom they regarded as good soldiers and therefore useful as protectors of Islam, but without any gift for culture. Their Arabic, if they spoke it at all, was deficient. Yet, Mamluk trainees received intensive instruction in Arabic, and most Mamluks must at least have understood the language. In the biographical sources about the Mamluks (e.g. a S- Safadee’s al-Waafee bi-l-wafayaat ), mention is made of many Mamluk scholars who occupied themselves with the religious and grammatical literature in Arabic, and even when in the fourteenth century they started to produce scholarly writings in Qipčaq and Oghuz Turkic, Arabic remained in use in Egypt as the main literary language.

When the Seljuks conquered Anatolia, Turkish became the official language of their empire, with Persian as the literary language; but even then, Arabic remained important, in the first place as a source of loanwords in Turkic (cf. below, Chapter 13, p. 234), and in the second place as the language of religion. It lost, however, its place as administrative language of the empire to Turkish. At the end of the nineteenth century, during the Renaissance ( Nah Da ) of Arabic (cf. below, Chapter II), attempts were made to reintroduce Arabic as the language of administration, but with the advent of the colonial period these attempts turned out to be short-lived, and it was not until the independence of the Arab countries as political entities in the twentieth century that it became once again the language in which matters of state and administration could be expressed.

From The Arabic Language
© 1997 Kees Versteegh
Used by permission of the Edinburgh University Press.